The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Page 268 The Educational Screen EDITORIAL Museums and Photosraphy WE WERE wondering, in the last issue, why museums are content to exercise only an infinitesimal part of their potential influence ; why such huge investments should be allowed to realize but a fraction of one percent in value to the public for which they were made; why these stately edifices, with their priceless contents, should be let stand year after year in semi-stagnant isolation, satisfied with the meagre figures from their turnstiles as an index of their achievement. W'e hasten to admit the fact that not a few museums have long since recognized this danger of sterility and have gone to great efi^ort and expense to avert it. The efYort usually takes the form of circulating-unit- cases carrying actual objects in their settings, collec- tions of sample stuflfs, sequential arrangements of process-materials, topical groupings of manufactured products, etc. (In this issue we present Miss Wads- worth's interesting account of the activities and achieve- ments of one American museum which is small but outstanding in worth to its community. We suspect that the Kalamazoo museum belongs in the front rank for magnitude of service rendered in proportion to parvitude of resources available.) The unit-case is valuable when any one sees it. Its costly weaknesses are getting it built, getting it moved, and getting it seen. A museum exhibit is worthless except when human eyes are looking at it. The degree of its worth de- pends upon the minutes or hours it is looked at by those eyes. Now what is the fate of the unit-case in schools? In a pitifully large majority of schools so served the case means little. Where to put it is a problem, customarily solved by placing it in some cor- ridor more or less dark, at a point where it will be least in the way during change of classes. The average pupil's chief concern is not to bump into in going by. A few look at its contents a moment or two, the day it arrives, and merely dodge it the rest of the two weeks. Occasional schools have a teacher sufficiently alert and conscientious to take her class once to the case for thoughtful viewing and discussion, when those students near enough to see gain real value. A specialist in decimal statistics might determine the coefficient of efficiency of such a case in its round of the schools. Assuming, however, adequate viewing of the ex- hibit, consider just what these unit-cases do. They aim to duplicate the object as it stands in the museum for use at a di.stance. A most worthy aim. Nothing can equal "the object itself" for educational purposes. But the su])renie argument for "the object itself" is that it permits the play of all the senses, and "we learn through all our senses, not through any one alone." Quite true! Yet the object, as displayed in the mu- seum or in the unit-case, is carefully and necessarily guarded against the operation of any sense save vision. Inaccessible position, guard rails, or enclosing glass ensure that the public shall not touch, taste, smell or hear. It can only see. Further, it can see from one side only, for the o]iaque sides and back of cases and cabinets assure this limitation of view. The same exclusive appeal to vision, the same limited viewpoint, spell "picture". If vision is the only sense that can act upon museum objects, why all the costly procedure of transporting objects hither and yon? Why not a per- fect picture of that object—a picture costing cents instead of dollars for production, duplication, trans- portation and replacement? Tradition is an excellent asset, rightly used. It should serve as the one sound standard whereby to test and select the new, not as a fornuila to embalm and eternalize the old. The museum tradition is venerable and deserves the authority it wields. For twenty odd centuries—from Alexandria to America—there was no chance or reason for the museum to change policy or method. "Gather things, anchor them, and let who will come and see." But from 1833 to 1933, one brief rich century, certain things happened of which the museum world is still too blissfully unappreciative. Photography was born with the daguerreotype, and there followed the transparent negative, the paper print, the stereograph, the lantern slide, film and the motion picture, silent, in color, in sound. Photography is ready and waiting, with all its forms and subtleties, to end the isolation of museums. The picture, the right kind for the specific object, can carry the museum's treasures abroad safely, cheajjly, accu- rately. It can move the mountain to Mahomet, where ever Mahomet may be. A museum now doing sporadic circulation of cumbrous objects can saturate with serv- ice its comnumity, its State, and forty-seven other States with the money now used in laboriously building and carting around a few costly unit-cases to local schools. Once photogra])hy has been harnessed for the pur- l)ose, museums will be emancipated from present handi- caps. They can broadcast all their possessions. But a fraction of their exhibits are adaptable to unit-cases. Most of them are too large, too small, too rare to be risked in transportation. But no group can be too large, no fabric too delicate, no exhibit too costly for pic- torial distribution. Difficulties of cost, once prohibi- tive become meaningless. With modern camera equip- ment a few cents makes the perfect negative, a few more the print or slide; a few dollars make duplicates by hundreds, and transportation is a matter of penny postage. Result? The original objects stay safely in the museum, but the whole collection can be laid under the eyes of millions, in homes or in schools, to be scanned and studied as long and as often as the spirit or the teacher moves. When museums accept what photography offers them they can take their normal place at the head of the visual education movement. Nelson L, Greene.