Small amounts of public funding can make an enormous difference to a photographer. But there are some objectives like, for example, ‘safeguarding the documentary heritage of humankind’ that require more substantial backing. The Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library received $18.2 million from a charity called Arcadia to work towards this ambitious goal and, since 2004, have been spending this money to preserve and digitize all manner of precariously situated collections around the world.
It is remarkable that such an enlightened project exists, and nearly as surprising that it has received so little notice. The British Library (motto: ‘the world's knowledge’) is the perfect place for such a project having in-house expertise in many different cultures and languages as well as experience in archiving and digitizing documents of all kinds (Arcadia also fund the excellent National Sound Archive).
I went to speak to Lynda Barraclough, the curator of the programme, and she explained how individual projects are selected and administered. Of the 15 projects funded so far that are exclusively photographic she mentioned, among others, photographs from the Georgian State Archive, a photographic archive of Siberian indigenous peoples and a Cameroonian photographic studio.
The last of these sounded particularly interesting so I arranged to meet up with David Zeitlyn the social anthropologist who had organised it. David has been working in one village in Cameroon for more than 25 years. He says he stumbled into photography by chance when he tracked down the two photographers who made the village's identity photographs, Samuel Finlak and Joseph Chila. David subsequently organised an exhibition of their work at the National Portrait Gallery in London based on what remained of their archives. Only later did he meet the photographer that had taught them, Jacques Touselle. ‘Photo Jacques’ had retained much more of his work and this prompted an application to the Endangered Archives Programme.David explains the process he went through to make digital copies of Photo Jacques' archive. This included great efforts to try and identify the people in the pictures which have been largely fruitless because surnames are not widely used in the area. He also puts the archive in a historical perspective, even in rural Cameroon the spread of digital photography has put professional photographers out of business. The studio collection is a lucky survivor of a once-common form of photography in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa.
As you will hear in the interview, while I was talking to Lynda Barraclough we were interrupted. A PR woman from the Library had turned up unannounced and sat in on the interview. When my questions turned to whether there were ethical issues about the Library's work in Africa she effectively brought the interview to a halt. Lynda Barraclough is a thoughtful, well informed and articulate speaker. I find it hard to understand why the Library would employ someone who knows nothing about the subject to police what she has to say.
A photographic archive serves to preserve collections of photographs. Inevitably one of its responsibilities is therefore to conserve those pictures. In 2001 Elizabeth Martin and Martin Barnes of the V&A wrote an article for Source about the underlying conservation challenges that face an organisation that wants to look after its photographs. These include appropriate environmental conditions but also being realistic about whether an item can be preserved 'in perpetuity', in their case giving the example of Heather Ackroyd and Daniel Harvey's grass photograph Presence.
What comes across in both their approach and that of Susie Clark is pragmatism. Small changes, for example using paper sleeves with folds rather than glue, can be important for the long term stability of photographs. A large collection amassed over many years and stored in a variety of ways could present a daunting task; how to tell what is most endangered?
Clark says that today most important photographic collections have probably 'received a visit from a conservator' and that there is more awareness of how photographs should be treated. Nevertheless, there is still a shortage of trained photography conservation specialists (in the UK they are paper conservationists that have specialised in photographs) and institutions that employ a photographic conservator are the exception rather than the rule. Until that situation improves the long-term well being of photography archives will depend on the occasional visit of a freelance specialist like Susie Clark.
Elizabeth Kirwan is the current curator of the National Photographic Archive which opened in 1998. When it opened the Archive consisted of a new building – designed by O'Donnell and Tuomy – into which the existing collection of the National Library (of which it is a part) was moved. A new catalogue, reviewed in Source at the time, was produced for the opening. Justin Carville in his review said that the archive should be clearer about their acquisitions policy and collect more contemporary photographers.
Since it opened the Archive has undergone a few quiet changes. It has taken an active policy of digitizing its collections and putting them on Flickr. It has acquired a number of collections, notably the Irish Independent Archive. And it has closed, only to re-open nine months later having received a stay of execution from a new board of governors for the Library.
