Fotografija kao (ne)pouzdani muzejski predmet
Photography as an (un)reliable museum object

Summary/Abstract: Photography is the science and practice of making permanent pictures by using light on a light-sensitive surface, which cannot replicate the duration of an action but can record a specific moment. This visual media enables us to save important moments from history, including our personal memories which do not necessarily bear historical significance.Photography can also influence history, either by giving us a picture of what happened or how somebody else saw it happening. A photograph was considered as a reliable document of an event occurring in the past. It was regarded as an objective way of representing an event and a document credible enough to convey ‘reality’. But, throughout history we have seen photo manipulation happening, some of it unintentionally, but some of it on purpose. Photographs were manipulated and changed either for the purpose of politics or for the purpose of creating a long-term historical context that would turn the actual reality into an alternative, i.e.‘desired’ one. The editing techniques were discovered not long after photography itself, out of the need to remove certain objects or excessive details, but as years went by, the techniques were used to erase people from photographs, and later to place people in places and times they could not possibly belong. These little modifications that were made could, and did have consequences later in the course of time, which we are aware of today. This paper will put stress on few examples that show how the perception of things can be changed by just editing one photograph and how the ultimate objective medium – photography could be corrupted to become an unreliable document and ultimately an unreliable museum object.

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