At the start of my career, in fact as soon as I started graduate school, I wanted nothing more than to work in a museum. The direct contact with antiquities, the chance to create displays for the public, the swanky receptions that I was sure accompanied exhibition openings: perfect. And I did wind up working in many museums, as a volunteer, as a paid student intern, on short-term contracts, and finally, a permanent contract. From my first behind-the-scenes experience at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in 1995, to the day I left my post as curator of the Manchester Museum Egyptian collection, with more relief than regret, I spent more than 11 years working in museums. In all that time, though, I never curated a temporary exhibition. I worked on major gallery overhauls, and I made a few minor tweaks here and there to individual displays. But coming up with a single idea to develop as a temporary show, with the aim of drawing in visitors just for that – nope, never had the chance and never learned the specific skills that it requires. Most of my museum work involved caring for large collections, which meant dealing with day-to-day inquiries, improving storage and cataloguing, and processing loans to other museums that were organizing exhibitions.
Applying for a Mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy back in 2013 gave me the chance to revisit my curatorial past. To fulfill the public dissemination aspect of the fellowship – that is, how was I going to share my research beyond academia? – I came up with the idea of creating a relatively low-cost, high-quality, photography-based exhibition that could travel to small venues, or to small spaces within larger venues. Because my research is based on the premise that photography was a working tool in archaeology, and was not at all considered some kind of art form, I wanted to get away from the conventional manner of displaying photographs in frames on gallery walls, as I’ve discussed. I also wanted to serve local and regional museums near me – something which seemed a natural fit given that photographer Harry Burton grew up in Stamford, Lincolnshire, while lead excavator Howard Carter grew up in Swaffham, Norfolk. Continue reading “Curating as an ex-curator”
‘Heat’ is everything in this image. Notice the short shadows: it was taken when the sun was near its zenith on May 14th, 1923. That day, from sunrise until 6 pm, dozens of Egyptian men moved 34 crates containing 89 boxes of objects that had been cleared out of the first room (the ‘antechamber’) of the tomb of Tutankhamun over the previous five months. The tomb lay more than five miles from the Nile, and the objects were due to sail down the river on an Egyptian government barge, destined for the antiquities museum in Ismailiya (now Tahrir) Square. There was only one way to get them there, and that was manpower. 
Christina Riggs 