the Frick Collection momentarily relaxed its no-photography policy in the galleries, and then reversed it after only a month. According to a Hyperallergic website report, the decision was made to protect the Frick’s objects, which are usually displayed sans protective glass cases.
I personally applauded this move. Every time I go to a museum, I see tourists backing up into other people angling for a shot. In every gallery there’s at least one person fixated on their digital viewfinder rather than the actual object (which they presumably flew across the globe to see!)
Taking photos gives us the false sense of recording a moment or visual experience. It takes us out of the moment and renders the visit little better than browsing the museum’s online catalog.
Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel did an experiment to find out if photography helps or hurts a person’s memory. She found that test subjects exhibited bad recall of what they saw if they took a photo of it.
“The objects that they had taken photos of they actually remembered fewer of them and remembered fewer details about those objects, like how were the statue’s hands positioned or what was the statue wearing on its head,” Henkel told NPR’s Audie Cornish.
Featured image credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
This is part of an article published by Epoch Times in 2014. Read the full article here.