Kirwan and her small staff are now undertaking a stock take which will form the basis of an argument that the Archive should continue to exist. The necessity of this stock take is made apparent when, incredibly, she says that they have discovered the Irish Independent Archive (still described on their website as 300,000 negatives) consists of roughly four million more images than they originally thought. Now, more than ever in its short life, the Archive needs allies who support the idea of a national collection of photography in Ireland.
On Sunday I was at Photo Fest Ireland the annual get-together of those searching for the latest cameras, printing papers, albums or framing options with an emphasis on technical solutions to photographic problems. I had been at the Source stand for the proceeding two years and it had always proved a useful way to touch base with individual photographers.
Browser at the Source stand
The current issue of Source – looking at photographic archives – led to a few interesting conversations. Denis O’Shea, who organises Finglas Library Photo Group, was enthusiastic about the Dublin City Public Library collection of photographs which includes the record of the German bombing of the North Strand in 1941, as well as a number of other collections.
Next to stop at our stand was a student from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design who recalled his former role as a photographer in the Irish Army. During his stint there he had, amongst other things, taken aerial reconnaissance photographs of Spanish trawlers and helped out with a project to re-photograph and archive other soldiers personal photographs. He anticipated he would have to swap the sharp and well-lit technique of his army days for the dark and out of focus work he often saw at college.
Punctuating my conversations were calls over the PA system for the various seminars taking place as part of the event. I was unable to attend any of them but, by title, the most intriguing were: 'Beauty Retouching', 'Black and White – the Guy Gowan Solution' and a session on 'Fantasy Portraiture'.
We were pitched beside the Gallery of Photography (also taking a stand for those interested in less technical matters). I caught up with Tanya Kiang the Gallery's Director who was quick to point me in the direction of the book Where Were You? Dublin youth culture and street style 1950-2000, from among the selection they had brought along from their bookshop. At a mighty 304 pages its production was all the more remarkable for having been crowdsource funded via fundit.ie. The book had just been launched with great success at the Gallery with some of those featured in the book turning up in period costume.
Cover of 'Where Were You?'
Tanya was also enthusiastic about her forthcoming show by Evelyn Hofer who photographed in Dublin in the 60’s, which will be part of the PhotoIreland Festival. Angel Gonzalez Director of that Festival stopped by to bring me up to speed on the this year’s theme 'Migrations: Diaspora & Cultural Identity'. The festival is now in the final stages of preparation and will be held at venues across Dublin from 1 – 31st July during which Source will be screening its new film 'What is Conceptual Photography?'
Towards the end of the day I managed to catch up with Helen Burke director of the days events who also runs the Irish Photo News web site. She reported that although there where slightly fewer numbers this year the exhibitors had been happy with the overall level of custom. So despite the straightened economic times technical solutions are still in demand.
In March of 2011 a group of people from different photography organisations met in Bradford to talk about 'Networks and collaborations'. This was convened by, among other people, Anne Mcneill, the Director of Impressions Gallery who said it was partly a result of the threat of cuts that were facing the sector. Not everyone could make it. Another meeting was held to coincide with Look 2011 a couple of months later. Time passed but there was still a desire to talk about matters of common interest and so the group agreed to meet once again to coincide with the National Photography Symposium which took place at the weekend.
The group was made up of representatives of publicly-funded photography organisations, mostly galleries but also organisations like Redeye and Source. There was some debate about how loosely defined this group was: how clear was the distinction between the publicly-funded and not-publicly-funded? (Not that clear) Should museums be included? What about university departments? In the end it was thought the group seemed to share a common history and that they belonged together.
Everyone agreed that more could be made of this common history and that it would be a good thing to reassert the collective purpose of exhibiting and examining photography. Social media seemed like a good way to demonstrate this shared ambition. Everyone present took the practical attitude that it would be difficult to arrange anything that required extra work but that a simple thing like using Twitter (for those that do use Twitter) could be an effective way of supporting and highlighting one another's activities.
As well as being easy, it would allow anyone else to join in. Everyone also pledged to make more of an effort to share information about what they were planning and to meet again in the future. But for the time being if you see the hashtag #photouk it probably means it is something to do with the activities of our national network of photography organisations, if you're interested in what one of them is doing you'd probably find the others interesting as well.
