Record of the International Symposium for the 20th Anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum:
Why Are Photography Museums Necessary?

A Place for Photography
Filippo Maggia
Director at Fondazione Fotografia Modena, Italy

A Place for Photography

Filippo Maggia
Instead of following the style of a normal lecture I’m now going to show a
50-minute video, since I have so many things I want to tell you. I want tointroduce the institution I represent and what we do, and also cover why
photography is so important today, namely why a photography museum isnecessary.
Andrea Landi (President of Fondazione Fotografia Modena): The project
implemented by Fondazione Fotografia is the result of the coupling of the
Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena (FCRMO) bank’s experiencein the art field and a number of favorable circumstances that led to theidentification of photography as an area to explore in the field of culture.
The Fondazione Fotografia project was launched by the FCRMO in order toinclude photography into the sphere of modern art.
I first met Filippo Maggia back in 2007, at the exhibition Northern Lights:
Reflecting with Images, which he had curated. This was a meeting which I
think left its mark on my experience, and his too. Together with Maggia
and Angela Vetesse, then director of the Galleria Civica di Modena, we
discussed the possibilities of setting up a project which was not exclusively
exhibition-minded, but which might also be characterized by training andresearch activities. Another key element is the fact that this project, thoughinitially just one of the many projects of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio
di Modena, began to emerge as an ever more stable and organized structure
within our activities. Indeed, at the end of 2012 it was turned into an
instrumental company. This is not a mere formality: it is the first and only
time the Fondazione has created an instrumental company, thus underlining
the intention to make long-term investments in this project.
Filippo Maggia: The Fondazione Fotografia started out in 2007 at thebehest of the FCRMO with the main aim of putting together collections ofcontemporary photography, both Italian and international. Since then, morethan 1,300 works by contemporary artists have been collected, from the Far
East to Eastern Europe, from the Middle East, Africa, India, South America,
North America, Western and Northern Europe. Currently, there are still a104couple of areas left to be explored in the world: Oceania, Central America andparts of Europe — the collection plans to acquire works from these regions
too.
The Italian collection, on the other hand, offers an account of the researchcarried out in our country from the 1980s right up to the present day. It
ranges from photographers of the generation of Luigi Ghirri, Gabriele
Basilico and Mimmo Jodice right up to today’s thirty- and forty-somethings.
The Fondazione Fotografia's exhibitions have been hosted in the rooms of
the Sant'Agostino complex, currently undergoing restoration work; in the
future, the Fondazione will be housed in Modena's Polo dell’immagine
contemporanea (Polo Centre for Contemporary Imagery), along with othercultural activities from around the city. Exhibitions staged over recent years
with works from the collections include Asian Dub Photography, History
Memory Identity, Breaking News, and North Tenth Parallel, among others.
Alongside the collections, over the years a range of training activities havebeen developed, with the two-year post-diploma master's degree for young
imaging artists, a course for curators, and numerous specialist workshops.
The master's course in particular, which is now in its sixth biennium,
brings together artists from all over Italy. It offers them the chance to comeinto direct contact with the world of art through lectures but also handson experiences, workshops and seminars with international artists, foreign
residencies, commissions, and exhibitions (The Summer Show).
A few years ago, the Fondazione Fotografia began to host the archives of
the Fotomuseo Panini, a historical institution within the city that houses
the Panini Collection (with over a million images from the nineteenth
century up to the post-war years), as well as works from other major public
and private collections. Since then, the Fondazione has hosted both major
historical exhibitions, such as Robert Rive and Photography of the Andes, andcontemporary ones.
The Fondazione's work on historical photography also continues throughthe cataloging, conservation, and restoration of both its own archives andthose of other public or private collections. As well as collecting works andcontributing to contemporary research through its support for training
activities — particularly for young artists and curators — it also promotes
special projects with artists, including Axel Hütte and Daido Moriyama,
Ahlam Shibli, Mitra Tabrizian, Zanele Muholi, and Claudio Gobbi. With
Kenro Izu and Hiroshi Sugimoto, we currently have two different projects
underway: Izu is busy photographing Pompeii and Sugimoto portraying
Italian theaters.
Over the years, we have also put together a major video library, which may
be consulted on request. It's home to around a hundred long interviews with105

