Britain’s key, London-based photography institutions have always collaborated to some extent, but given the new impetus of Simon Baker’s arrival as Tate’s first curator of photography, and Charlotte Cotton’s return from the US to head up the National Media Museum’s new space in the capital, we may be entering a new era of joined-up thinking, according to Martin Barnes. The curator of photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum says that while past partnerships have largely been based on loaning work to each other, there is a new climate of communication.

“Simon and Charlotte and I, and representatives from The Photographers’ Gallery, have had lots of discussions about how the offer of photography in London could be more joined-up,” says Barnes. “We’ve talked about perhaps co-ordinating timings for exhibitions and thematic shows where we make real connections. Each institution has its own character and agenda, but we’re all fans of photography and, as a visitor, you just want to see good photography shows wherever you happen to be. For example, if you go to Paris when Paris Photo is on, there’s the fair itself, but then  there are also photography exhibitions at the Pompidou, the
Jeu de Paume and the Musée d’Orsay. There’s a sense of collaboration, and we’d like to move towards that kind of approach.”

It takes a couple of years to organise shows at big institutions, so any such co-ordination will take time to filter through. Barnes says it could happen in 2012, when Cotton hopes to open the NMM space in the Science Museum. It’s a chance to set up a kind of virtual overarching photography institution in London, but Barnes says he doesn’t mourn the lack of one key venue equivalent to the Maison Européenne de la Photography in Paris. “The battle is won in establishing photography as an art practice as well as a documentary medium, so do we need to start setting up a ghetto of photography? I don’t know.

“The independent photography spaces that were set up in the 1970s and 80s do a great job of raising the profile of photography,” he continues. “There’s more than enough photography to go around. I enjoy the fact that when you come to the V&A you see jewellery and sculpture and architecture and design, and you can see how photography links into all of that. You approach photography differently than you would at the other institutions, which all have a different sense of how photography connects with the other media in their collections.”

Barnes adds that each of the institutions has its own history working with photography – the V&A was the first institution in the world to collect photography, for example both as documentary materials and fine art (an idea sparked by correspondence in an early edition of BJP), and now owns around 500,000 prints. The collection is “a broad church”, adds Barnes, encompassing everything from advertising to journalism and fine art, and he considers it his job to understand those different formats and “present and enjoy those crossovers and ambiguities”. The collection is occasionally given a big boost – in 2000 the British Library transferred most of its photography collection to the V&A, for example, including around 4000 prints – but otherwise it adds approximately 30 or 40 prints per year.

These prints tend to be from contemporary photographers, partly for practical reasons – the gaps in the V&A’s collection tend to be there because other institutions own the prints, and older prints often have “inflated prices” at auction. But the V&A doesn’t just collect contemporary photography because it’s cheaper. In fact, some of the contemporary prints in its collection are very valuable, because they’re by celebrated artists such as Gregory Crewdson. Barnes feels it’s important to collect contemporary artists’ work, to keep the collection alive and keep the artists going. “Often we collect really emerging photography, before it’s been validated by other institutions or galleries, supporting someone early on in their career,” he says. “We go to MA shows, degree shows and portfolio reviews, and photographers come in with their work. We also talk to other people about work they’ve seen.”

So far in 2010 the V&A has acquired prints by Al Vandenberg, Ariq Rahimi, Dennis Morris, Jowhara Al Saud, Maurice Broomfield, Susan Derges, Pierre Cordier, Adam Fuss, Steven Klein, Taysir Batmji and Amirali Ghasemi. Last year its acquisitions included prints by Jo Spence, Indre Serpytyte, Anderson & Low and Mitch Epstein. The funding comes from public grants and private donations, and all acquisitions have to be approved by a museum panel and a curators’ group but, says Barnes, in the end it’s also a personal commitment about what’s worth collecting. “There’s no neutral barometer of choice, you just have to feel informed enough to make a decision,” he says. “You’ve got to feel enthusiastic about the work and be able to stand up for it. But I’m not afraid to show people who are not well known, as long as it’s good, interesting work.”

Currently on show

Once an image is in the collection, the V&A will endeavour to show it, whether in its new acquisitions gallery, photography gallery or a show. The forthcoming exhibition, Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography (12 October to 20 February 2011), for example, features work by Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges and Adam Fuss, who the V&A has collected since the 1980s.

Barnes has also used the exhibition as an opportunity to make new acquisitions, buying work by Pierre Cordier for the first time and acquiring new work by Fuss and Derges. A small display will also go on show in the V&A’s photography gallery, exhibiting earlier camera-less work from the V&A’s collection by photographers such as Anna Atkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. “We don’t have to show work from our collection but it makes sense to show as much from the permanent collection as we can,” says Barnes. “And doing a show gives us an opportunity to acquire new work so that there’s a legacy in terms of the collection.”

Further works in the exhibition have been loaned by other institutions or by the photographers themselves – curating the show has required a bit of detective work, says Barnes, because unlike other photographic prints, camera-less works are one-offs. The images are united by the fact that they’re made without lenses, by painting or placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper, but Barnes hopes that the show is about much more than experimentation alone, adding that each of the artists involved has conceptual and philosophical reasons for working in this way. It’s a show he’s wanted to put together for a long time, he says, and now felt like the right time to go back to basics and look at the magic of photography.

“It could be that when the world is saturated by works produced through digital means, then works like this stand out,” he says. “There’s something weirdly unfamiliar about them that makes you want to look again. But I was also interested in why some photographic artists are abandoning all that possibility with digital media and going back to the beginnings of photography. When lens-based practice can do so much, why do that?”

The show also combines earlier, European artists with contemporary British photographers, to suggest that camera-less photography has been going on as long as photography itself, whether it is more widely appreciated, as in the Bauhaus era, or currently under-represented in public galleries.

“I see it as an undercurrent in photography that has been there from the start and is the essence of photography,” says Barnes. “Light sensitivity on a light-sensitive material is like getting a suntan or seeing the shadow of a leaf on an apple, it’s the absolute basics. There have always been people who dip into that power of light and the magic of the trace, so in that way, this work feels like a continuation,
but it’s one we haven’t really looked at in this country. We’ve been drawn to perhaps a more journalistic or ironic practice. Now there’s a whole renaissance
of this kind of work, I think, but we’ve not seen much of it in museum shows in the UK, where we have the opportunity to place things in a more cultural and academic context.”