VR Photography and Museums

For a recent 360 photography project, I took a VR photograph inside of an old, water-powered mill that has been turned into a state park: Thompson’s Mills in Shedd, Oregon. The purpose was to make a picture for the Worldwide Panorama Project quarterly theme of “Museums”. The picture here is a “little planet” view of that panorama.

This seemed like an interesting choice because it illustrated two different expressions of the museum concept in one photograph. The first expression is the familiar one of a building full of artifacts and stories. This is what most people probably think of when they hear the word museum.

The second one is the idea that the building itself is an artifact and that the interesting stories are of people living and working in and around the building. This is a little less common, sometimes isn’t really even thought of as a museum.

This picture, taken inside the historical building, shows that there are artifacts, exhibits, and other displays that are themselves interesting. Thus, both types of the “museum” idea are present in this one picture.

In a case like this, it may be easy to miss the importance of the building itself when focused on all the artifacts, the recreated venues, and the working machinery. We might need to be reminded that, even without those other things, there is plenty to see here.

VR photography seems to be a good metaphor for this idea. While a standard photograph keeps us focused in one place at a time, like looking at one artifact or museum display at a time, a 360 photograph allows us to look around and see the full context. This “Museum” VR is thus an example of both levels of the museum idea, and also a picture of the importance of context.

Of course, this dual perspective of museums isn’t the only place that context is important yet easily missed. It’s easy to miss the context around us in many different ways.

For example, we often don’t realize the rich history that surrounds us, no matter where we live. Both the impersonal geography and very personal human stories that have come before us, define the environment in ways that greatly affect us, yet we rarely think about. We just take the world as we see it, as if that were the norm, and often, as if the rest of the world operates the same way.

Similarly, we often take our culture for granted, without thinking about the long train of events (the history) that led us here, resulting in the world as we know it. It’s easy to forget that the rest of the world, with much different histories than ours, has much different values. But anyone who has interacted with people from different cultures quickly learns this.

For example, the values and even ethics that we have here in the west are definitely not the same around the world because history is different all over the world. In fact, many people don’t even know where our values come from, and without that, find it easy to assume that everyone else’s are the same.

Thus, VR photography reminds us of the need to look around, both physically and thoughtfully, to the entire context of whatever we are considering. In the case of this photograph, it reminds us that we best appreciate every individual display in the museum when we remember the story of the whole building.