The Theatre and Performance Archive holds a large number of photographic collections, containing thousands of prints and negatives. But in more recent years, as technology has moved on, we are acquiring more ‘born digital’ collections, meaning that the native format is digital – rather than an analogue source that has been digitised.
Born digital collections have many implications, both good and … unknown!
Still in relative infancy in photographic terms, digital photography creates less pressures on physical space and housing, which with ever tightening constraints on museum stores and finances is a huge plus. On the other side hard drives can become corrupted, disks damaged and servers crash, and software and hardware can become obsolete or incompatible with other systems … it is, to say the least, worrisome.
Whatever the challenges for the archivist, the rise of the DSLR has made photography truly instant. There is no processing while hoping that one spectacular moment was captured; now the images can be edited and sent to press or published on a website in moments. Of course, it also means that we are likely to take 100s if not 1000s of images – we are limited only by the size of our memory cards and the charge on our batteries.
Which brings me to a born digital collection of dance photographs, the Frederika Davis Photographic Archive THM/636, shot mostly during photo calls predominantly in London. Of these, 9009 are born digital, and the other 195 were chosen to be digitised by the photographer as a representation of her earlier work.
Frederika Davis, or Fred to almost everyone who knew her, was born in May 1923 and became known as a dance photographer in the 1960s. Her photographs of Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev taken in rehearsal in 1963 are some of her best-known images.
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After many years photographing the leading names of the Royal Ballet and too many other companies to name, Fred decided to retire in the late 1970s. That might have been an end to her photographic story, but in July 2007, at the age of 84 and armed with a Nikon D40, Fred made her photo call comeback with the Bolshoi’s Le Corsaire.
By October of 2007 She had moved on to a Canon EOS 30D.
Upgrading to a Canon EOS 50D.
Frederika Davis attended her last photocall, at the age of 91, for the Royal Ballet’s Manon in 2014. She passed away peacefully on 22 August 2019. Between 2007 and 2014, Fred photographed over 200 performances and took over 9000 images, which she bequeathed to the V&A. You can find details of the Frederika Davis Photographic Archive on our website.
Capturing dance through photography offers a complex set of challenges. Sometimes the photographer has to prioritise the dynamic over focus, or movement over sharpness. When we look at Fred’s images, we see movement, stillness, passion, control, drama, strength and grace – we see the set and costumes as well as the dancers.
Fred had a wonderful ability to capture a split-second of the magic of the performance.