many of the artists in the collection, with unique testimonies of great value
for those who wish to study and investigate the many ways images contributeto our understanding of the contemporary world. Contributors to the video
library include Amar Kanwar, Nobuyoshi Araki, Gabriele Basilico, Daido
Moriyama, David Goldblatt, Yasumasa Morimura, Roman Ondák, Adrian
Paci, Hrair Sarkissian, Mladen Stilinović, and Artur Żmijewski, among
others. On the occasion of the exhibitions, the Fondazione also offers a vast
program of fringe events, from book presentations to small conventions and,best of all, meetings with the artists featured (such as Willie Doherty and Axel
Hütte).
In March this year (2016), together with the international television channel
Sky Art, the Fondazione launched two major photography prizes: aninternational one dedicated to artists whose research has made a significant
contribution to the development of the photographic language, and a second
prize for Italian artists under 40. Santu Mofokeng was the winner of the firstedition: he won €70,000, a book deal, and a solo exhibition.
As this preamble has explained, the Fondazione Fotografia is not just a
museum or a traditional exhibition space, nor has it ever set out to be one.
The city of Modena has a long tradition of photographic culture and I
myself was a curator at the Galleria Civica di Modena (the city’s modern andcontemporary art museum) for 10 years, from 1993 to 2003. The Fondazione
aims to be a center, an incubator of ideas in support of research, in which thecollections serve as the raw material with which to study, reflect, and consider
how the language of imagery has been evolving — and how it has never beenas universal as it is today.
In 1990, the front cover of the journal Camera Austria featured a work
produced by two Austrian artists Michael Schuster and Hartmut Skerbish,emblematically titled All Has Been Seen by All (1989). Twenty-six years havegone by, and today we may realize just how contemporary this Hasselblad
camera body with four lenses featured on the cover was. And yet judging by
what the world of imagery — to which photography belongs — became overthe following decades, we might be tempted to say that "all" is never enough.
In 2011 Flickr, the social network for image sharing, was uploading 4,733
images per minute — almost seven million per day. By 2014, almost twobillion images had been uploaded to the site, of which 1.3 billion were also
on Facebook. In October 2013, the social network Instagram had around 150
million active users, of whom 28% were aged between 18 and 29. Around 55
million photos were shared per day, totaling of 16 billion by October 2013.
Over the course of the last two or three years, these remarkable figures havebeen increasing in a giddying exponential vortex. Rather than a language ofimages, we should talk about a Babel of images.

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The question thus arises: is there still any sense in talking about a "languageof imagery," an expression coined more than two decades ago by Thomas
Ruff? What kind of distinction can we make today between images andphotographs, if any? What dignity does the status of photography confer on
an image?
And so, perhaps more than ever, it is now important to have a place to discussphotographs and images, be they still or moving, as part of other media.
Installations like those by Nikhil Chopra or Ishmael Randall Weeks call upon
the viewer to participate, to get inside the work so as to perceive its meaning,
to share in the experience.
But what are these images trying to tell us? What do they offer? Clearly they
constitute a language which, thanks to technology, has become universal; they
travel through the ether and in the blink of an eye go "from the Apennines
to the Andes," to paraphrase nineteenth-century Italian writer Edmondo
De Amicis. In his time, this was a matter of daydreaming: the reader had to
imagine everything. Now all you have to do is press the "send" button.
The power of these images is immense: communication through sharing,
through "likes." But just what lies behind the "likes"? Do these images
constitute visions or are they just a means to their own end? Do theyencourage reasoning; do they open doors?
Never before has photography been so democratic. The problem isunderstanding what to do with it, and for artists this responsibility is evengreater: it’s not a matter of mere form or aesthetics, as Michael Schuster andHartmut Skerbish aimed to demonstrate; there is no longer anything todiscover; the sense of mystery may only be induced or perhaps evoked. All
has been seen, experienced, consumed. Of course, every artist has his or her
own style, through which he or she tries to emerge, to affirm himself/herself
and his/her own poetics. And s/he does so, ever more often, by addressing"highbrow" themes. I would like to examine three of these themes, as I
believe them to be central to current research: memory, identity, and genre.
Memory may be individual or collective, and it may even be both. The
history of a person belongs to that person alone, but s/he may also be partof a group of people who, like him/her, feel they belong to a social body —a society, in other words — made up of relations, traditions, and customs.
In photography archives, through the yellowing of yesteryear's photographs,
we may reconstruct the history of a man or a woman, of a family group, of avillage. (I am reminded here of the work of Vivan Sundaram, who elaborated
images from his own personal family history in the work Re-take of 'Amrita',or that of Marika Asatiani, produced in the Georgian province of Adjara,
once a Soviet territory but culturally Islamic.)

