Object photography supports a wide range of museum work, from documentation and conservation to loans, research, and public access. Even when newer photography is available, earlier images may remain part of the record, coming to the fore at different moments.
And that’s largely fine. It’s expected that records will accumulate layers. The question is whether your images ever add time, even occasionally, to routine work at your museum.
At scale, you want to think about: How consistent are our images across collections? How usable are they for different audiences? How easily can they be integrated into new systems as needed? These are not hypothetical concerns.
It’s prudent for museum leaders to consider object photography as a matter of institutional accountability, beyond the purview of a particular role or department. After all, these images are used by collections, conservation, registration, exhibitions, education, communications, IT, and shared externally. Once an image enters your institutional record, its ongoing use and interpretation (and limitations) are borne by the organization as a whole, thus, leadership buy-in very much matters.
Supporting museum work over time
Imaging standards, both national and international, are there to help ensure technical quality, yes, but also to enable images to be compared, evaluated, and reused in ways that support long-term usability. When photography follows these standards, your museum can better rely on it as systems and staff inevitably evolve.
Technical choices around lighting, resolution, framing, and editing will all impact how useful an image can be beyond its original intent. And file naming conventions and metadata are of extreme importance, including the standardization of both. As noted in the Getty Research Institution’s Introduction to Metadata:
A high-level understanding of the importance of metadata and buy in from upper management are essential for the successful implementation of a metadata strategy. Without a general understanding of [these 9 practical principles] on the part of the decision makers of an institution, it will be difficult if not impossible to consistently create adequate, appropriate metadata to enable access and use by core constituents (including internal users, the general public, and expert researchers).
Object photography then, is as much about properly capturing objects as it is about how your institution carries information forward. Recognizing an image’s longer life — the demands it’s asked to meet and how those demands tend to grow — is paramount.
A peek behind the scenes: Photographing objects at the Penn Museum includes interesting comparisons of the impact of different lighting choices.
Photography and image stewardship resources
Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), the U.S. standard for cultural heritage imagining.
ISO 19264-1:2021, image quality analysis that’s vendor-neutral, internationally recognized, and auditable. Note: A new edition will be published in the coming months.
NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation, a resource to help you build or assess your digital preservation systems.
Cataloging Art and Architecture includes the application of Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) and Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO).
AIC/FAIC webinar on collections photography includes a slide deck and recorded video of the presentation.
