‘Expert assistance’ and ‘important discoveries’: photographs and hidden histories in museum catalogues, 1840–1910

Conventional institutional histories have focussed on male directors and curators. This article posits a more expansive understanding of museum histories that encompass women’s professional labour. In the twenty-first century, the museum catalogue might include large glossy illustrated tomes that accompany blockbuster exhibitions as well as online gallery catalogues vital for the identification of objects held in public collections. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, museum catalogues developed alongside photography. Photographs of art and architecture were acquired as a means of documenting and understanding collections and communicating with the wider public. At the intersection of museum catalogues and photography women’s labour will be uncovered hidden in archives and submerged collections. Women were working at the forefront of new approaches to cataloguing from within and beyond the museum. It will be argued that their labour and expertise were acknowledged at this catalogue-photograph nexus but were subsequently occluded.