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We live in a moment of great transition, dominated by continuous migrationsof peoples from one corner of the earth to the other. In such moments, many
contemporary artists use photography to preserve memory, which is after all
the great depository of history. (Just think of the silent photographs of the
Armenian-Jordanian Hrair Sarkissian, or the moving Larvae Channel 2, a
cartoon created by Wael Shawky telling of the lives of two Palestinian refugees— the story of an existence denied.) We might even state that the history weall learned from books at school is today handed down more through images
than texts (take the History channel, which my students often quote as theirprimary source).
Have images replaced words? For several years now, almost all the mostprestigious international papers have published photographs on their front
page on a daily basis. The photographs are in fact the icons of the moment:
essential moments that mark the passing of time. So many times, when we
think back to a historical event, we first recall the image that represented it,even before the details of the event itself. Do you have any recollections of the
Gulf War photographs or those from the Balkans in the early 1990s? We canall remember the shot of Peter Arnett on the terrace of a hotel, but if you ask
people, few could tell you whether it was taken in Baghdad or Sarajevo.
Which brings me to another issue of Camera Austria. The cover and the inside
pages were entirely black, as if in mourning — a strong gesture of protest.
Against what? It was the year 2000, and the populist, xenophobic party led
by Jörg Haider had taken control of the Austrian government. The editorsof the Graz-based magazine, co-founded by Austrian photographer Manfred
Willmann, opted for silence, and a deafening one at that. The artist is thefilter of the period he or she lives through, and provides humanity with his/
her testimony — we might almost say his/her version of the facts.
This is what Thomas Struth does when he tells us of China; Daido Moriyama
in his endless pilgrimage from one end of Japan to the other; Iosif Kiraly andpost-Ceausescu Bucharest; David Goldblatt and the recent history of South
Africa; Swetlana Heger and East Berlin after the fall of the wall; or Robert
Adams and the deforestation of the American West. And in an even more
direct fashion — militant, we should perhaps say — so does Akram Zaatariwith his collection of letters from the young imprisoned Palestinian Nabih
Awada. Or Mounir Fatmi in his provocative video Bad Connection, in which
the Moroccan artist questions the pre-constituted meaning of what we see:the video shows bomb belts typical of suicide bombers, which immediately
evoke death and destruction, but which are here fitted out with books by
André Gide and Guy de Maupassant, as if to say that the only real explosive
charge is that of words, of culture.
And then for many artists, memory is something extremely young, still "in
progress." We might look at the countries of the Eastern Bloc or North Africa,108

or even those of the Middle East or South America: what memory are wetalking about here? Over the last 30 years, everything has changed and is stillchanging in those parts of the world: the photographs from three decades ago
already look tired. And yet, thanks to them, today it is possible to understandthe reasons behind a present which often seems indecipherable, and of whichphotography continues to provide a faithful testimony.
From memory, it is a small step to identity. The defense of an identity, its
affirmation through the work of an artist, is one of the most widely examinedthemes in the contemporary arena. Contemporary photography needs torecount the identities of places before that of those who populate them.
Again, we have to go out to those parts of the world which photography has
unveiled for us over recent decades: the Mali nightlife (by Malick Sidibé),
the sea sailed by a messenger of peace (by the Israeli Yael Bartana), the muchtormented Palestine (by Ahlam Shibli), the colors of India (by the learned
Raghubir Singh), China suspended between tradition and modernity (byYang Fudong), even the pure and tribal South Africa (by Santu Mofokeng).
In other forms — in a sort of hybrid representation, lying between
politics and social commitment — we find the Thailand of Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, the Peru of David Zink Yi, the Turkey of Fikret Atay, theRomania of Călin Dan or the Croatia of Renata Poljak. Their work sometimes
takes the form of reportage photography, but most of all it is photography
with a sense of awareness, which aims to be a vibrant conscience and not justa mere testimony. Images that set out to force the viewer to stop and question
things, aimed most of all at a Western audience that prefers to see thesepainful historical dramas recounted in television programs. Photographs thattell the stories of men and women, of peoples, populations, lives undergone
and never lived.
The question of identity often leads to one of gender, of belonging, ofrecognition and self-affirmation, in which the emotion goes beyond reason,trying out different forms of narrative in order to give shape to profoundemotions. In this territory, the West over the last few decades has set out
precise yet initially very tormented positions.
Referring to the United States alone, I might cite New York photography of
the 1980s and ‘90s: from Robert Mapplethorpe to Mark Morrisroe, Peter
Hujar, Nan Goldin, and the very delicate William Gedney before them.
As hard-hitting and decisive as Cindy Sherman was, or early Philip-Lorca
diCorcia, only over the last decade have many other countries started toreason about this openly. Two artists who are undoubtedly fighting are Zanele
Muholi, a leading figure in Africa's gay rights movement, and Samuel Fosso
before her.
Yet I don’t wish to reduce the gender issue to an exclusively sexual or

