Through the Lens

A collection of essays, articles and reviews of photography by Marina Vaizey published in the past decade.Photography is the one art form in which we all participate.We all take photographs, are photographed, and look at photographs. A striking phenomenon of the post war period, the last half century or so, has been the proliferation of collections of photography in museums and galleries of all kinds, the integration of photography with the other fine arts, and the complementary increase of scholarship, publications and the attention of universities. Thus the expansion of photography in the visual universe has been both commercial, critical There have been auction prices for individual prints that have reached millions of dollars, and increasing attention not only to all of the categories of photography from documentation and reportage to what we might call art in all its guises. In Britain for example the variety of approaches is clear in the great national collections. The Victoria and Albert museum collected photography as part of its documentation of art, architecture and fashion, but also formed the first national collection of photography for its aesthetic values.The Science Museum, London's National Portrait Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, the National Monuments Record are other great collections. It is however only in the past ten years that Tate has established posts for dedicated curators in the field. The Museum of Modern Art in New York established in 1929, started to collect modern photography in 1930 and established its department in 1940. Both the Centre Pompidou and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris collect, curate and exhibit photography as a core part of their activity. So the histories are various.What is clear however is that both historic and contemporary photography, however the ramifications of the digital age we now inhabit, is of inescapable importance in how we view and understand the world around us. And that this significance is now universally recognised. MV