ABSTRACT
Although they are initially treasured for their ability to reproduce a person, an event or a location, the passage of time is not kind to photographs. As connection is lost and memory fades, photographs are quickly stored in boxes and albums. They are moved to attics and basements until, eventually, they become merely discarded objects. Over the decades a few hundred thousand survive as they pass through a series of commercial exchanges from private hands to those of booksellers and antique dealers. Of those preserved images, a few tens of thousands are of enough educational or aesthetic merit to rate the attention of a cultural institution such as a library or art museum. Of these, a small fraction is judged to be of high enough quality or great enough rarity to enter into the permanent collections of these cultural institutions. This movement and shifting from private to public, from commercial commodity to a confined social meaning and back to commodity on the art market, marks the photo-object. 1 Too often this socio-cultural inscription suppresses the materiality of photographs as they are squeezed within the rhetorics of canonical histories of photography and their concomitant spaces of collection and exhibition. Historically, even when attention is paid to the materiality of photographs, as is the case with the fine art print by the master photographer, it is submerged beneath the discourse of aesthetics.
