Charting the rich and varied history of photography

in this month’s Art Fund column looking at art brought to the region with help from the national fundraising charity, we look at the Royal Photographic Society Collection of over 270,000 photographic images.

The Photographic Society of London – later known as the Royal Photographic Society – was founded in 1853 to promote the art and science of photography. It is one of the oldest surviving photographic organisations in the world, and has amassed a wonderfully rich collection.

In 2003, the National Media Museum in Bradford became the new home of the collection which, in addition to the photographs, also included 13,000 books and periodicals on photography and more than 6,000 items of photographic equipment.

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Some items in the collection date from the 1820s, the earliest days of photography. They are exceedingly rare and provide a rich historical insight into the images within and the processes used in early photography.

Legendary pioneer photographer Roger Fenton is generally considered the driving force behind the society which came into being following a growing public interest in photography stimulated by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Some of the very first examples in the collection are from the 1890s and include Frederick Hollyer’s portraits of GF Watts and JM Barrie.

The collection today includes examples of original methods of photography including daguerreotypes, salted-paper prints and albumen prints – as well as examples of little known experimental colour processes. Works by seminal photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen and the team of Hill and Adamson, as well as the largest collection of images by Roger Fenton in the world, form part of the collection.

Interesting examples include an image of the head of Christ combined with a leaf by the little known German, Johann Carl Enslen, who began experimenting with photography in 1839 at the age of 80.

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There are also examples in the collection of Eadweard Muybridge’s fascinating work from the 1880s at the University of Pennsylvania which used multiple cameras to capture the motion of humans and animals. It was this work which formed the foundations of the science of biomechanics.

In the years before the collection was acquired for the National Media Museum due to the huge resource and efforts needed to conserve, catalogue and display a set of works on this scale, the collection was in storage. The Art Fund contributed £342,000, its third largest grant for Yorkshire, towards the £4.5m needed to buy the collection for Bradford. If the funds had not been raised, it would likely have been broken up and sold piecemeal. The collection is now accessible to the public and the richness of this cultural asset is available for all to see for free.

Special Yorkshire Post Reader Offer: Buy a National Art Pass for free entry to 200 art galleries, museums and historic houses all over the UK and 50 per cent off tickets to major exhibitions. Proceeds go to the Art Fund’s funding programme for museums and galleries. Buy your National Art Pass today and get 12 months for the price of 9. Call 0844 415 4100 quoting MO1102 or visit www.artfund.org/nationalartpass

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