109racial matter, however much both may be fundamental in the life of every
individual. I believe that today, belonging to a genre of whatever nature means
first of all defending an autonomy of thought; being rooted in one’s own life
— or a faithful mirror of it — this autonomy paradoxically emerges moreclearly as a method, a modus operandi et vivendi, in those countries where
the art system is not yet established enough to substantially compromise thecontents. This is an approach that the latest generation of artists highlights
today, especially females, due to a question of sensitivity and determination.
The previously mentioned Ahlam Shibli, the intransigent Japanesephotographers Lieko Shiga and Tomoko Kikuchi and the disarming Yurie
Nagashima (from Miyako Ishiuchi onwards, female artists have played an evergreater role in Japan), Fen-Ma Liuming (the alter ego of the young Chinese
artist Ma Liuming), the Argentine Laura Glusman, the Romanian Alexandra
Croitoru, the Icelandic Hallgerdur Hallgrímsdóttir, and the ambiguous young
Englishman Jonny Briggs are but some of the contemporary artists wholive their art as a life mission — one from which they cannot be alienated,
often making creative isolation a sort of defensive bulwark of their own
independence.
The future will be a hotbed of comparison between different cultures,
becoming more integrated, at times coordinated, other times piloted if notindeed forced, and I think rarely natural and spontaneous. And yet neverbefore have these cultures been so close, by virtue of the rapid transmissionof data, thoughts, and reflections transformed into imagery. That said, not allof these are shared or shareable; this is probably a further point of strength
in this new challenge for photography. It is not enough to add a "like": weare asked to observe, reflect, and criticize. And what better place than themuseum to host and feed this discussion! Today, the images that dominate
the world and communication between humans may thus be discussed andanalyzed by young artists, scholars, critics, and curators as much as by thegeneral public who come across them in the morning papers or on the wallsof museum spaces.
I believe that the artist who knows how to exploit art forms to express thegreat movements and the great issues of the contemporary world — and who
therefore manages to offer a reading, an interpretation — may endow theirown work with great power. Therefore I think those who manage to insert
such art forms into contemporary issues are the ones who really can invest theartwork with great strength, insofar as they may help the viewer to question
his/her own views, for it is a prerogative of the artwork to offer a synthesis
and highlight aspects that the onlooker has not grasped, moving in to strike
him/her emotionally.
The training of a critical generation, capable of interpreting the languageof images, bringing it up to date from moment to moment, is a need towhich this institution, before anyone else, is called to answer — if for no110

other reason than that the wide-scale spread of imagery entails enormous
responsibilities with regards to the potential conditioning of millions ofpeople (for example, we might think of the risks minors run today throughthe use of smartphones). The programming of exhibitions, artist talks,seminars, and teaching activities are the elements that, on a daily basis, theinstitution weaves into its own fabric: the museum.
And that is not to forget its publishing activities and, most of all, itscollections: a heritage which remains available to the community, and whichhelps us to understand how, all around us, the world is changing (“collecting
photographs is a bit like collecting the world,” as Susan Sontag would say). In
other words, that which photography set out to do right from the start.
(English Editing: Alex Dudok de Wit [Art Translators Collective])111