From significant surface to historical presence: Photography as a site of social engagement in the museum

The creation of a new display in the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum of contemporary photographic works by Australian Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson was revealing of previously submerged prejudices about the status of photography in the ethnographic museum. The case study is positioned within the overall argument that photography can act as an important site of social and cultural engagement between artists, curators, and audiences in museological theory and practice, both at the level of the image itself but also in the performative spaces that photography creates through our interactions with it. The essay argues for a deeper understanding of photography’s plurality and variety of ontologies in different social and historical contexts, and how this understanding will be vital for the future of photography studies. The concept of the photograph as a site of social and cultural engagement in the ethnographic museum is partly connected to the way in which indigenous artists have used the medium to explore historical narratives and rework them within the image, but also in the sense of how such photographic works then establish themselves as a site for contemporary social and political debate within the museum or gallery setting.