You have been invited by one Museum of Visual Culture (MVC) to put together a small exhibition focused on two photographs. Before it will install your exhibition, however, the board of the MVC would like you to write a proposal that explains your ideas. The MVC has allocated a single wall on which you can hang two photographs: Raising the Flag on Mount Suribachi (Joe Rosenthal, 1945) and your choice of any photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe that we have discussed in our course
For this assignment, instead of completing a conventional essay, you will write a project proposal for the board of the MVC. You can organize and write up your proposal however you like, but in crafting your proposal you should respond to the following questions
1) Which Mapplethorpe photograph have you chosen as the second photograph for the exhibition,and what factors have informed your choice?
2) What are some themes – visual, technological, political, or otherwise – that you wish to explore by exhibiting these two photographs together? What connections, ultimately, are you trying to draw between them?
3) Although you have only one wall to work with, what is your approach to the physical hanging of the two photographs? Does it matter how a museum visitor encounters them—and if so, why?
4) According to Hariman & Lucaites and Mercer, the histories of how Rosenthal’s and Mapplethorpe’s photographs have been exhibited are complex. How do these histories inform some of the choices you’re making?
5) Museum exhibitions typically have a “wall text”—that is, something printed on the wall for visitors to read that explains or interprets the significance of the artist(s) or object(s) on display. What will your wall text say?
6) Finally, what is the title of your exhibition, and why have you chosen it?
Sample Solution