Artist: Richard Ross: Museology

As I decide how much I want to be engaged with this museum slash institutional conventions (and in what way) I think it would make sense to take note of a photographer who was featured in the "Next of Kin: Looking at the Great Apes" exhibition (and therefore that I found out about in the exhibition catalog, which had essays by Harriet Ritvo, Tommy L. Lott, and Ron Platt and artist entries by Ron Platt, from the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge,and the show ran from October 7 - December 10, 1995.)

The photographer, Richard Ross, travels around photographing museum displays as part of his Museology project. The photos in the show were American Museum of Natural History, New York, (1977) and Museum of Natural History, Cairo, Egypt, 1984. The New York one shows the image of the mountain gorillas exhibit done by Carl Akeley and show the triad of father, mother, and child that other people have talked about before in terms of the museum's reinforcement of certain societal values.

He talks about how Akeley was on the expedition to kill the gorillas, and then says: "Given the symbolic parallels between guns and cameras, and between taxidermy's and photography's bravura for freezing of time and matter, Ross' image provides a dizzying headful of equations masquerading as straightforward re-presentation" (22)

The second photo is described as depicting our relationship of disregard and care for other animals by leaving these "moth-eaten" specimens in such a profoundly un-natural and sad environment.

After looking him up, he apparently has a website where he shows all these Museology images, and they have been published as a book (which maybe I should check out!)

There were a couple that were really compelling to me, so I'll copy them below.

What I love about this one is that I still can't figure out what that thing is, or why someone put it on that hanger. It makes me think about the "unexpected" that was talked about in my review (or the loss of the unexpected, rather) and how much unexpectedness is present in these photos.

This makes me think about building things but leaving parts off, or having extra parts laying around.

This is just so strikingly beautiful. And with all of these its so interesting to look at the stands they are on or carts or cases. 

The thing I loved about this one is that it seems as though they are all coming towards the glass, like little delicate-footed zombies with beady black eyes, ready to investigate our interrupting them.