The board may want to think beyond a quick facelift. It may need to talk about a full sex change.
With the one that I'm suggesting, the Corcoran would at last have a clear identity that visitors would understand, and be attracted to right off.
Focus on Numbers
The Corcoran could show the certified masterpieces of photographic history, by everyone from Julia Margaret Cameron to Ansel Adams, to attract museum-goers who prefer their art with an establishment stamp. When the National Gallery launched a big Adams show in 1985, it averaged almost 6,000 visitors a day -- about 500 more than the museum's van Gogh blockbuster drew in 1998.
A huge percentage of today's most daring artists choose to use a lens where they might once have used a brush or chisel. The Corcoran would have room to install the country's most lavish suite of video galleries, as bait to attract some of the biggest names in contemporary art -- and the younger audience they would bring with them. In 2003, when the Metropolitan Museum in New York surveyed Thomas Struth, a leading "photo conceptualist" from Germany, the show's daily totals were the second highest in the world that year, right behind the Met's own "Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman." (The portraits of Richard Avedon, also at the Met, came in seventh.)
Crucially, our new Corcoran Museum of Photography could also attract hordes of visitors without much interest in fine art of any kind. Photographs document the world as well as decorate it, so thematic shows could sell their subject matter as well as their aesthetics. Sarah Greenough, curator of photography at the National Gallery, noted that casual visitors seem to find photography more "approachable" than more esoteric, and explicitly artistic, media. "People don't feel they need to take an art history course to appreciate photography," said Malcolm Daniel, her counterpart at the Met.
A groundbreaking exhibition on the history of nature photography could grab audiences from the National Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society, as well as from rival art museums. "The Heavens Through the Lens" might tempt some NASA fans to skip the long lines at the National Air and Space Museum. "The Body Laid Bare," which could include everything from the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge (the guy who, in 1878, used cameras to prove how horses gallop) to the recent morgue photos by contemporary artist Andres Serrano, could get medical conventioneers to come by after meetings at the National Institutes of Health.
Photographic exhibitions don't take up a huge amount of space, so at any given time our new museum could have up a range of exhibitions conceived to target different groups.
A good number of those shows could be brought in from outside. There are plenty of photo exhibitions doing the rounds at any given time, and it would be easy to become an added venue on their tours.
And it would cost much less than bringing in comparable painting or sculpture surveys, because the insurance, shipping and installation of photography is vastly less expensive.
The switch to photography would bring similar advantages for the exhibitions the Corcoran would want to mount in-house. Because most photographs exist in multiple prints, getting the images you need doesn't put you at the mercy of a single collection that happens not to lend. You'd rarely be in the situation paintings curators face, where a show has to be rethought because a crucial canvas or two turn out to be ungettable -- the good old Louvre, maybe, has once again determined that its treasures are too precious to leave Paris.
There's also more incentive for museums to lend you photographs than other major works of art. When a museum sends out one of its three Rembrandts, there's suddenly a notable hole in what's on view. But photographs, which can fade if kept too long on display, are always shown in rotation, so no one would notice if a few go out on tour.
You could even imagine that the Corcoran Museum of Photography -- why not make that the National Museum of Photography at the Corcoran, to give it a more patriotic ring -- could come to be used by the country's other museums and archives as a kind of extension to the limited photo space they already have.
