The Museum That Became Its Own Archive

With nothing left to buy, the museum turned the camera on its own storage and found a show in the inventory.

Shows like this one tend to be remembered for a single room, and the argument about whether the rest earned it starts on the second weekend.

Dr Alma Petrov, the museum's head of collections, has been close to it from the start.

What changed

A digitisation project meant for insurance produced 9,400 images of objects that had not been on public display since 1988.

It took three attempts. The first was abandoned at the end of the first month, the second survived until costing, and the third is the one standing.

The unexpected effect is scale: seen at true size, the collection reads as a single household.

We were not curating. We were opening drawers with a camera.

Petrov

How it works

The exhibition hangs the photographs at the size of the objects, so a brooch occupies eight centimetres of wall and a dining table occupies three metres.

The measure will be whether anything changes afterwards, in the collection or the programme, rather than in the press release.

It has been well received by the audience it was made for and largely ignored by everyone else, which the team says is the outcome they wanted.

They are careful about what they claim. Two of the decisions that look deliberate now were, by their own account, the only option left by the time anyone noticed.

What happens next

The archive is online, and the museum has made the whole catalogue downloadable.