End Of An Era

Reassessment

By the 2000s it was becoming increasingly obvious that—although the Centre’s Photographic Archive Collection was an extremely valuable resource—continuing to add to it in the traditional way was no longer sustainable or effective. The process of identifying, cutting and mounting images from auction catalogues alone was time-consuming. More importantly the move towards digital photography had meant that the volume of images available continued to increase dramatically, but there was no clear mechanism for capturing them for future generations.

These issues were not exclusive to the Centre but were widely debated by Photographic Archives all over the world. The situation came to head at the end of 2012, when the future of the Centre’s Photographic Archive was examined in a Strategic Review document which set out the various issues but basically asked the question “where next?”¹ The internal discussion that accompanied this document resulted in the Centre calling a halt to adding images from sale catalogues to the Photographic Archive. No further images have been added to the resource since this date. At the time this significant decision was made, the total number of images stood at roughly 100,000.

Conclusion

The Centre’s Photographic Archive is a unique collection that provides a superlative resource for the study of individual works of art, artists and British art history more generally. It also has much to tell us about photography, the practice of art history in the UK and the digital revolution of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it is a source of visual inspiration and the images in the collection tell stories of the people and projects interwoven in the Archive’s own history.

The decision to digitise, taken in 2016, supports the Centre’s founding aim of advancing the knowledge and understanding of British art. The challenge now will be to successfully harness born-digital images created in relation to traditional Centre activities, such as publishing, for this online resource. As the Centre’s Photographic Archive transfers to a digital environment, it enters a new chapter, reaching wider and more diverse audiences than ever before.

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Footnotes