Museology
November 28th, 2004by Richard Ross
ISBN: 0893813761
Ross photographs what he sees in museums: display cases, storage rooms, statues in a corner. He goes for the unexpected shot — the things you might see if you had keys and could get in on an overcast Sunday afternoon when the place was closed and no one else was around. The kind of things you would see if you gave yourself the time to really look around, not just at the objects set out for your attention, but at the rooms those objects were in, the cracked basement floor, the back rooms containing broken or leftover bits, and the reflections on the glass cases.
Most of the photographs in this book were taken at natural history museums. Ross always includes the edges just past the diorama because he want viewers to understand the context of his pictures; the trick isn’t in getting you to question whether or not the animals are real, but in making it obvious they both are and are not at the same time.
Triptychs created from out of focus details of oil paintings are the other types of photographs in the book. Where the taxidermy and statue shots are clear in their focus, with a bit of mystery in the shadows cast by natural or overhead lighting, the triptychs verge on being abstract art. Color seems to join the three pieces, and they all have a sort of underwater/otherworldly feel to them. Maybe it is the disjointed body parts; maybe it is the lack of focus suggesting motion in what you know can’t have moved.
I don’t think the included essays added anything to the book. The foreword and the introduction are, at a single page apiece, not bad. They just aren’t that good. The six pages given to David Mellor’s essay would have been better spent on four more museum shots and two more triptychs. He cites the “right” people (Adorno and Derrida) and says things like “sublime inventorizing” and “enclosed boundaries of displayed animals” — in other words, I think Mellor is more interesting in how his critical analysis sounds than in offering an accessible opinion on Ross’s photographs collected in this book.
Not that I think Ross’s work needs a great deal of textual explication. The images of row after row of birds fixed on their perches, of ductwork hanging behind a marble statue, and antlered heads in plastic bags held shut with the kind of binder clips you find in office supply stores are compelling enough in their own right. Highly recommended.
