Photographs Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The V&A's new photography space crams a lot into a small space but still provides a thrilling tour of the history of the medium, says Patrick Henry
Peter Henry Emerson published the following “renunciation to all photographers” in the British Journal of Photography in 1891:
“The limitations of photography are so great that, though the results may and sometimes do give a certain aesthetic pleasure, the medium must always rank with the lowest of the arts, lower than any graphic art, for the individuality of the artist is cramped; in short, it can scarcely show itself… Photography is first of all the handmaiden of art and science.”
Disputes over photography’s status within the visual arts continued throughout the century that followed Emerson’s outburst. But in the late 1990s a new landscape was forged by seismic shifts in the art market and a new era of audience-focused museums.
Over the past decade photography has become ubiquitous in the exhibition programmes of our galleries and museums. The most dramatic change has been at Tate, which embarked on a feverish embrace of photography in the noughties, having effectively refused to collect or exhibit it until that point.
(Alan Bowness, the director of Tate from 1980-88, famously declared: “You have to be an artist, and not only a photographer, to have your work in Tate.”)
From the beginnings
Against this backdrop, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) opened a new Photographs Gallery last year. Drawing on the museum’s “national collection of the art of photography”, which holds more than 300,000 works, the gallery chronicles the history of the medium from 1839 to the 1960s.
This new gallery was preceded by a larger, ground-floor space (opened in 1998 and substantially rehung in 2003 and 2009) that is now designated for short-term collection displays with a contemporary emphasis. The new configuration marks a significant expansion in the area afforded to the V&A’s photography collection.
The Photographs Gallery occupies a newly restored space adjacent to the Europe and America, 1800-1900 gallery. The walls are blue and the works are mostly single-hung – a far cry from the V&A’s first photography exhibition in 1858, in which frames were stacked five or six high.
The opening Discovery section presents the museum’s impressive holdings of early photography, from its invention in the 1830s to its industrialisation and popularisation in the mid-century.
An 1839 Daguerreotype of Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square is the oldest photograph in the collection. Its combination of jewel-like beauty and futuristic precision of detail captures the shock of photography’s new image of the world. Photography’s protean, hybrid character is wonderfully illustrated by this first section.
The majority of photographs here were not produced or collected as works of art in their own right. Some were aids to scientific research, others studies for artists, craftsmen and manufacturers.
New medium
Julia Margaret Cameron, who features in the In-focus section that follows, was in no doubt about what she wanted from the medium. She wrote to Henry Cole, the first director of the museum, in 1866, about a series of prints “that I intend should electrify you with delight and startle the world”.
Cameron took photography up in 1863, at the age of 48. Her portrait of Annie, the daughter of a family friend, made the following year, shows just how quickly she developed a distinctive vision. Its graphic simplicity and sombre psychological intensity make it appear strikingly modern.
Documents, Records and Travel, the gallery’s next section, charts photography’s imperial expansion from the 1860s to the 1880s. A handful of prints from Francis Frith’s Universal Series, shot on enormous 16 inch x 20 inch glass plates, show topographical and historical scenes with crystalline clarity.
Frith made his name with scenes of the Near East before turning his attention to Britain and continental Europe. The prints on display were place-markers from the company’s catalogue, with numbers and place names elegantly scrawled across their skies.
Selections such as this point to some of the gallery’s secondary narratives. This is primarily an art history of photography, but the curators have interwoven a wider cultural history, drawing in, for example, the progressive professionalisation of photography, and its changing technological characteristics.
Their selections are also, inevitably, responsive to the current aesthetic mood. The choice of Frith’s defaced place-markers over “clean’” prints elaborates the historical backstory while also invoking more recent artistic experiments with image and text.
Massive collection
Facts and Focus takes us into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on the competing visions of “straight” and “pictorialist” photographers. (Emerson had been a leading pictorialist before his “renunciation”).
Modernism, which includes Man Ray, Walker Evans and Cecil Beaton, leads us to the second In-focus section, which showcases a stunning set of Henri Cartier-Bresson prints.
The gallery’s final section, After the War: Personal Vision, takes us to the 1960s, which the curators identify as a point of rupture, “after which developments in scale, concept and technology mark a shift in appearance”.
Here, an image from Robert Frank’s 1958 book The Americans has one foot in the formal, eloquent picture-making of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” and another in a new and as yet undefined set of strategies.
This section’s array of works from the 1950s and 1960s points towards an eclectic future for makers and collectors of photographs. At this point in the exhibition, however, photography’s eclectic history is just as striking.
Trying to cram so much history into such a small space, and to do justice to such a massive and varied collection, must have been a mind-boggling task for the curators. It’s thrilling to see this fresh revision of the medium’s history, to revisit familiar works and discover new ones.
The size of the new gallery doesn’t give much scope for surprises, but the combination of this space with the changing displays on the ground floor has great potential.
The next couple of years will see some big changes in London’s photography scene with the reopening of the Photographers’ Gallery and an outpost of Bradford’s National Media Museum being developed at the Science Museum on the other side of Exhibition Road.
The V&A’s Photographs Gallery sets a high bar. It looks as if Emerson’s “handmaiden” might be about to have her moment.
