Abstract

In spring 2002, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an "experimental" exhibition about the city of New York under the title Life of the City. Aiming to "explore the richness, diversity, and power of the tradition of photography in New York", on a par with the architecture, landscape and buzz of the city, the 150 exhibits that furnished the first part of the show were drawn from the museum's masterpiece collection. Next to the artworks proper, in an installation continuously changing throughout the duration of the exhibition, featured photographs contributed by New Yorkers and visitors who responded to the museum's open call. Yet, the arresting centerpiece of the show was the projection of a constant stream of professional and amateur photographs collected by the post-September 11 project, Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs that was initiated, its instigators claimed, "as an alternative way of looking at and thinking about history" proposed "by the people for the people". Similarly, a current project in the London Transport Museum, invites Flickr users to contribute their own photographs of London suburbs to feature in the forthcoming exhibition Suburbia, which "will tell Londoners stories of the shaping of their city". Without credits, titles or other information, taken by "everybody and anybody", such un-authored imagery contradicts, by its very nature, the museum's traditional canons of connoisseurship and ownership. Even so, we are currently witnessing a curatorial fascination with the amateur vernacular. So what is it that makes today's amateur photography so appealing to museums?

This paper proposed that amateur photography, included in the museum through conventional or Web 2.0 channels, may be seen as a means for challenging the dominant museological narrative and promoting what Andea Witcomb calls "unstable museum interpretations". The paper explored this hypothesis, focusing on the re­definition of existing tensions in the museum, such as the changing relationship between producers and consumers of meaning and the emergence of the 'prosumer'; the shifting of boundaries between amateurism and art making; and the renegotiation of authored discourse through the deployment of polyvocal and kaleidoscopic narratives.