While I was studying art history, my tutor once advised the class that when you want to take photos in a gallery, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Later, when I started working in various galleries, I always felt bad when someone asked whether they could take photographs because I had to tell them no.
Thankfully, things have loosened up – at least in UK museums and galleries – and personal photography is generally allowed and even encouraged. But have things swung too far in the other direction? This has been a heated topic of debate on social media this past week. Smartphones have made photography accessible to almost everybody, while social media provides somewhere for all those photos to go. As such, the phone has become a significant presence in the gallery, to the annoyance of some.
It’s easy to see why phones can be annoying. They represent a sort of loud carelessness, the idea that someone isn’t really paying attention, isn’t really experiencing the thing that’s in front of them. Sometimes phone use can be outright obnoxious. At a recent exhibition opening, I had to abruptly move myself out of the way of two separate people who were live-streaming their visit on Instagram, seemingly expecting everyone else to move to accommodate them.
Obnoxiousness aside, phones are an easy target. The criticism of their use in galleries seems rooted in an elitist perception of who art is for and how it should be experienced. The idea of banning photography in galleries carries an expectation that people should follow an unwritten etiquette to engage with art. It implies that if you can’t behave yourself, then art isn’t for you. But art is supposed to be for everyone, and for that to mean something, galleries must accommodate for a variety of experiences.
Those experiences don’t necessarily have to be profound. Art and the experiences of it can be many things – powerful, thought provoking, funny, and often even boring. Some people will want to contemplate quietly, others will crave lively discussion. Many will wish to take photos and post them on social media. The important thing about art is just that you experience it, not how, and for many people, taking photos on your phone is a natural extension of that experience. Factors such as the safety of people and the art itself must be taken into consideration, but by regulating how people should behave in art exhibitions, we’re ultimately saying that some people are less welcome than others.
Moreover, photos are taken for a wide variety of reasons. I know this as a regular gallery visitor and a habitual photo-taker. I often take a huge number of photos to help me to remember a show: a small detail of one artwork, a bit of text on the wall, anything and everything that catches my interest. These can be especially helpful if I’m writing something, but I don’t always reference these photos directly. Somehow the act of taking them helps me remember, perhaps because it’s something active, whereas looking at art is typically a passive experience.
When I visited New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I found myself in front of artworks that I had only ever read about – like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night – artworks that I never really thought I would see in real life, and ones that I may never see again. I was happy to photograph them. Things aren’t always so dramatic, but I continue to take photos only for my own enjoyment, and more often than not, these photos will end up on Twitter and Instagram. Social media gives me, and anyone else with access, the chance to freely voice an opinion, and photos give valuable context to those opinions. The only time I take no photos is when an exhibition has had no effect on me.
A common argument against taking photos in a gallery or museum is that you should buy a postcard or exhibition catalogue instead, but catalogues can be prohibitively expensive, especially after the price of a ticket. While postcards are relatively cheap, they lack the instinctive appeal of taking your own photo. The key words there are “your own”: when you photograph a work of art, it turns that work into something personal, giving you a sense of ownership so that you can not only see a Van Gogh but take a tiny piece of it with you – one that’s yours and no one else’s. That feeling can’t be replicated with a postcard.