Picturing Our Past

An Archive Constructs a National Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID2806966
AuthorsKarin Becker (0000-0003-4967-1027, corresponding author)
Year1992
Volume105
Issue415
Pages3
Publication date1992-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American Folklore (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8715 • E-ISSN: 1535-1882
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/541996
OpenAlexW2323877018
LanguageEN
Citations received6

PHOTOGRAPHY'S POSITION IN WESTERN CULTURE is embedded in an ideology of representation that regards it as simultaneously copying and constructing the world that it pictures. Photographic practice, which includes not only the taking of pictures, but also how photographs are looked at, thought about, saved, used, and re-used, illustrates the ways we resolve this apparent paradox. State institutions that rely on keeping records produce photographs that can be used as documents-as replicas of the world-with all apparent disinterest in how their pictorial records construct the objects and arena of the institutional gaze. Yet a closer examination of the routines an institution employs in gathering, selecting, and preserving its records reveals strategies of representation and conservation that create and perpetuate the world within the institutional boundaries, with implications reaching beyond its specific time and place. The photographs thus are joined in a mutually authenticating discourse that validates the institution's picture of its sphere at the same time that the photographs' ideological power is increased by their link to the institutional practices that have produced them. Museums established as official repositories of culture and history offer clear examples of this pattern. Charged with documenting and preserving that which is considered valuable, the museum has also become the institutionalized arbiter of value, determining what is worth collecting and saving for the future. Because photographing and archiving are primary ways of assigning value, they often occupy a central position in the museum's task of constructing and perpetuating a shared conception of a collective past. Since its founding in 1873, the Nordic Museum has been a central institution in the collection and documentation of Sweden's cultural history. Included in the museum's vast and intersecting collections of cultural artifacts are the pic

Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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