From a Private Archive to a Public Museum

This paper describes a curator’s personal experience in a museum of art with several “auxiliary” archives of museum collections, in which various photographic objects are the most numerous. The paper underlines the issue of experts’ unpreparedness within museum institutions for managing and preserving photographic material, which is especially challenging when it exists in a heterogenous documentation cluster that has been reassembled multiple times. In an effort to preserve the conceptual integrity of the new/old archive, which will as much as possible mirror all earlier uses, interventions, manipulations, etc. of the material, as a sign of its pre- and post-acquisition biography (Edwards, Morton), and equally the history of the museum, it has been resorted to a top-to-bottom archival description that will reach the level of each individual item. In this way, the archival imperative of acknowledging the provenance and original order is not being betrayed, while at the same time we are ensuring the visibility of each individual photograph, which is described both as a document and as an artifact. Taking into consideration the fact that this kind of approach is not universally applicable, all of its recognized benefits and inherent limitations are presented. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the challenges of applying the same approach to a digital context.