Photographs, Museums, Collections: between art and information: Elizabeth Edwards & Christopher Morton

This book highlights the history of the photograph through museums and collections and its shifting status over time. Photograph collections in museums have long been uncategorised and often used as an additional element in a display - a bit like a label than a historical object in its own right. The book uses case studies from real collections and traces their trajectory as photographs have been shunted between departments, re-categorised and often de-coupled from their original source material. Copies of photographs often take on a life of their own creating mini sub-collections and the materiality of the photograph is highlighted by the many marks that are made on the backs and borders of photographs by their curators.

This book made me think about the shifting nature of information as it is repeatedly relayed between sources. The visual and written information from my triangle project has shifted and changed through interpretation over time; Josef Kohout, who lived his early twenties in the concentration camps recounted his experiences to Heinz Heger who wrote the book "The Men With the Pink Triangle". Kohout's experiences relied on personal memory, selecting and self-editing as he told his terrible story. Heger had to shape these memories into a coherent and readable form; no doubt his editor and publisher also had input with an eye to a market for a historical commodity. I read the book many decades after it was published through the lens of my own political and personal experiences of LGBTQ life in the UK. I've taken events from the book that stood out, affected me, and re-interpreted them through a visual medium of constructed photography; the images I made have been discussed at peer and tutor critiques and potentially adapted with a contemporary photography perspective. The work will be edited for assessment before possibly being produced as an exhibition in some form as its final output.

Kohout's original memories have taken a shifting and changing course through several artistic mediums and not only my work. I know that a play and a movie has been made (Bent) that uses the original book as its source material. I have no doubt that the work has inspired multiple trajectories from that original account that I am unaware of at this time.