Thanks to an article by Jörg M. Colberg on Conscientious I have just spent most of the time I would normally have taken writing a post for this blog on the Kunstmuseum Basel web site online exhibition ‘The Incredible World of Photography‘ which is based on the collection of over half a million images made over 45 years since 1974 by Ruth and Peter Herzog as well as images in the Kunstmuseum’s collection. Among other things the Herzog collection includes around 3,000 photo albums produced by individuals and families around the world, with their small images pasted or held by photo corners onto scrapbook pages for passing around with friends and family – an earlier and limited form of social media.
The Herzog collection is particularly interesting in containing much work by unknown photographers (I don’t much like the term ‘anonymous’ as it’s just that no record has been made of their names.) The web site presents them with an interesting commentary and the site takes some time to explore; although I might argue (you always do my wife would say) with some of the texts it’s both informative and entertaining, and my only slight disappointment came when clicking on the magnifying glass icon to see images more clearly results in only a slight increase in size, hardly enough to warrant the effort of finger on mouse.
If you are in Basle you can visit the gallery and see more, and there is also a 360 page catalogue of this and two other exhibitions of the collection, ‘Exposure Time (E): A Photographic Encyclopaedia of Man in the Industrial Age‘ with a preview online.
Unlike Colberg, I haven’t actually seen a copy of the catalogue, and his piece, The Incredible World of Photography puts the show and book in a wider context. In a short consideration of the difference between physical albums and digital ones he asks “It will be interesting to see how future historians will deal with digital albums: is there actually going to be a way to do that, given that so many of them exist on corporate platforms?”
Colberg suggests that the Herzog collection might be a good starting point for developing “a vastly expanded (and more critical) new History of photography” allowing “what as long been dismissed as vernacular photography” to “have its proper part in that endeavour.” It isn’t of course a novel idea, and something we have already seen at least to a limited extent. And while there may be much of interest in unearthing material from the vernacular and neglected, a great deal of it is tedious in the extreme. My own view of history is very much one that stresses the importance of influence and development which I think is behind the “artists that we think are so special“. I still think at least most of them were.
Tags: Conscientious, family albums, history of photography, Jörg M. Colberg, Kunstmuseum Basel, online show, photo albums, Ruth and Peter Herzog