This series was photographed in the
in my home
town, Koblenz. The museum was in a period just before moving to
new premises and on that occasion held a series of exhibitions
under the heading 'Unser Museum' (Our Museum), with a subtitle of
'Depot-Ausstellungen' (Depot-Exhibitions). All exhibits came from
the museum's own collection, many of which had not left storage to
be on public display for many years. I was intrigued to learn
that, like many other museums, the Mittelrhein Museum too had it's
origin in the donation of a private collection: The collector
Pastor Joseph Gregor Lang bequeathed his collection of paintings
to the city upon his death in 1834.
One element that appealed to me about these exhibitions was that
they included exhibits that were (are) usually hidden in the store
rooms because they need restoration and/or are considered to be of
a lower artistic quality. I also liked the different types of
presentation which included some rooms with a dense salon-style
hang and others, where paintings were hung on the metal meshes
usually used in depots.
Thinking about photographic images of museum spaces always
reflects on the nature of photography itself. Both, museum display
and the photographic image re-present their subject in chosen
compositions –by necessity– from a subjective angle.
The term parallax refers to an apparent, seeming change of
the position of an object which appears changed only due to the
viewer's changed position or point of view. This is a hugely
important aspect to all photography which becomes specifically
obvious when placing photographs of the same subject but taken
from different angles next to each other. Museums too, cannot
avoid to stage objects from a certain 'angle'. Hence, one aspect
of this series can be seen to be a pointer to the subjective
artificiality of both the curatorial composition of artefacts and
the photographic composition determined by the chosen point of
view of the lens.
In a wider sense, it seemed a fitting conceptual framework for an
image series about a museum on the move – which is about to
present itself and its artefacts in a different context.