Recently I visited a cultural venue, that shall not be named, when a member of the party I was in attendance with got a ticking off from a surly member of staff for taking a photograph. With more and more people carrying cameras, in the form of mobile phones, in their pockets can museums, art galleries, theatres maintain their ‘no-photography’ policies?
A few days later the BBC Radio 4’s frontrow posed the question ‘Can you photograph in museums?’ to Maurice Davies from the Museums Association and Sarah Brown, Curator of Leeds Art Gallery.
So imagine my delight to find out today is Picture A Museum Day, designed to encourage museums to share behind the scenes photos and the public to tweet and post to Flickr their snaps of their museum visits. It is fantastic to see visitors being encouraged to take a visual record of their interaction with museums and sydicate that across the web – I just hope no one got in trouble for trying to participate at the Musée d’Orsay…
Image c/o Oriol Gascón licensed under Creative Commons.
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2 Responses to camera shy?
Having recently travelled across Australia, it was interesting to note how this topic was handled over there. In every art gallery and museum I visited in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane the policy was the same – You could take photographs, just not use the flash.
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That’s interesting. I have been talking this afternoon around some of the concerns and benefits. I do wonder how these galleries and museums get around any issues with copyright surrounding certain artists, objects or collections.
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