Photographs are integral to museum practice, employed on a daily basis by museum professionals, whether curators, registrars, exhibition designers, or educators. Despite this ubiquity, Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton observe that, to date, histories of museum collecting have been written without ‘serious critical engagement with the work that photographs have been asked to do’ in museums. The editors and contributors to this volume seek to fill this analytic void by closely examining the role and status of photograph collections within museums. The focus of the publication is deliberately limited to museums since there are unique social biographies attached to photographs housed in institutions that primarily collect and display objects. The chapters explore how the collective histories of groups of photographs parallel or collide with the corporate histories, value systems, and organizational practices of their holding institutions. These are timely stories to tell, since as Edwards and Morton note, analogue photograph collections are increasingly endangered by digitization schemes that reduce photographs to pure image information and ‘elide the history of the collection and its relationship with the museum’.

Edwards is a noted visual and historical anthropologist, who has written extensively on anthropological photography and the materiality of photographs; she serves as Director of the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University. Morton is Curator of Photograph and Manuscript Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Together, the editors represent the target audience for this publication: scholars interested in the history of photography and the social uses of photographs and curators and other museum professionals at institutions with photograph collections. The thirteen essays assembled by Edwards and Morton are intended as practical case studies, reflecting a wide range of museums, from art museums to maritime museums, that vary greatly in scale, from national cultural heritage museums to local history museums. The volume is the product of a one-day workshop, ‘Between Art and Information: Collecting Photographs', organized by the Museums and Galleries History Group and PHRC in Leicester in March 2013. The genesis of the publication is reflected in the preponderance of British institutions represented, though there are also submissions related to collections in the United States, Cuba, New Zealand, and France. These collected case studies chronicle the history of photograph collections both before and after their entry into museums, as they shift from private collections to public resources.

The transformative effect of museum acquisition is highlighted in the first section, ‘Becoming collections’. For some, incorporation into a museum is revelatory event, expanding the potential uses of the photographs and exposing the collection to a broader audience, as was the case for the David MacGregor maritime photographs in the SS Great Britain Trust (Eleni Papavasileiou). In other cases, the liminal status of photographs outside object-centered museological practices and systems leads to their neglect and marginalization after acquisition. Duncan Shields recounts how Alfred Maudslay's photographs of archaeological fieldwork from 1881–1894 and plaster casts of Maya monuments, while highly prized by scholars, were considered undesirable by both the South Kensington Museum and the British Museum due to curatorial bias. And yet, some donors, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, recognized the value of photography in memorializing her curatorial vision, assembling photograph albums of art installations to visually reinforce the written stipulations of her will (Casey Riley).

The second section, ‘Scientific documents’, examines a subset of scientific and anthropological museums. In these contexts, the informational and evidentiary value of photographs is instrumental to their use in didactic displays intended for public consumption, whether in anthropological exhibits at the South Kensington Museum (Christopher Morton) or as illustrations for plant specimens at the Museum of Economic Botany (Caroline Cornish). In a fascinating study, Geoffrey Belknap and Sophie Defrance describe more private uses, using Charles Darwin's papers to illustrate how 19th-century scientists used photographs to exchange information to facilitate their work, as well as to establish and cement personal relationships. Darwin assembled albums of portraits to document his global network of colleagues and friends. Since the albums do not survive at the Down House Museum, they constitute an invisible photograph collection, retraceable only through the text of Darwin's letters.

The questions of lacunae in the historical record and the fragmentary nature of visual sources are tackled in the third section, ‘Shaped in history’. These case studies show how the collecting of photographs by museums is often tied to historical events and how photographs are used to develop historical narratives, whether a national history that focuses on select political figures at the Museo de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba (Kristine Juncker) or the effort to include marginalized voices and perspectives of the Māori in the development of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Athol McCredie). Gareth Syvret illuminates a collection of seemingly mundane photographs of signage from the British Channel Islands during World War II in the Société Jersiaise Museum. He reframes the photographer's activity as a form of resistance, visual evidence that counters a prevailing historical narrative of collaboration by the islands' inhabitants during German occupation. Syvret also describes an exhibition at the Jersey and Guernsey Museums on the experience of Channel Islanders as prisoners of war in Germany, noting that photographs were mainly used as design devices, not contextualized or interpreted to the same degree as the displayed objects.

The loss of meaning that occurs when photographs are used uncritically in exhibition design is treated with deft and nuance in the fourth and final section, ‘Curatorial practices’. These essays provide thoughtful meditations on the role that curators play in the interpretation and exhibition of photographs. In contrast to the instrumental use of photography in the Channel Islands exhibition, Ulrike Bessel describes a project at the Royal Engineers Museum with an explicitly stated goal to focus on photograph albums and their materiality as artefacts. Nevertheless, practical preservation and display issues undermined the curators' intent since the need to use reproductions and digital facsimiles limited the ability of visitors to physically engage with the photographs. Damarice Amao also considers the material nature of negatives when discussing the collection of surrealist French photographer Eli Lotar at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Since art museums tend to collect vintage prints as exemplars of photographic practice and aesthetic achievement, the physical format of the negatives hampered the reassessment of Lotar's oeuvre. Amao highlights the critical role that museums play in the establishment of canons in art history – the very act of acquiring and exhibiting Lotar's work alongside more established artists elevated the status of a relatively neglected figure.

The final essay in the volume effectively sums up the themes of the preceding sections, which are useful analytical facets that cut across all the case studies. Caroline Edge describes a fruitful curatorial encounter with a collection of photographs of everyday life in Bolton, which were created in 1937 as raw data for a social research study. When acquired by the Bolton Museum in 1994, the photographs were valued primarily as art works of local interest, rather than as scientific documents. In researching the photographs, museum staff realized that local knowledge would be necessary to identify all the contemporary locations. By posting the photographs to social media, the museum generated new histories, both local and personal, thereby shifting their status yet again from art objects to family photographs. As historical photographs reactivated by a local audience in their contemporary settings, this case study demonstrates the potential for photograph collections in museums to catalyse social interactions and spark intellectual engagement among individuals and within communities in profoundly meaningful ways. Above all, Photographs, museums, collections proves the value of this kind of contextualization in the consideration of photographs in any setting, institutional or otherwise. By tracing the trajectories of photographs through their institutional life cycles within museums, these capsule histories provide readers with an intellectual framework to better assess the cultural and social significance of the collections and speculate on the afterlives of images through their display and online distribution.

Photographs, museums, collections provides analytical lenses that may profitably be applied to other contexts. An additional audience for the publication would be librarians, archivists, and visual resource professionals, who may use the case studies as models when assessing photographs within their own collections. Certainly, one hopes that the editors will also turn their attention to assembling the hidden histories of photographs in libraries and archives, which have their own distinct institutional ecosystems that privilege text over images. Though the volume lacks a comprehensive bibliography, students and library and archives professionals seeking recent literature on the relationship of photography to fields such as anthropology and history will benefit from the lists of references that accompany each essay. For a publication focused on photography, the number and quality of illustrations is adequate – approximately 50 black and white figures and 16 colour plates – though not overgenerous, since authors occasionally refer to specific images that are not reproduced. Sporadic typos and punctuation errors indicate that the publication could have benefited from closer copyediting. However, these are minor deficiencies that do not detract from the publication's overall usefulness and its contribution to a promising avenue of research that will no doubt be beneficial to academics and practitioners actively engaged with photograph collections in a range of institutional settings. Much more surely remains to be written, but Photographs, museums, collections is an excellent start.