PHOTOGRAPHY
Past Photography Exhibitions
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The Photographers' Pilgrimage: Exploring Buddhist Sites in Asia
29 April - 21 June 2009
The beauty of Buddhist sites was revealed in this free display of sepia-toned photographs, capturing picturesque ruins in remote places and unusual aspects of familiar places. The display uncovered some of the highlights of the V&A's collection, showcasing the work of the photographers Linneaus Tripe in Burma and Joseph Lawton in Sri Lanka. Also included were souvenir photographs of the Longmen caves in China and a hand-tinted image of the Golden pavilion (Kinkakuji) in Japan.
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Libraries of Light: Photographic Books from the V&A Collection
24 April 2008 - 19 April 2009
Photographic books are almost as old as photography itself. This display featured highlights of historic, classic and contemporary photographic books from the Museum's library alongside prints from the photographs archive.
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The Art of Lee Miller
15 September 2007 – 6 January 2008
Sponsored by Olympus
Lee Miller is one of the most renowned female icons of the 20th century - a unique individual admired as much for her free-spirit, creativity and intelligence as for her classical beauty. This exhibition covered her extraordinary career as a photographer and was the first complete retrospective of her life and work, exploring her transformation from artist's muse to ground-breaking artist.
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Curtis Moffat: Experimental Photography and Design, 1923–1935
Curtis Moffat created dynamic abstract photographs, innovative colour still-lives and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early 20th century. He was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design.
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Snap!
17 June - 22 July 2007
Link Gallery
Free AdmissionSnap! is Mencap’s annual photo and story competition for people with a learning disability, their friends, families and carers. Started five years ago, Snap! showcases people’s talents and offers a rare insight in to the world of learning disability.
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Eugène Atget: Unintentional Surrealist?
29 January - 22 July 2007
Free admission
Eugène Atget (1857-1927) took up photography as a professional in the late 1880s. Details of his earlier life are shadowy. He is known to have been a sailor and then an amateur actor, which may account for the 'stage set' quality of many of his images. He seems to have lived a largely secluded life in his apartment in Paris.
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Festivals, Ceremonies & Customs: Sir Benjamin Stone & the National Photographic Record Association
6 October 2006 - 14 January 2007
In 1897, Queen Victoria's Jubilee year, Sir Benjamin Stone announced the formation of the National Photographic Record Association (NPRA). Its aim was to record the ancient buildings, folk customs and other 'survivals' of historical interest for the future.
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Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour
10 October 2006 - 17 December 2006
This exhibition focussed on contemporary photography and video, exploring the ways in which the theme of twilight has inspired artists who strive to record and replicate the ambiguity of the moment between night and day. Twilight included work by both established and emerging artists from around the world including Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Gregory Crewdson, Bill Henson, Robert Adams, Chrystel Lebas, Liang Yue and Ori Gersht.
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Jem Southam: Path to a Picture
Jem Southam (born Bristol 1950) is one of the UK's leading photographers. He is renowned for his series of colour landscape photographs, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until the present. His trademark is the patient observation of changes at a single location over many months or years.
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The Edwardian Eye of Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles
18 May - 16 July 2006
The Edwardian Eye of Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles displayed highlights from the recently acquired archive of an Edwardian photojournalist, showing sports and street life across Europe during the belle époque.
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John Riddy
20 February - 7 May 2006
John Riddy (born 1959, Northampton) is interested in places and the passing of time. He is renowned for his black and white prints of urban architectural spaces, but his latest photographs are in colour. They explore the relationship between the traditional and modern landscapes of Japan. Layering the urbanised small town of Shin-Fuji with the natural beauty of Mount Fuji, Riddy contrasts the polar opposites - rural and urban, old and new, natural and artificial - for which modern Japan is famous.
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Diane Arbus Revelations
13 October 2005 - 15 January 2006
Supported by The Bank of New York
Diane Arbus is one of the 20th century's most important artists. Her photographs, as universal as they are startling, redefined the concerns and the range of the art she practiced. 'Diane Arbus Revelations' was the first international museum retrospective of her work in more than thirty years. The exhibition consisted of nearly two hundred of the artist's most significant photographs-making it the most complete presentation of her work ever assembled. Prints were drawn from major public and private collections throughout the world and included many images that had never been exhibited publicly.
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Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
15 September 2005 - 15 January 2006
This exhibition offered the first comprehensive overview of innovative photo and video art produced in China since the mid 1990s. Bringing together works by younger artists from mainland China, many of whom were exhibiting for the first time in the UK, the exhibition comprised a host of highly individual responses to the successive waves of change that have swept through China’s economic, social, and cultural life. In addition to introducing a remarkable body of work to UK audiences, the exhibition provided insight into the dynamics of Chinese culture at the start of the 21st century.
