DAYTONA BEACH · THREE DISPLAY CASES
Southeast Museum of Photography: A Different Way to See Daytona
Before the Southeast Museum of Photography had a museum building, it had three display cases in a classroom. That beginning is the detail I keep returning to. Someone believed photographs deserved to be seen, and started with the space available.
By Robert Urban · PaperBoat Media
01
Dan Biferie made a place to look
The museum’s account of its beginnings starts with Dan Biferie arriving at Daytona Beach Community College in 1975. The photography program emphasized commercial work. Biferie brought an interest in fine-art photography, but the college had no exhibition space for it.
Three classroom cases became a starting point. A display area in the library lobby followed, with the wonderfully candid name Standing Room Only Gallery. In 1977, college president Charles Polk helped make a larger gallery possible in the Goddard Center.
I like the persistence in that progression. The subject did not wait for an ideal building to become worthy of public attention. People began showing work, then made more room for what the work could do.
A gift becomes a collection
Jerry Uelsmann donated the collection’s first photograph in 1978. The museum formally opened in 1992, with Allison Nordström serving as its early director and curator. Under Kevin Miller, the institution later moved into a new campus complex in 2007.
A donated photograph has a different future from an image briefly displayed and returned. It becomes something an institution agrees to care for. Other work can gather around it; new audiences can encounter it; students can return with better questions.
That is the human promise inside a collection. One person’s act of giving creates responsibilities for people they may never meet. The photographs acquire a local home without losing their connection to a much larger art form.
03
The classroom and the gallery belong together
The Daytona State College setting is central to this story. Photography is being learned nearby, with all the imperfect attempts and discoveries learning requires. A museum on that campus puts finished work into a continuing conversation with people finding their own way of making images.
The museum’s presentation of graduating photography students makes that exchange public. A photograph crosses an important threshold when people who were not part of the assignment stop to consider it. The work has to speak beyond the classroom.
Daytona State’s account of Andrew Sovjani’s Fact/Fiction exhibition offers another example of that conversation, describing a practice that joins photography with printmaking and painting. A familiar medium can open into unexpected territory.
What a second look can give back
A photograph seems unusually easy to finish looking at. We recognize a subject and move on. Staying with it lets the edges, the light and the photographer’s decisions become part of what we see.
That pleasure connects this museum with the Museum of Art DeLand, while the history of the three cases gives it a character all its own. Daytona’s contribution grew from an educator’s willingness to begin, an artist’s gift and the people who kept expanding the possibilities.
The city has room for that kind of attention. A person can walk into a photography museum and leave better equipped to notice the world outside it.
Three display cases were enough to begin a cultural institution. The Southeast Museum of Photography reminds me how much a community can gain when someone takes an interest seriously and gives other people a way to share it.
Questions about this place
How did the Southeast Museum of Photography begin?
Its roots include Dan Biferie’s use of three classroom display cases after arriving at Daytona Beach Community College in 1975. The museum formally opened in 1992.
Who gave the collection its first photograph?
Jerry Uelsmann donated the first photograph in 1978. That gift became part of the collection’s development into a museum at what is now Daytona State College.
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