ABSTRACT
You open this collection with an important contribution to pedagogy and museology, a reflection on “Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention”. You and I have many things in common: first, a lifelong fascination with photography; and a close second, an active interest in its various modes of articulation and circulation in exhibition form. In 2007, you argued that curatorial process ought to be considered as more than the organization of related artworks in a space, as an investigation and an argument. You share your research questions – a teacher’s generous gift that reveals the many forces that shape a curatorial proposition. Your use of the word “proposition” is very telling – a word that combines critical judgement with a plan of action to see it through. And you share what it means to see it through, as you discuss the installation of the same exhibition in different spaces that bring out the specificities of landscape and land-use as they might have struck audiences familiar with photography history or bringing other disciplinary or cultural backgrounds to the experience. You conclude with thoughts on the authority of the curator, and whether work can be subjugated to that overarching vision – a discussion that was much heard in the day. It was also around that time that curators began signing their exhibitions – their names not just appearing in the catalogue or on the introductory text, but screen-printed on the entrance wall, shocking to me when I first encountered it.
