ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the critical and at times controversial role that museum exhibitions have played (and continue to play) in defining and controlling photography’s meaning and value. It explores the interdependency between museums and photography by taking up a selection of exhibitions that have shaped our understanding of photography’s identity, most especially as art, and what these institutional histories in turn have overlooked or excluded about the medium. As photography’s aesthetic value was negotiated by museums over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the medium’s informational capacity, especially as a way of knowing and representing racial difference, remained largely steadfast. Photography’s status as art within the museum has not only been at the expense of documentary photography but also so-called vernacular photography.