Patrick Henry is the director of the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
“The limitations of photography are so great that, though the results may and sometimes do give a certain aesthetic pleasure, the medium must always rank with the lowest of the arts, lower than any graphic art, for the individuality of the artist is cramped; in short, it can scarcely show itself… Photography is first of all the handmaiden of art and science.”
Disputes over photography’s status within the visual arts continued throughout the century that followed Emerson’s outburst. But in the late 1990s a new landscape was forged by seismic shifts in the art market and a new era of audience-focused museums.
Over the past decade photography has become ubiquitous in the exhibition programmes of our galleries and museums. The most dramatic change has been at Tate, which embarked on a feverish embrace of photography in the noughties, having effectively refused to collect or exhibit it until that point.
(Alan Bowness, the director of Tate from 1980-88, famously declared: “You have to be an artist, and not only a photographer, to have your work in Tate.”)
From the beginnings
Against this backdrop, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) opened a new Photographs Gallery last year. Drawing on the museum’s “national collection of the art of photography”, which holds more than 300,000 works, the gallery chronicles the history of the medium from 1839 to the 1960s.
This new gallery was preceded by a larger, ground-floor space (opened in 1998 and substantially rehung in 2003 and 2009) that is now designated for short-term collection displays with a contemporary emphasis. The new configuration marks a significant expansion in the area afforded to the V&A’s photography collection.
The Photographs Gallery occupies a newly restored space adjacent to the Europe and America, 1800-1900 gallery. The walls are blue and the works are mostly single-hung – a far cry from the V&A’s first photography exhibition in 1858, in which frames were stacked five or six high.
The opening Discovery section presents the museum’s impressive holdings of early photography, from its invention in the 1830s to its industrialisation and popularisation in the mid-century.
An 1839 Daguerreotype of Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square is the oldest photograph in the collection. Its combination of jewel-like beauty and futuristic precision of detail captures the shock of photography’s new image of the world. Photography’s protean, hybrid character is wonderfully illustrated by this first section.
The majority of photographs here were not produced or collected as works of art in their own right. Some were aids to scientific research, others studies for artists, craftsmen and manufacturers.
New medium
Julia Margaret Cameron, who features in the In-focus section that follows, was in no doubt about what she wanted from the medium. She wrote to Henry Cole, the first director of the museum, in 1866, about a series of prints “that I intend should electrify you with delight and startle the world”.
Cameron took photography up in 1863, at the age of 48. Her portrait of Annie, the daughter of a family friend, made the following year, shows just how quickly she developed a distinctive vision. Its graphic simplicity and sombre psychological intensity make it appear strikingly modern.
Documents, Records and Travel, the gallery’s next section, charts photography’s imperial expansion from the 1860s to the 1880s. A handful of prints from Francis Frith’s Universal Series, shot on enormous 16 inch x 20 inch glass plates, show topographical and historical scenes with crystalline clarity.
Frith made his name with scenes of the Near East before turning his attention to Britain and continental Europe. The prints on display were place-markers from the company’s catalogue, with numbers and place names elegantly scrawled across their skies.
Selections such as this point to some of the gallery’s secondary narratives. This is primarily an art history of photography, but the curators have interwoven a wider cultural history, drawing in, for example, the progressive professionalisation of photography, and its changing technological characteristics.
Their selections are also, inevitably, responsive to the current aesthetic mood. The choice of Frith’s defaced place-markers over “clean’” prints elaborates the historical backstory while also invoking more recent artistic experiments with image and text.
Massive collection
Facts and Focus takes us into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on the competing visions of “straight” and “pictorialist” photographers. (Emerson had been a leading pictorialist before his “renunciation”).
Modernism, which includes Man Ray, Walker Evans and Cecil Beaton, leads us to the second In-focus section, which showcases a stunning set of Henri Cartier-Bresson prints.
The gallery’s final section, After the War: Personal Vision, takes us to the 1960s, which the curators identify as a point of rupture, “after which developments in scale, concept and technology mark a shift in appearance”.
Here, an image from Robert Frank’s 1958 book The Americans has one foot in the formal, eloquent picture-making of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” and another in a new and as yet undefined set of strategies.
This section’s array of works from the 1950s and 1960s points towards an eclectic future for makers and collectors of photographs. At this point in the exhibition, however, photography’s eclectic history is just as striking.
Trying to cram so much history into such a small space, and to do justice to such a massive and varied collection, must have been a mind-boggling task for the curators. It’s thrilling to see this fresh revision of the medium’s history, to revisit familiar works and discover new ones.
The size of the new gallery doesn’t give much scope for surprises, but the combination of this space with the changing displays on the ground floor has great potential.
The next couple of years will see some big changes in London’s photography scene with the reopening of the Photographers’ Gallery and an outpost of Bradford’s National Media Museum being developed at the Science Museum on the other side of Exhibition Road.
The V&A’s Photographs Gallery sets a high bar. It looks as if Emerson’s “handmaiden” might be about to have her moment.
Patrick Henry is the director of the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
Project data
- Cost undisclosed
- Main funder V&A
- Curators Martin Barnes; Marta Weiss
- Lighting DHA Design
- Design in house; David Jode