What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Why are some photographs valued and others not? Why are some photographic practices visible and not others? What value systems and hierarchies do they reflect? What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. It focuses not on formal collections of photographs as accessioned objects, be they ‘fine art’ or ‘archival’, but on what might be termed ‘non-collections’: the huge number of photographs that are integral to the workings of museums yet ‘invisible’, existing outside the structures of ‘the collection’. These photographs, however, raise complex and ambiguous questions about the ways in which such accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories and knowledge-systems, through multiple, folded and overlapping layers that might be described as the museum’s ecosystem. These photographic dynamics are studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an institution with over 150 years' engagement with photography’s multifaceted uses and existences in the museum. The book differs from more usual approaches to museum studies in that it presents not only formal essays but short ‘auto-ethnographic’ interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work. As such this book offers an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs ‘do’ in museums, expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

Borders Cuts Images. History and Theory. Editorial, edited by Linda Bertelli and Maria Luisa Catoni Maria Luisa Catoni, Cut as a device. An example from Classical Antiquity. Camilla Pietrabissa, Cutting down the interpretation of drawings. The case of Watteau. Maja-Lisa Müller, Framing representation. The hybrid zones of intarsia. Costanza Caraffa, The photographic cut and cutting practices in photographic archives. Sara Romani, From cuts to clues, hidden narratives within the details of Carl Durheim’s photographic portraits (1840-1860). Laura Di Fede, A look from outside. Foreign photographers in Palermo between the 19th and 20th centuries. Agnese Ghezzi, Framing the ‘delegated gaze’. Handbooks for travelers and the making of anthropological photography in Italy at the end of the 19th century. Linda Bertelli, Chronophotography as an archive. The dialogue between the physiologist and the artist in Le Mouvement by Étienne-Jules Marey (1894). Sonia Colavita, The aesthetics of cut in found footage film. The case of Decasia by Bill Morrison. Maria Giusti, Rediscovering censorship to understand the struggle for the contemporaneous age-oriented movie rating systems. Laura Forti, Francesca Leonardi, At the border of artistic legitimation. Geography, practices and models of project spaces in Milan.

The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation. Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes. The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.

This Handbook provides a transnational reference point for critical engagements with the legacies of, and futures for, global archaeological collections. It challenges the common misconception that museum archaeology is simply a set of procedures for managing and exhibiting assemblages. Instead, this volume advances museum archaeology as an area of reflexive research and practice addressing the critical issues of what gets prioritized by and researched in museums, by whom, how, and why. Through twenty-eight chapters, authors problematize and suggest new ways of thinking about historic, contemporary, and future relationships between archaeological fieldwork and museums, as well as the array of institutional and cultural paradigms through which archaeological enquiries are mediated. Case studies embrace not just archaeological finds, but also archival field notes, photographic media, archaeological samples, and replicas. Throughout, museum activities are put into dialogue with other aspects of archaeological practice, with the aim of situating museum work within a more holistic archaeology that does not privilege excavation or field survey above other aspects of disciplinary engagement. These concerns will be grounded in the realities of museums internationally, including Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Europe. In so doing, the common heritage sector refrain 'best practice' is not assumed to solely emanate from developed countries or European philosophies, but instead is considered as emerging from and accommodated within local concerns and diverse museum cultures.

(Un)sighted Archives of Migration acknowledges that migration is a fundamental part of social practice and collective memory. However, archives that have undergone migration or were established by individuals or communities with migration experience gain little public and institutional attention. This volume with its transversal perspective across the fields of art, anthropology and social activism, offers new perspectives on the enormous potential of migratory archives as resourceful spaces for encounter and remembrance, and as a contribution to the plural collective memories and identities of post-migratory societies. Emphasizing the archival agency by migrants, the chapters raise new questions with regard to the multi-directional, collaborative forms of knowledge production within and beyond an archive, its boundaries, and its materiality. Focusing on the complexities of power relations, spatial and temporal dynamics, media practices, and meaning production involved in the making, maintenance, viewing, appropriation, destruction and loss of such archives, the chapters contribute to a critical methodological and theoretical discussion about (un)sighted archives as spaces of encounter and resistance in a liminal zone of visibility and invisibility. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Anthropology.

This Special Issue of Arts investigates the use of digital methods in the study of art markets and their histories. As historical and contemporary data is rapidly becoming more available, and digital technologies are becoming integral to research in the humanities and social sciences, we sought to bring together contributions that reflect on the different strategies that art market scholars employ to navigate and negotiate digital techniques and resources. The essays in this issue cover a wide range of topics and research questions. Taken together, the essays offer a reflection on what takes to research art markets, which includes addressing difficult topics such as the nature of the research questions and the data available to us, and the conceptual aspects of art markets, in order to define and operationalize variables and to interpret visual and statistical patterns for scholarship. In our view, this discussion is enriched when also taking into account how to use shared or interoperable ontologies and vocabularies to define concepts and relationships that facilitate the use and exchange of linked (open) data for cultural heritage and historical research.