Tracing the cultural value of photographic documentation in, and beyond, the museum

From the Google Art Project to the screenshot, from the jpeg to the gigapixel image, imaging technologies continue to mediate twenty-first century art and culture. In museums and galleries, the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century radically transformed documentation practices; with the contemporary fusion of camera, phone and internet such practices continue to be destabilized. The migration of networked digital media into the museum has created new challenges, with curators and conservators tasked with harnessing unstable media as both mediator of art and art object. At a time where art selfies mix with installation shots on Instagram, control of art’s reproduction has become diffused, with a range of distributed agents contributing to art’s global hyper-circulation. There is a growing recognition that despite the camera’s central role in museum practices, the place of visual documentation within an increasingly computational and networked ecosystem for the preservation and circulation of art has largely been ignored. How can institutions engage with this expanded field of visual documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory?