Abstract

With a brief reference to the beginnings of photography’s institutionalisation as contemporary art in the early twentieth century, this presentation sought to map the different ways American photography was defined in the collecting and exhibiting cultures and strategies of arbiter-of-taste North American museums. Focusing on landmark exhibitions, it highlighted how different institutional profiles prescribed the ‘Americaness’ of American photography through distinctly different appreciations of the medium, as belonging to photography itself, or situated within the wider fields of visual arts.