NON-COLLECTIONS? OLD COLLECTIONS OF REPRODUCTIONS AND DOCUMENTING PHOTOGRAPHS IN MUSEUMS: SELECTED EXAMPLES

Elizabeth Edwards, a British researcher into therelations among photography, history, and anthropology,used the term of non-collections to define numerous photographsof unidentified status which can be found in contemporarymuseums. They are not collector’s items, such as e.g.,artistic photography or unique specimens of the first photographytechniques. What she rather means are various items:prints, slides, photo-mechanic reproductions, postcards, namelyobjects once produced on a mass scale, with copies presentin many institutions worldwide, thus being neither uniquenor extraordinary. They present works from a museumcollection, historic pieces of local art, or universally known worksof world art. They exist in a hierarchical relation with otherclasses of museum objects, yet they are often pushed to themargin of curator’s practice and kept as ‘archives’, namely outsidethe system of the museum collection. They can sometimesbe found in museum archival sections, in other instancesin libraries, yet it is on more rare occasions that we comeacross them in photo departments. However, owing to the researchinto archival photographs conducted in the last decade(the studies of afore-mentioned Elizabeth Edwards and alsoConstanza Caraffa as well as the teams cooperating with the latter),such collections are experiencing a certain revival. Formingpart of this research, the paper focuses on the collections of reproductionsproduced at the turn of the 20th century in museumsin Toruń, Poznań, and Szczecin, which were German at thetime; the reproductions later found their way to and continuebeing kept in Polish institutions.