Small Museum began with a practical problem: how to hold together the scattered, improvised institutions that preserve Australia’s local memory. Photographer Simone Rosenbauer spent four years travelling to every state and territory, visiting jails saved from demolition, repurposed telegraph stations, an apple warehouse, a planetarium with a corrugated plastic sky. The result, published by GOST Books in May 2025, gathers 137 images into a hardback of 192 pages, arranged less like a survey than like a museum catalogue: each photograph carries an SM exhibit number, so the book becomes an institution of its own.
The sequence moves through three registers. First come the buildings—orphan dormitories, miner’s banks, underground hospitals, opal mines—whose varied architecture shows how readily a community will convert what it has. Then portraits of the custodians: directors, curators, volunteers, people who came to the work after lives as teachers, psychiatric nurses, policemen, social workers, a surfboard painter. Their accounts of the collections follow, anchoring objects in personal rather than official history. The final section is a catalogue of still lifes: a golden nugget, a hearing trumpet, a toy soldier, a worn shoe. Selection here owes nothing to academic or monetary worth; these are things kept because they carry a story.
That principle—value conferred by care rather than by canon—gives the book its distinctive temper. The interiors especially, free of the conventions that govern larger museums, reveal arrangements that are eccentric, provisional, occasionally funny: an elephant foot on a podium, a headless mannequin reclining in a lawn chair, an austere vault full of currency. Rosenbauer photographs these without condescension, letting the rooms keep their own logic.
The project extends beyond the page. Work from Small Museum has been shown at Paris Photo, AIPAD, Expo Chicago and Art Miami through Laurence Miller Gallery, and at Maitland Regional Art Gallery in 2024; more than a hundred images entered the National Library of Australia’s permanent collection. There is also a quirk in the physical edition: a small number of copies carry a tipped-in image of a gold nugget on the back cover, in one of 35 variations. For collectors drawn to photography that treats display itself as a subject—how objects are arranged, explained and kept—this book registers as both document and argument.
