On 31 January 2016, Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS,
Director-General of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), circulated an important announcement concerning the Society’s Collection. This had been transferred to the National
Media Museum (NMeM) at Bradford from the RPS’s headquarters at Bath in
2003. However, the NMeM’s remit is
undergoing a substantial alteration and the RPS’s holdings will shortly be on
the move once more. As Dr Pritchard put
it, ‘The NMeM is refocusing on the science, technology and culture of light and
sound and away from the “art” of photography.’ Consequently an agreement has
been reached between the Science Museum Group – of which NMeM is part – and the
Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.
Under this agreement the RPS’s Collection currently housed in Bradford
will be transferred to the V&A. This
does not just affect the RPS: anything characterised as ‘art of photography’,
will be moving to the V&A. Dr
Pritchard suggests that the operation will take place later this year.
The scale of the task is indicated in the RPS
announcement, where it states that more than 400,000 objects will be sent to
the V&A: ‘These
photographs, cameras, books and manuscript material will join the V&A’s
existing collection of 500,000 photographs to create an International
Photography Resource Centre. The new Centre will provide the public with a
world-class facility to access this consolidated collection, which will become
the single largest collection on the art of photography in the world.’ The present limited exhibition space
at the V&A devoted to photography will be doubled, which is welcome news in
itself, but to enhance access there will be a digitisation programme and
touring exhibitions around the country.
Those developments will facilitate greater usage of
the RPS’s archives than was the case in either Bath or Bradford. The RPS has been assured that its Collection
will retain its status as a distinct part of the broader V&A holding, as
was the case with the NMeM. The main
concern expressed in the RPS press release is the loss of a coherent curatorial
approach to photography, with the V&A concentrating on the art of
photography rather than its artistic application in conjunction with the
technical and scientific aspects that the NMeM was able to supply and
consideration of which is vital to a full appreciation of the RPS’s Collection.
In practice one hopes that the RPS and the V&A will work
together to ensure that usage is optimised to take into account those aspects which
would otherwise fall outside the V&A’s art remit.
Overall the announcement is good news for the
V&A and researchers in the south of England, but surely not for the
NMeM. The lengthy announcement on the RPS
website highlights the key change: the NMeM is in future going to focus on STEM
subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The NMeM will retain more technical items, for example the Kodak
Museum collection, those that deal with photography’s cultural impact, such as
the Daily Herald archive, and
anything specific to Bradford. A new
‘interactive light and sound gallery’, costing £1.5m, is scheduled to open in
March 2017, a valuable initiative for public education, but there will be fewer
opportunities to undertake research there than before. With even less reason to visit the
NMeM once its archives have been reduced, its long-term future must be in
doubt; after all, it was under threat of closure three years ago when faced
with significant public spending cuts.
It is a large and expensive institution to maintain if its core function
in the area of photography is going to be to inform school parties and the
casual public about the medium’s science and technology.
The NMeM used to be called the National Museum of
Photography, Film and Television, though as its logo indicates its current
scope is broader. One has to wonder about
the long-term future of its non-photographic collections. Those relating to film and television tend to
be more about technology, so they may be safe, but the future must be less
certain. I went to the NMeM to examine
Charles Urban’s papers in my research into the early colour process Kinemacolor
(and found both staff and surroundings very pleasant); the Urban papers were
originally at the Science Museum and could easily go back there, or to the
British Film Institute. Further
announcements about the changes will be made in the coming months, but losing
such an important part of its offering feels like the thin end of the wedge for
the NMeM, however upbeat it tries to be about future developments.
Update 20 March 2016
An upsurge of opposition to the move of photographic
collections from Bradford to London has been building since it was announced at
the end of January, with politicians and figures in the art world expressing
their dismay. Now the Guardian on 17 March has an article,
‘Royal Photographic Society “not consulted over collection move”,’ sub-headed,
‘In first public statement, society says it would prefer collection to remain
at Bradford’s National Media Museum’.
The RPS’s announcement sounds slightly more
equivocal than the subheading’s bald declaration suggests because the article
goes on to say:
‘In its first public statement on the move since it
was announced in February, the society said it would prefer its much-loved
collection to remain in Bradford provided the museum remained a well-staffed
centre for photography, although it added it would not oppose the proposed move
to the V&A if certain conditions are met.’
The RPS is actually fairly glowing about the V&A. The article continues:
‘The RPS described the V&A as a “world-class
museum of international renown” and said it would have no reason to oppose the
move providing that it met four key criteria: “The collection is kept together
as a whole and not broken up; our initial agreement with the Science Museum
Group is transferred to the new custodians and honoured in full; public access
is maintained or enhanced; the collection is seen as a live collection and
continues to grow.”’
It is most unlikely that those conditions would not
be honoured by the V&A. On the other
hand, with the NMeM making staff redundant, the RPS’s requirement that the
photographic part of its operation be well-staffed could be difficult to
satisfy should the move to London be halted.
This issue was recognised by the RPS’s Director General, Michael
Pritchard, in a Guardian article on 2
February (‘Bradford photography collection move to V&A reviled as “vandalism”’),
noting declining staff and funding cuts at Bradford.
On the surface it was discourteous not to have consulted
the RPS beforehand, assuming the report is accurate, considering what a
significant proportion of the volume to be moved its holdings represents,
though given the storm of protest that has met the announcement one can
understand why the V&A and NMeM wanted to keep the matter quiet during their
discussions. The RPS Council needs to be
diplomatic, but it must surely be secretly pleased that, while expressing legitimate
concerns about the loss of a unified approach to the art and technology of
photography, its collection will be utilised far more in London than it has
been in Bradford, and the organisation will achieve a higher profile.
The Guardian
article makes much of the fact that a 2015 exhibition of RPS photographs, Drawn by Light, was visited by 29,000
people at Bradford, while 21,260 attended when it was shown at the Science
Museum. That might suggest a greater
appetite for the art of photography in the north. But then the NMeM show was free to enter,
whereas Londoners were forced to cough up £8.
If the Bradford leg had charged, one wonders how many would have gone
in. And of course someone is paying for
it, either the visitor directly or, as at Bradford, through subsidies. The NMeM is strapped for cash, and those in
favour of retaining the photographic collections there need to explain how
photography would be better served than at the V&A, with the latter’s
vastly superior resources and potential for both scholarship and public
engagement (and possibly visitors’ greater willingness to put their hands in
their pockets for an exhibition).
Bradford East’s MP got excited by the Drawn by Light numbers, declaring ‘This revelation further illustrates the need for a full review and meaningful consultation before any decision can be taken with regards to moving the collection.’ I’m not sure that the numbers actually reveal very much, other than that people will always enjoy getting something they think is free. And to refer to the move as ‘an appalling act of cultural vandalism’, an ‘act of cultural rape’ and ‘metropolitan cultural fascism’, as it has been variously described, is offensive hyperbole on the part of local politicians who should know better. If you want to see those things, go to Syria, not the V&A. Much of what is going to London came from there in the first place, and London rather than Bradford, it can be easily argued, is its natural home.
