A Johannesburg club bouncer, a Senegalese village portraitist and a Mexican taxi driver are among the photographers featured at the Brighton Photo Biennial (2 October-14 November).
The festival’s broad programme of exhibitions and events reflects the way that photography appeals to all sorts of audiences. Venues range from Brighton Museum and Art Gallery to a former department store.
“This festival will be about the process of discovery, with opportunities to see and engage with exciting contemporary work,” says British photographer Martin Parr, who has curated the biennial and sought out photography from Japan, Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America.
“There will be opportunities for participation by people of all ages through a wide range of community and educational events.”
Photography appeals to broad audiences at many venues. Four of the top five paid-for exhibitions in the history of the National Portrait Gallery have been photographic (Testino, Leibovitz, Beaton and Vanity Fair). Five out of the top 10 Barbican exhibitions in the past decade years were photography shows.
“Photography is attracting big audiences in venues of all sizes,” says Patrick Henry, the director of Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery, which is moving to a purpose-built space on the city’s waterfront in early 2011.
“It can keep one foot in the art world and one foot out, which opens it up to a range of audiences, bypassing the perceived exclusivity of contemporary art. There are so many points of entry. Huge numbers of people do photography as a creative pastime, and now almost everybody does it in one context or another.”
The Photographers’ Gallery in London closed last month for a year-long redevelopment. Camilla Brown, its senior curator, says there has been a sea-change in the UK towards photography in the past decade. “There are now regular shows in museums and gallery programmes.
With more photography-focused spaces opening in the next few years, this trend seems set to continue – and we would hope that the audience for photography will continue to grow. Tate Modern in particular has played a key role in elevating the medium’s status and the profile of contemporary international work.”
The Tate appointed its first photography curator, Simon Baker, in 2009. Baker says his role is to look at photography in its broadest sense and reflect this in exhibitions and acquisitions.
His first exhibition at Tate Modern, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera (until 3 October), has been developed with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and shows how galleries have expanded the material included in photography exhibitions.
As well as images by the giants of 20th-century photography such as Man Ray, Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the 250 works in Exposed include CCTV footage, government archive material and paparazzi shots.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) latest show also reflects the wider material that is featuring in photography exhibitions: Shadow Catchers (13 October-20 February 2011) focuses on camera-less photography.
The V&A and Tate combine large thematic shows with monographic exhibitions featuring acknowledged greats of the medium. The V&A has focused on Bill Brandt, Diane Arbus and Lee Miller in recent years, while Tate has just opened an exhibition on the pioneering British photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
It’s not just the London nationals that are broadening the appeal of photography. Many museums are reaching new audiences through festivals such as the one in Brighton.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery and the Quad arts centre are among the venues involved in the Format International Photography Festival, which takes place in early March next year. And Hereford Museum and Art Gallery is part of the Hereford Photography Festival, which begins at the end of this month.
None of the UK festivals have the pulling power or funding of Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, but the number of events is growing. The National Media Museum is developing a month-long photography event in Bradford and the Open Eye Gallery is launching a photography festival, Look2011, in Liverpool.
Festivals are not the only way to bring innovative photography projects to the public. Photographer Betina Skovbro has created an exhibition for Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) featuring more than 130 images that have been placed in an allotment (until 15 October).
The photographs at St Fagans: National History Museum in Cardiff profile the diverse backgrounds of the city’s allotment community.
Photography works well with community projects because so many people are familiar and comfortable with the medium. Gallery Oldham has a strong collection and Sean Baggaley, its exhibitions and collections coordinator, says it holds at least one photography show a year as well as using photographic work in its community gallery.
Last year, the Oldham Photographic Society took the theme of fish and chips for Made in Oldham, an exhibition celebrating the town’s claim to be the birthplace of the chippy.
And next year, photographer Charlie Meecham will revisit his Oldham Road work of the 1980s. As part of this he has bought six digital cameras for local community groups to take images that question their sense of place.
“When I worked on the first project, one could still feel it was OK to work in relative isolation, photographing where ‘others’ live, looking in from the outside,” Meecham says.
“More recently, as the internet and digital imaging have become universally adopted, there is an expectation that people have a right to participate in what gets said about them and where that information is placed.”
Photography also dovetails well with other activities. Tim Smith took the images for the Grant Trunk Road, a project that combined photography and oral history to engage Asian communities in Bradford and beyond.
Many of the photographs will feature in a book to be published next year, the final part of a project that has included a touring exhibition and educational elements such as teaching English to speakers of other languages.
Smith says: “The exhibition proved to us that showing people with limited English photographs of back home was a good way to get them talking. Photography cuts across linguistic barriers and for that reason is ideal for getting people engaged and telling stories.”
Smith hopes the forthcoming book, like the exhibition, will prove that photography can appeal to a wide audience.
