itself. That is to say, photography’s establishment
in these decades—the ‘‘photo boom’’ as it is some-
times called—had relied widely on standardization,
historicization, and definition. As Douglas Nickel
has commented:
A latecomer to institutional attention and intellectual
respectability, the field suddenly found itself in the
1980s in the uncomfortable position of being the arri-
viste of academic subjects, both newly sanctioned by
officialdom and an occasion for heated controversy....[I]
t also encountered a growing body of critical writing that
took exception to the methods of photography’s formal
canonization, one that argued against the mapping of
traditional art historical approaches and values onto
photographic subjects and, ultimately for the noniden-
tity of photography and photographic history itself.
(Nickel 548)Indeed, many of these critical objections were
provoked by museums’ sanctioning of photogra-
phy as art, worthy of collection, displaying, and
preserving in its own right.
Douglas Crimp, among others, provided a salient
example of this trend when he outlined the removal
of photographic books and albums from the shelves
of the New York Public Library. These objects were
then reassembled as the Library’s Photographic
Collections, a physical move that embodied the
separation of photography from its subject, a tri-
umphal dislocation that allowed photography to be
understoodonlyin the context of art.
Whereas we formerly have looked at Cartier-Bresson’s
photographs for the information they conveyed about the
revolution in China or the Civil War in Spain, we will now
look at them for that they tell us about the artist’s style of
expression. This consolidation of photography’s formerly
multiple practices, this formation of a new epistemologi-
cal construct in order that we may nowseephotography,
is only part of a much more complex redistribution of
knowledge taking place throughout our culture.
(Crimp 1989, 8)Crimp was not alone in theorizing the institu-
tional structures—and strictures—newly placed on
photography. Other critics began illuminating the
classificatory, exploitative, regulatory, and racist
uses of photography. Victor Burgin, Rosalind
Krauss, Christopher Phillips, Allan Sekula, Abigail
Solomon-Godeau, Sally Stein, and John Tagg were
chief among those who attempted to reveal and
contextualize the power and politics of photogra-
phy vis-a`-vis their institutions.
Not coincidentally, certain artists had begun using
photography to convey and problematize some of
these same perceptions of the medium. Artists with
practices as diverse as those of Vito Acconci, John
Baldessari,DanGraham,LouiseLawler,Sherrie
Levine, and Robert Smithson began to use photo-
graphy in new and provocative ways that raised
questions crucial to museums: how is such work
to be classified, exhibited, and interpreted? For ex-
ample, Cindy Sherman famously declared in the
press release accompanying her bookUntitled Film
Stillsthat she wasnota photographer. Instead, she
classified herself as a performance artist utilizing
photography. Thus, the 1990 Index to American
Photographic Collections could make note of the
fact that Sherman’s work could be found not in the
Art Institute of Chicago’s photography collections,
but in those of the contemporary department. While
this is no longer the situation (both departments now
hold Sherman’s work), such a classification is more
than mere syntax; it had a direct impact on deter-
mining the context in which Sherman’s work would
be exhibited and thus viewed. Such a classification
originally determined that it was institutionally more
productive and appropriate for Sherman’s images to
be surrounded by works contemporary to hers re-
gardless of medium rather than by other examples
of, say, photographic self-portraiture.
The questioning of the boundaries of media spe-
cificity made so explicit in the work of someone like
Sherman continue to haunt broadly the conception
of photo history and, more specifically, to define
exhibition and acquisition practices in today’s
museums. Once a sign of photography’s arrival
and success, departments dedicated exclusively to
photography must now work to explain that exclu-
sivity. Some choose a kind of forced historicism,
wanting to attract only those photographers’ work
that explicitly refers to either the medium’s history
or its technology, particularly as it was shaped and
understood by museums in the twentieth century.
Some have sought out artists who do just the oppo-
site, intending to push or even break down the
boundaries of the medium. Some have chosen to
collaborate across media boundaries—meaning,
institutionally, between departments—in order to
breed a different kind of interpretive exhibition,
one that perhaps in the end dwells on photogra-
phy’s ubiquity as in MoMA’sOpen Ends. And still
others have coyly extended arguments of medium
specificity by mixing together photography and
film and video. This outlook has yielded such
recent major exhibitions as the International Cen-
ter of Photography, New York’s,Strangers: The
First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video,
which inaugurated a series of exhibits devoted to
the collective consideration of shared themes
between the two media and the Solomon R. Gug-MUSEUMS: UNITED STATES