**1. Introduction**

The history of holography, methods of hologram construction, and the trends in how the field has evolved is beyond the scope of this paper. This information is readily available. In Appendix A, I have listed some good resources for anyone wanting to better understand the medium.

During the time period from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, there were technical and material challenges to producing holograms that were bright enough for the types of lamps that were available for illumination. Holograms required a white point source of light and at that time, there were few options. As a result, exhibition rooms were generally kept dark for the holograms to appear bright and clear. Over the years, the recording materials improved, formats enlarged, chemical processing improved and MR-16 halogen lights became available. These advances made it possible to move holography out of dark display spaces and into exhibition spaces with ambient light. The visual possibilities and myriad of special e ffects available to the art holographer that have resulted are also beyond the scope of this paper but are readily available in the literature (Crenshaw 2009).

The focus of the earliest exhibitions and into the 21st century has been to install holograms so that they appear bright, so that there is enough space in front of the holograms for viewing and that the predominately glass artworks are safe. Traditionally, installations were arranged based on the size of the hologram and which of the two main varieties they were, white light viewable Reflection or white light viewable, Transmission holograms.

It is the opinion of this author, as both an artist and curator, that after all these decades, we have not taken a critical look at how we design holography exhibitions. There are few guidelines, no standards, and minimal installation instructions requested for participation in a holography exhibit. This is in part due to a lack of understanding of the full dynamic range of holograms. In this paper, I address some of these fundamentals in this paper and o ffer suggestions for hopefully mitigating some of these issues.
