Transcending the Label: Photographs as Objects in the University of Aberdeen’s George Washington Wilson Photographic Collection

The abstract. This paper will examine photographs as objects and their role within a museum context. Drawing upon the repository of images in the University of Aberdeen’s George Washington Wilson collection, this paper will analyse how photographs and memory together transcend the perfunctory label and enrich the human presence in the people, places, or events that they depict. It is through memory that we can relate to photographs, despite the fact that they were taken over one hundred years ago and the fact that some photographs in the collection give the impression of timelessness, which clashes with a contradictory sense of the
present.