Detective stories from the life of a museum curator

DETECTIVE STORIES FROM THE LIFE OF A MUSEUM CURATOR

Curators: Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova, Larisa Zaitseva, Nikita Malashenko

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow was founded in 1996 as the Moscow House of Photography and became the first museum in Russia to consistently collect the history of Russian photography from its inception to the present day. Today the collection comprises more than 220,000 works. The museum holdings are divided chronologically into sections and a dedicated museum curator is responsible for each one.

However, it is not enough to simply store collections – they must be studied. Photography begins its ‘museum life’ when we can collect information that allows it to be placed within a historical, artistic and cultural context. This research work is carried out daily by museum curators, and in addition to ensuring preservation, they study the objects entrusted to them. The result of their work is a significant contribution to the development of art history, the foundation of curatorial work and the scientific activities of the museum.

Usually research work is hidden from the eyes of visitors. But in this exhibition Larisa Zaitseva, the curator of a collection consisting of more than 10,500 works from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, reveals the secrets of the museum’s scientific ‘inner workings’. As an experienced ‘detective’, Larisa Zaitseva talks about her most fascinating and exciting ‘cases’ and reconstructs the path from riddles to solutions in order to guide museum visitors through the process. She shows what studying photographs looks like, and how their attribution is carried out.

Attribution is establishing the authorship of the images, establishing the time and place of their creation. Sometimes it is impossible to ascertain the exact date of a photograph, but the curator can make an educated guess about the timespan when the shot may have been taken.

Even when many details are already known about a photograph when it enters the collection, the curator still has a huge field for research. He or she needs to verify the existing information and check facts associated with the images, ensuring that the modern viewer has a comprehensive understanding of the history of any featured subjects and events. Thanks to this research little-known places and names accumulate stories, and well-known ones are revealed in a new light.

The exhibition presents images by classics of Russian photography such as Karl Bulla and Maxim Dmitriev, and also more obscure works with extremely interesting stories. A special section of the exhibition donated to the museum by Reikhan and Ulvi Kasimov, trustees of MAMM, shows photographs selected from the archives of British periodicals published during the First World War.

With this exhibition the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow opens a series of similar projects, in which the curators of our museum will share the secrets of their work.