The Archive of Modern Conflict is in a large house in an expensive part of West London. I visited in 2005 to conduct an interview with Timothy Prus (published in Source 43) and when we visited again to make this film, in December last year, at first glance nothing much had changed. Each room was lined with shelves containing books and photo albums, apparently in such profusion that taking down something at random could transport you to any part of the modern world and any imaginable experience. On my previous visit I was shown albums made by Peruvian transsexuals in Paris, a 19th century vicar in East Anglia and doctors recording head wounds.
The impression of universality was an illusion however, because in the intervening years they have expanded the building downwards to create a large store-room (re-routing a river in the process) and now have additional warehouses elsewhere in London containing, among other things, an operational printing press. The curious objects I was shown on this visit included a large and ancient volume of pressed plants, a book of tiny handwriting (I couldn't read what it was about) and a blacksmith-made blunderbus for intimidating poachers. So, although the majority of the objects in the Archive are still photographs, they have branched out into other fields.
Since my last visit they have also created a website to promote their publications and conducted a few remote interviews with other publications. Articles about the Archive describe it as ‘mysterious’ and ‘enigmatic’ but what really distinguishes it, is that it is a private collection without any obvious commercial motive. The Archive is owned and funded by David Thompson (the wealthiest man in Canada) and Timothy Prus and the others employed by the Archive are, unlike most archivists, constantly adding to their collection rather than struggling to maintain what they already have and make it publicly accessible.
They are not obliged to make themselves ‘relevant’ in any way or depend on public profile for their funding (the opposite in fact). They do invite people selectively into the Archive from time to time as with this issue of Draft magazine or the intriguing forthcoming show by Mike Nelson (given a surprisingly low-key billing here). Prus, Jones and the others are in a kind of paradise for the inquisitive, allowed to follow where their curiosity leads them... and the collection just keeps getting bigger and more astonishing.
Michael Pritchard was made the Director General of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) last September. Before that he had worked at Christie's as a photography expert and had completed a PhD about the early years of the British photographic industry. He will be known to many photography enthusiasts for the excellent British Photographic History website that he runs.
He comes across as a careful and sensible person, unlikely to make any wild or spontaneous remarks. His own website shows that he is himself a keen amateur photographer, aspiring to make pictures similar to those made by many other RPS members, which is to say technically accomplished but traditional is subject matter. Nevertheless, he sees his role as that of a reformer at the Society, aiming to attract a new, younger membership and being open to new approaches and technologies.
The strength of the RPS is that it is a genuinely grass roots organisation in which the members, to a large extent, run their own groups and decide their own priorities. One of their main priorities is their system of awards that recognise and codify a standard of photography. As with all standards however, it is liable to be left behind by changes in the way people use the medium. In response to this, the Society now grants an ‘exemption’ to graduates, accepting a photography degree as of equivalent merit (even if a different aesthetic standard is at work) to their Distinctions. They have also welcomed (or attracted) a broader range of contemporary practitioners (Simon Roberts and Paul Seawright to name two). Michael Pritchard, in his diplomatic way, wants to create an organisation that accepts both what he calls ‘creative’ photography and the work of the amateur concerned with the craft of photography.
Jo Spence is one of the most important and well known figures in post-war British photography yet is strangely neglected in the UK. This position in the culture is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the Jo Spence Memorial Archive which – despite its grand title – is the remains of her life's work in Terry Dennett's cluttered flat. Dennett is her former partner and collaborator and has been doing his best to make people aware of her work and find a permanent home for it. On the day we visited him he was preparing to send away the larger part of what he still had to Ryerson University in Canada. This collection of boxes has since taken its place in the growing collection of the Ryerson Image Centre alongside other collections, and will be installed in a new building when it opens this September.
Spence's work has not been completely neglected. There were exhibitions in 2005 at Belfast Exposed and Street Level in Glasgow and there will be a survey show of her work at Studio Voltaire this summer. However, the largest retrospective has taken place at MACBA in Barcelona and, with a few exceptions, British institutions have proved uninterested in Spence's work; she is not represented in the Tate collection and although the Art Fund has supported the purchase of a number of photographs for public collections Spence's work has not been among them.
