On April 6 Paul Apodaca wrote in reference to Hank Burchard's thoughts on
credits in exhibitions.:
"The museum does not have to be the house of a thousand stars of museology.=
"
The point, I think, is not to create stars, but to unpack for the public
the processes we go through in selecting objects and interpreting them. The
subjectivity and point of view of our choices is an important part of
understanding our exhibitions. Too many Museum viewers accept exhibitions
as having fallen out of the sky complete in the only form possible, after
curating by the Lord.
At the Southeast Museum of Photography, our policy is to identify
every writer of texts by name, and to credit staff involved in putting a
show together. Our practice is often also to address which objects were not
chosen for exhibition and why,and, when considering photography in popular
culture, to discuss which photographs were either not taken or not
preserved. We also often use multiple labels by people of different
perspectives, opinions, or interests.
We seek to question a double whammy of ostensible
objectivity---that of the photograph itself as unbiased and true, and of
the exhibition as a fixed and singular reality rather than one of many
possible voices, contexts, and meanings.
A broader understanding of what we do and how we do it could have
defused much of the anger around, for example, the Enola Gay debacle.
Alison Devine Nordstr=F6m
Director/Senior Curator
Southeast Museum of Photography
Daytona Beach, Florida
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