Photography is flourishing as an activity and the cheapness and accessibility of digital technology makes it ideal for museum education and learning departments.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London has developed photography projects for residents of a local hospice and for a group of young people not in education or training.
The gallery has also just finished Picturing the Past, an intergenerational project that brought together younger and older men through a series of photography workshops, gallery tours, drama lessons and sharing of stories.
With all this activity, the future looks promising for photography in UK museums and galleries. But Patrick Henry at the Open Eye Gallery points out that many other countries still have better facilities.
“The UK is way behind the game, despite world-class photographers, collections and a small number of very strong institutions,” he says. “The museum and gallery infrastructure for photography in this country is weak compared with our European or US peers.”
Things are changing though, particularly with the creation of new capital projects. Martin Barnes, senior curator, photographs, at the V&A, points to the expansion and refurbishment of the Photographers’ Gallery, which will reopen next year and the National Media Museum site planned for London’s Science Museum.
Elsewhere, the new Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool will be unveiled in 2011 and Edinburgh’s Scottish National Portrait Gallery is redisplaying its photography collection as part of its £17.6m redevelopment.
“There is plenty to look forward to within London and beyond,” according to Barnes, who says the V&A has a programme of photography exhibitions lined up until 2014. “If photography in the UK seemed marginalised to some before, these upcoming developments look set to change that opinion.”
Even with new and improved venues for photography, there are challenges. Finding funding for new acquisitions is hard (see box below), and with definitions of what photography is expanding and becoming more complex, it is difficult to decide what to collect.
Also, the digital revolution and the development of online resources are profoundly changing the way the public view the medium (see box below). People are using photography as a social and creative tool on a massive scale. How museums adapt to these changes will be key to their success in engaging audiences.
Museum acquisition budgets for photography are usually small, despite its popularity with visitors.
“We do acquire works and have a very developed acquisitions plan but sadly not a budget that can keep up with it,” says Greg Hobson, curator of photographs at the National Media Museum (NMM) in Bradford. “Since 1983, auction prices for photography have gone up 2,000% but our acquisitions budget has barely risen at all.”
Like curators at other museums, Hobson acquires a lot of works for the NMM by having direct relationships with photographers, often through exhibitions. Practitioners are keen for their work to be well cared for, available for research and shared with audiences through publications, exhibitions and public programmes.
Hobson and the other relatively small number of photography curators in the UK also try to make the most of their limited budgets by staying in touch with each other to coordinate collecting and make sure they are not competing for the same acquisitions.
There is some help for acquisitions. The Art Fund is an important source of support and earlier this year announced details of a £100,000 fund to allow the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum to create a national collection of recent Middle Eastern photography.
Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar says: “The Art Fund’s support of photographic acquisitions is on the rise, a reflection of the increasing number of artists who use photography as a medium through which to create. Museums are rightly responding to this and are building their photographic collections accordingly.”
Most of the Art Fund grants are for specific purchases though, rather than funding packages for an area of collecting. A recent example is a £43,000 grant to help Birmingham Central Library buy an archive of work by the Coventry-born photographer and printmaker John Blakemore. Other funding for this £92,000 purchase included money from the V&A Purchase Grant fund, which supports collecting in regional museums and galleries.
Janet Davies, head of the Purchase Grant Fund, says she receives a steady stream of requests for grants to support photography acquisitions, although it is behind categories such as manuscripts and documents; pre-20th century drawing and watercolours; textiles; archaeology; and pre-20th-century ceramics.
“The eclipsing of film-based photography by digital and the evolution of web 2.0 social networking portals has created an economic, social and cultural step change in amateur photographic practices every bit as significant as Kodak’s introduction of the Box Brownie in the 1900s,” says Roger Hargreaves, a photography curator, writer and lecturer who used to work at the National Portrait Gallery.
More photographs have been taken in the past four years than in the previous cumulative history of the medium dating back to 1839, according to Hargreaves. The US web publication TechCrunch says the six leading online photo-sharing websites host about 50 billion unique images between them.
Lots of museums are already using Flickr and other photo-sharing websites to involve the public in creating and displaying content. Gail Durbin, head of online museum at the Victoria and Albert Museum, says: “Flickr has made people much more aware of photography and has offered an international forum in which to display and share work.
“Now they are used to this, they look for other places where their work can be shared, and some people find it easier to engage with collections through practical activity.”
Digitisation is raising questions about how visitors interact with objects in museums and how far they can get involved in their interpretation. With photography, as with other areas, there are demands for museums to be places where visitors can engage in debate.
Museums are beginning to respond to this, says Hargreaves, who also points to museums’ use of Flickr as a way to engage audiences. Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in the US and the National Media Museum in the UK are among those using The Commons site on Flickr to post images from their collections under “no known copyright restrictions”.
The initiative aims to “increase access to publicly held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge”.