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Garry Fabian Miller
30 June - 11 September 2005
Garry Fabian Miller is one of the most progressive figures in fine art photography. Born in 1957, he has made exclusively 'camera-less' photographs since the mid 1980s. He works in the darkroom, shining light through coloured glass vessels and over cut-paper shapes to create forms that record directly onto photographic paper. These rudimentary methods recall the earliest days of photography, when the effects of light on sensitised paper seemed magical.
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Ilse Bing
7 October 2004 - 9 January 2005
Ilse Bing initially taught herself photography to illustrate her research into Neo-classical architecture. In 1929 she bought a Leica camera and started to photograph new buildings in and around Frankfurt. The architect Mart Stam commissioned her to record several of his ambitious projects, including the Hellerhof housing development pictured here. Dizzy angles, flat plains and strong shadows were all part of a contemporary language of design pioneered by both the 'New Photography' and the new architecture.
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Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective
24 March – 25 July 2004
Celebrating the centenary of the birth of Britain's best-loved photographer of modern times, this exhibition presented 155 vintage gelatin-silver prints from the Bill Brandt Archive. Brandt's best-known work documents the vivid social contrasts in Britain during the World Wars. He also photographed the landscapes of 'Literary Britain' and a pantheon of great artists and writers.
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Alfred Stieglitz
10 November - 14 March 2004
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a pioneer of modern photography. A photographer, publisher, writer and gallery owner, he played a key role in the promotion and exploration of photography as an art form. He also helped introduce modern art to an American audience.
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Photojournalism 1930-1970 - Recent Gifts to the V&A
11 August 2003 - 2 November 2003
Photojournalism emerged as a distinctive form of photography in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The term denoted picture making that was spontaneous, topical and rapid. The V&A’s photography collection has recently been enriched by two important gifts of mid-20th century photojournalism.
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Sea and Sky: Photographs by Gustave Le Gray 1856-1857
8 May - 3 August 2003
Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes are one of the greatest achievements in the art of photography. Their exquisite tonal quality, impressive scale and innovative exposure and printing methods set high technical standards, while also elevating the evocative and poetic capacity of the medium. This display draws together a rare and visually stunning group of vintage prints from the V&A collection.
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100 Photographs: A Collection by Bruce Bernard
5 September 2002 - 26 January 2003
Bruce Bernard was a wonderfully gifted picture editor. Between 1996 and his death in the year 2000 he built up a remarkable collection of photographs for the artist and collector James Moores. The collection, shown here for the first time, [and in the accompanying book] provides a very personal, fresh and exhilarating view of photography. It is a special farewell book and exhibition from a great and discriminating friend of photography.
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Stepping In and Out: Contemporary Documentary Photography
5 September 2002 - 26 January 2003
Stepping In and Out takes as its starting point Bruce Bernard’s belief in the profound ability of photography to both record and comment on all human life. Eight projects were brought together here in recognition of this essential capacity of photography. They offer us insights into the scope of contemporary documentary photography and the motivations of photographers who continue to work with photography’s most enduring qualities.
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Seeing Things: Photographing Objects, 1850-2001
21 February - 18 August 2002
Seeing Things looked at still life plus the many other ways in which photography has interpreted objects: as museum specimens, as direct facsimiles (such as a startling photographic copy of a bank cheque from 1858), as Surrealist surprises, natural history, found objects, impossible objects, domestic details, personal accessories and advertising. The exhibition took in the home, the studio and the street and includes many of the greatest practitioners of photography, including Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugene Atget, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn, William Eggleston, Helen Chadwick and Hannah Collins, and younger photographers of today.
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Out of Japan
20 September 2001 - 3 February 2002
Out of Japan was an exhibition about photography in Japan from the pre-modern to the post-modern. This was a rare opportunity to view work by three major photographers working in Japan in the 1860s, the 1970s, and the present day. The photographs of Felice Beato, Masahisa Fukase and Naoya Hatakeyama were explored. The Photography Gallery’s autumn exhibition at the V&A was part of the Museum’s contribution to the Japan 2001 initiative.
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Where Are We? Questions of Landscape
5 April - 28 August 2001
The image of the changing landscape has been mediated through photographs for over 150 years. Over this period different types of landscape photographs have become as varied as the terrain they map out. This exhibition brought together a wide range of photographs, from the 1850s to the present, including many recent acquisitions, drawn from the V&A Photography Collection.
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Rural England Through a Victorian Lens: Benjamin Brecknell Turner
5 April - 27 August 2001
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-94) is known for his beautiful early photographs of rural England. He was one of the first, and remains one of the greatest, of all British photographers. His superb vintage prints, now in the V&A, form the basis of both a book and exhibition, organised by the V&A in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and opening alongside the V&A's spring 2001 exhibition The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain.
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Breathless! Photography and Time
11 February - 18 September 2000
Photography and Time are inextricably linked, as this millennial exhibition vividly shows. From the first photographs to capture movement of waves or the flight of a bullet, to modern-day contemplative images on life in the metropolis, Breathless! Photography and Time explores the notion of time and its associated themes of movement, speed, growth and reflection.