I personally believe that the gallery‘s role in society is to give the society access to arts. The arts here could be in the form of paintings, sculptures, installations or photographs. It is a form of response(s) from the artists to what happens in society by reading plus interpreting the situation. The artwork could stand as a depiction of reality or it could act as a response to criticize the reality. As the role of the gallery is to provide that particular access, it automatically puts itself in the role of educating the society as well.
A gallery provides information not only from the local perspective but also the international perspective as well. Ideally, every gallery should have a curator. The curator would have a double role; for the gallery he/she would act as a gatekeeper, to seek plus curate which artworks are relevant to be exhibited to the public plus for the society, the curator acts as an agent of change where he/she would try to give place for new opinions constructed by the artists that he/she had selected from the society. The one that should be highlighted here is that the galleries, the curators plus the artists are all part of one environment plus society on the other end. It should be made into an understanding that even though one could exist without the others but that particular act would only akin to self-gratification. In other words, the gallery, artists plus curators have created a response from what happened in the society plus society needs to correspond back to their works.
Photography, at first, was never considered as a form of art because it is viewed as the replication of reality. However, as it developed, the resistance of photography as an art form receded plus nowadays it enjoys a cozy position in between the work of documentation plus art. If we talk about the history of the photographic gallery, there was one prominent curator who always tried to push the boundaries. At a time when black plus white photography was the norm, the gallery that he curated made the most significant statement: that they should have a one-man show on colour photography. The curator’s name is John Szarkowski plus the gallery that he curated is the Museum of the Modern Art in New York. The works of William Eggleston at that time was definitely a ground-breaking statement where it marked the acceptance of color photography by a very prominent institution.