Abstract

This talk explored different stories of photography’s accommodation as contemporary in major European and American art institutions. The ways that photography moved from seat to seat in the art museum reflected and responded to the new status that photographic images and practices acquired within contemporary art from the 1960s on, as much as they catered to specific institutional agendas, opportunities, and limitations. They also point to the fact that ‘Photography’ as a default term has had many different institutional interpretations. So, what is photography’s place in the museum now that ‘We are all photographers’ and what is its future?