Public Collections
Policy Changes
Original photography remained the main route by which the Centre amassed images for its Photographic Archive for nearly ten years. However, in 1973, this policy changed. Following a review undertaken by the newly appointed director, Christopher White—it was recognised that the focus on original photography had led to the development of a somewhat idiosyncratic resource. Keen to fill the obvious “gaps” in the collection so that “a student or other visitor to the Archive should be able to find all the basic works of art as well as some of the more obscure in our boxes” the parameters of the Photographic Archive were widened.1
The Centre looked particularly to public collections, aiming to acquire images of works in the UK’s permanent collections, where negatives already existed. This new policy was clearly documented in the Annual Reports of the period which record that “steps are being taken to purchase photographs of selected works from public collections”2; “we are now receiving large orders of photographs from the permanent collections”3 and, finally, that the “slightly unbalanced nature of the archive, which was the result of the justifiable policy of giving priority to works of art passing through the art market, which might otherwise be lost to us, is now being rectified, since we are now receiving large orders of photographs from the permanent collections”.
Alongside permanent collection items, the Centre also sought to acquire images of works in temporary exhibitions. Again, original photography would only be commissioned where negatives did not already exist. Exhibition catalogues would be scrutinised, and prints ordered directly from the organising museum or gallery, who might have photographed the works for publicity reasons or for their own records. Today some of these exhibition catalogues—marked up by Centre staff indicating which prints would be ordered—are housed in the Centre’s Library and Institutional Archive.
It is not known exactly how many images were acquired from public collections, but it appears that—in the pre-digital era where a print would provide the only reference image of a work—ordering prints from negatives held by public collections was a relatively common occurrence and many institutions shared prints with each other in this way.