In some ways this is not surprising, although her work is often funny it can also be confrontational. She often worked collaboratively and used unpretentious materials like the laminated panels that formed many of her shows. She was shown by prestigious institutions like the Hayward gallery but was more often involved in grass roots organisations like Camerawork. Lastly, her subject matter was often uncomfortable, she ‘put herself in the picture’ and was not afraid to tackle such subjects as her own illness and death.
It looks as if her work will be looked after and made accessible for future exhibition and study, even if it has to leave the UK for this to happen. Terry Dennett has been looking after her work since she died and must take the credit for this eventual outcome. Once a photographer is no longer there to represent and promote their work it takes great commitment and effort to keep it in the public domain.
Getty Images is well known, with Corbis, as one of the dominant commercial picture libraries. Most people would encounter it through its website but behind the website is a physical archive in North London. I went to meet their curator Sarah McDonald to find out about the collection. Before I went I had been told (by Stephen Mayes who previously worked there) that the archive resembles the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark with rows of shelving holding innumerable boxes, more than you could possibly look through. This turns out to be true.
The outside of the building is unprepossessing, a drab brick facade down a side street but behind it is a warehouse divided in two, one half of which contains prints and the other half negatives. McDonald says they have between 30 and 60 million prints and that it is the largest photographic archive in the world. Her vagueness about the number of images they hold is a measure of its vast scale – it's too big to count – rather than their general orderliness, it all looks well organised, the negative half of the warehouse is noticeably cooler for conservation reasons.
The entire collection represents an accumulation of historical collections from the London Stereoscopic Company to the Daily Express archive, and it's still growing. These individual collections are themselves so large that they each maintain their original organisation and catalogues; there is too much material to impose a new structure on them. A researcher looking for a picture in the Evening Standard collection will be using the catalogue originally devised when it was a part of that newspaper.
The negative collection contains images that may never have been seen or even unpacked from their wrappers, and this includes images made in the 19th century. The Hulton archive (that was the basis of the collection) included Picture Post. McDonald showed me a daybook that records the different picture stories shot by Picture Post photographers during a week. On facing pages are the stories that were published and the ‘killed’ stories that were never used and may never have been printed. They are in the business of finding new uses for old pictures, a nice example of this being the sudden attraction of stereoscopic photographs to 3D TV and film makers. If you can keep everything then eventually someone might come along with a need for even your most obscure pictures.
The most high profile victims among photography archives have been newspaper archives. With the advent of digital photography the cost of keeping large collections of negatives and prints that were rarely used did not seem justifiable. In many cases they were simply thrown away. But some newspapers have kept their negatives and prints and want to preserve them. In the case of a local paper like the Newtownards Chronicle – and this would be true of many other local papers – their collections are unique. They don't offer a different view of national events, they offer the only record of what went on in their area.
These may not always be very important events but they demonstrate the link with the people that the newspaper serves. When we went to speak to the Chronicle's two photographers, Bob Torrens and Jonathan Coates, they were evidently proud of the connection they had with the people they regularly photographed and were concerned that the newspaper's archive (much of which was their life's work) should be well looked after and made available for people to use. Even with such committed advocates and the obvious care they took over their collection (which despite appearances was well organised) it is unclear what the long term future of this, and many other, newspaper photography archives will be.
Small amounts of public funding can make an enormous difference to a photographer. But there are some objectives like, for example, ‘safeguarding the documentary heritage of humankind’ that require more substantial backing. The Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library received $18.2 million from a charity called Arcadia to work towards this ambitious goal and, since 2004, have been spending this money to preserve and digitize all manner of precariously situated collections around the world.
David explains the process he went through to make digital copies of Photo Jacques' archive. This included great efforts to try and identify the people in the pictures which have been largely fruitless because surnames are not widely used in the area. He also puts the archive in a historical perspective, even in rural Cameroon the spread of digital photography has put professional photographers out of business. The studio collection is a lucky survivor of a once-common form of photography in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa.
Kirwan and her small staff are now undertaking a stock take which will form the basis of an argument that the Archive should continue to exist. The necessity of this stock take is made apparent when, incredibly, she says that they have discovered the Irish Independent Archive (still described on their 
