@museumsandthings / museumsandthings.tumblr.com
Forty five of the most powerful images from 2011.
From an academic perspective, I wonder how many of these images and their subject matter will eventually be found in museums.
From a personal perspective, I am really sad to see how many of these images have to do with violence. It has been a harsh year.
"I believe that history is important, and I also believe that history is not a series of events; it's all interconnected, messy, and it changes if you shine a different light on it or describe it in a different voice. I've never been especially interested in the major events of humanity's past, but the minutiae of it fascinates me. When I was starting my studies in documentary theatre in the spring of 2001, I was struck by the fact that documentary theatre doesn't focus on the big picture; it builds a picture out of individual experiences. Individual experiences interest me -- classified ads in papers from fifty years ago, the petty politics of a local college campus, a woman telling me that families during the second world war who'd lost a son in combat could hang gold-edged flags in the window. I didn't know that, and I'd had classes specifically focused on that war....
There were no airplanes in the sky for what felt like weeks after the eleventh, possibly was, I don't remember. The first time I saw one again, afterward, I stopped walking to stare at it until it disappeared."
