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Photo-Museology

The presence of absence and the absence of presence

Mark Adams Nicholas Thomas

$295

Paperback

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English
Sidestone Press
17 November 2022
Ethnographic museums, now often rebranded as collections of 'world cultures', appear permanently problematic, even as their contexts and the orientation of their activities change. Across Europe and elsewhere, curators and other museum staff are committed to dialogue and collaboration with the peoples from whom collections were made. But their vast assemblages of artefacts, removed from countries of origin primarily during the colonial period, and assumed, mostly inaccurately, to have been looted, seem always in question.

Photo-Museology arises from an art project undertaken over 25 years. From the early 1990s, Mark Adams and Nicholas Thomas together investigated sites of cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific and associated places in Europe, ranging from Captain Cook memorials to ethnographic museums. Some of those museums still exhibited colonial symbols and forms of knowledge, others had attempted to displace such histories, foregrounding more inclusive or progressive stories. Complementing the academic studies in the Pacific Presences series, this book offers what John Berger referred to as 'another way of telling'. Through photography, it revisits the places collections were made, and the places they ended up in. It is a meditation on presence and absence.

This books is part of the Pacific Presences series.

289 colour, 76 b/w illustrations

By:   ,
Imprint:   Sidestone Press
Volume:   7
Dimensions:   Height: 254mm,  Width: 178mm, 
ISBN:   9789088906329
ISBN 10:   9088906327
Series:   Pacific Presences
Pages:   474
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Mark Adams is one of New Zealand’s most distinguished photographic artists. He was born in Christchurch, and attended Canterbury University School of Fine Arts from 1967 to 1970. He subsequently became well known for work concerned with cross-cultural interactions around Rotorua, Samoan tatau (tattooing) among the diaspora in New Zealand, the voyages of Captain Cook and other dimensions of colonial history in New Zealand, elsewhere in the Pacific, and in Europe. His work has been exhibited at biennales in Sao Paulo and Johannesburg, and otherwise in countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Nicholas Thomas was an undergraduate at the Australian National University from 1979 to 1982; his BA (Honours) thesis, on Fijian politics, was supervised by Anthony Forge. He visited the Pacific first in 1984 to undertake doctoral research in the Marquesas Islands and has since written extensively on exploration and cross-cultural encounters and on art histories in the Pacific. He has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge since 2006. Key publications: 2016, (with Maia Nuku, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg and Amiria Salmond) Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories. Otago: Otago University Press. 2016, The return of curiosity: what museums are good for in the twenty first century. London: Reaktion / Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2012, (with Peter Brunt, Sean Mallon, Lissant Bolton, Deidre Brown, Damian Skinner and Susanne Kuechler) Art in Oceania: a new history. London: Thames and Hudson / New Haven: Yale University Press. Awarded the Art Book Prize

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