In February and March of this year ?Unknown Pleasures: Unwrapping the Royal Photographic Society Collection? was shown at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (NMPFT) in Bradford.
Organised to mark 150 years of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), the exhibition was described by curator Russell Roberts as ?a playful exploration? of one of the world?s most important collections of photographic prints, equipment and ephemera, says Dean Loughran.
Without doubt a major hang ? some 300 items in all ? the unique proposition of the show was that it reflected the collection?s depth and diversity. So, for instance, we found nineteenth century religious imagery opposite the contrasting styles and contents of war photography from the Crimea and Vietnam; images exploring movement and the unseen from early X-rays to the life history of a splash; celebrity portraits of Hepburn, Dali and Hemingway alongside enigmatic, anonymous Daguerrotypes and cartes de visite. Among examples of high art pictorialism was Henry Peach Robinson?s ?Bringing Home the May? (1862), which was created in the darkroom from nine separate glass negatives, five of which were on display on a specially constructed light box. The fact that images were being manipulated and created in this way so soon after the birth of photography comes as a shock to many of us only now getting to grips with the digital doctoring of photographs in the media and on our own PCs.
The exhibition also heralded a new future for the collection. Following the announcement of a partnership between the NMPFT and RPS in 2001, fundraising began to bring the RPS Collection into the museum. As John Dudley Johnson, the moving force behind assembling the RPS Collection in the 1920s regularly divided his spoils with the national collections now housed at the NMPFT, their histories are already inextricably entwined. Once the two sit side by side in our Insight facility, many items will be reunited with their siblings, allowing both the public and academics access to what will be the greatest resource for photography anywhere in the world.
Generous contributions from the Art Fund, Yorkshire Forward, Kodak and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation among others ? plus the record-breaking grant for photography of £3.75m from the Heritage Lottery Fund ? have brought us tantalisingly close to our target: a further £220,000 will allow us to realise the project fully and deliver an ambitious programme of exhibitions drawn from the two collections in a new permanent photography space, plus education and outreach work, allowing new and different directions to be explored.
Dean Loughran is Press Officer at the National Museum for Photography, Film & Television. t: 01274 203305; e: d.loughran@nmsi.ac.uk