The Tate was a late developer when it came to photography, staging its first major exhibition, Cruel and Tender, in 2003, decades after similar public-funded modern art galleries had done so on the Continent and in North America. And what little photography it had in its collection was predictably focused on the Becher School (as these were the first photographers to really break into the contemporary art market), along with a few prints donated by well-wishers.

But all that’s changed in the past couple of years, particularly since it appointed its first full-time photography curator. Simon Baker has been in the job for nearly 18 months, and this month Tate Modern will open four simultaneous photography exhibitions; one on each of its gallery floors. The shows include two exhibitions devoted to new work by Simon Norfolk and Taryn Simon, plus three artists’ rooms devoted to Diane Arbus, and a five-room show of recently acquired work called New Documentary Forms, which features recent projects by Luc Delahaye, Mitch Epstein, Guy Tillim and Akram Zaatari, and two series by Boris Mikhailov.

What’s more, the institution set up a photography acquisitions committee last May, which, according to one well-placed source, has an annual budget of around £200,000 to add to Tate’s photography collection (Baker says the figure isn’t correct, but hints it’s not far off, though he won’t be drawn on the exact figure). To put that into perspective, the V&A and the National Medium Museum are thought to have around 5-10 percent of that figure to spend each year, so Tate’s new fund represents a very significant investment. And that’s in addition to the purchases Tate’s regional acquisitions committees make. So while the exhibition and acquisition plans don’t always work in tandem (Tate Modern’s last big show, Exposed, was a travelling exhibition that had previously been in San Francisco), there is inevitably a symbiotic relationship between the two.

The Diane Arbus exhibition will show off 40 of the 69 Arbus prints donated to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland by London dealer Anthony d’Offay in 2008, for example, while The Wilson Center (BJP #7781) has loaned a five-room premiere of Taryn Simon’s new project, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, and has promised to donate the prints in the near future. New Documentary Forms consists almost entirely of new acquisitions, including Mikhailov’s Red and 13 images from the At Dusk series. In all cases, Tate has worked closely with the photographer or the photographer’s estate, working out what to acquire and how the prints will be displayed.

The King and Queen of a Senior Citizen's Dance, NYC, 1970 by Diane Arbus. This image was acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through the d'Offray Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund in 2008. Image © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

“We have to balance the resources we can fundraise for and the money we’re able to spend with people thinking, ‘OK, if I’ve got an amazing collection of photography, Tate is the right place for it’,” says Baker. “They won’t think that unless we show it really well. Part of the obligation on me is to make sure we’re showing things in ways photographers are happy with, so they really want their work to be shown here. The Pompidou [in Paris] only started its [photography] collection 30 years ago, and they now have 25,000 prints, including one of the biggest collections of Brassai in the world. They have many amazing gifts because whenever someone gives them a gift, they make a beautiful display – show it really sensitively and make amazing supporting material and publications. Our hope is if we pay photographers the respect they deserve and show their work brilliantly, they will want to be in the collection.”

Artist collaborations

Tate curators worked closely with Bruce Davidson last year on an exhibition of his Subway series, for example – prints that have been promised to the museum by collectors Jane and Michael Wilson. Using all the images from the book of the same name, in the order they appear in it, the prints were arranged as a single continuous strip in the middle of the gallery walls, just as the photographer suggested. Baker is working directly with Mikhailov on the installation of his room too, following the photographer’s directions on how to show his Red project and pairing it with the At Dusk series at his request.

Next year Baker is working on his first large-scale curated show for Tate Modern, a mouthwatering exhibition pairing William Klein with Daido Moriyama, and Tate has acquired a substantial body of work by the Japanese photographer in preparation. “With post-war work, it’s not so difficult – many of the artists are still alive, and often they have held onto things that they would love to end up in Tate,” he says. “When we talk with Lewis Baltz about what we might be able to acquire from him, for example, it becomes an interesting discussion about what can we afford and how we can make it work financially.”

Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia 2004 © Mitch Epstein.

Tate is also collaborating with younger image-makers such as Simon, Tillim and Delahaye, buying contemporary work sometimes well ahead of the loop. The institution acquired Epstein’s 2008 American Power series before it won the Prix Pictet, for example. Chief curator at Tate, Sheena Wagstaff, is collaborating with Simon Norfolk on his current project, which pairs John Burke’s images of the British military in 19th-century Afghanistan with their modern-day equivalents. The project isn’t a Tate commission, but Wagstaff has worked with Norfolk throughout its production, and even went to Afghanistan with him. “It shows the great strength of the curatorial team here,” says Baker. “The curators are always researching, always exploring, always trying to find new approaches.”

Building the collection

The real challenge is to build the museum’s collection of early 20th-century work, much of which is now priced way out of the institution’s league. It would be difficult for Tate to collect a large number of Man Ray or August Sander images retrospectively, says Baker, although fortunately some of this work has been lent to it – d’Offay donated a series of Sander images to Tate and National Galleries Scotland, for example, shown at Tate Modern in a photography show on typologies. Baker hopes to build up the Surrealist, Neue Sachlichkeit and Modernist collections in other ways instead, such as by collecting work by Iwao Yamawaki, a Japanese photographer who studied at the Bauhaus and spread the aesthetic back home. “It’s a challenge [to collect work from these periods] but because this work isn’t something the market has honed in on yet it’s a very effective way of showing a particular moment,” he says.

Tate is keen to build the photography collection holistically too, adding prints that relate to other work already held by Tate – and others – in various media. Baker says it “makes sense” to collect photographs relating to the Bauhaus, for example, because Tate already holds paintings by Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, and wants to build on the Surrealist photography collection for similar reasons. The Bauhaus influence spread around the globe, though, so having acquired some work from the German school, it also makes sense for Tate to add modernist images from elsewhere in the world. “We want work that speaks to the collection,” says Baker. “But everything we acquire suggests new connections and links.

“I love the idea you can trace the Bauhaus all over Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia. It’s perfect for us [because Tate Modern is an international gallery] and it’s the same with surrealism, because it was also an international movement. There are also avant-garde documentary practices and they are really important. Last year we collected fantastic work by Lewis Hine, for example, very political, crusading proto-photojournalism. If we have that in the collection, it helps us move towards collecting more contemporary political practice such as Simon Norfolk’s work.”

As this strategy suggests, Baker believes photography should be considered within the wider context of art history, not given its own distinct narrative, and says this is also Tate’s strategy. At the moments when photography was strong, in the Bauhaus or in surrealism, there was no sense that photography was separate from, or subordinate to, any other art form, he argues, so he wants to “integrate photography into the history of art”. He would love to show Baltz’s photography alongside minimalist sculpture, he says, as the Art Institute of Chicago recently did, and he’s also excited about the new hang of the permanent collection at the Tate Britain (initiated by the new director Penelope Curtis), which will group artworks chronologically rather than by medium or subject matter.

Not the usual suspects

At the same time, though, Tate’s recent photographic acquisitions and forthcoming exhibitions show a clear understanding of photographic history, concentrating on “photographers’ photographers” rather than “artists who use photography” who have traditionally found more favour in art galleries, such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Tate doesn’t imagine it can only show photography that looks abstract or conceptual, says Baker, plus the one-room Davidson display proved popular with visitors. On a similar note, perhaps, Tate is now committed to collecting and showing photography in large bodies and series, rather than in the broader surveys favoured at the V&A. This is partly down to practicalities – the V&A already has a survey collection, so Tate doesn’t need to replicate it – but also speaks of a different understanding of photography and photographers.

Kabul, 2010. Image © Simon Norfolk.

“There’s a basic principle of making sure that the Tate’s acquisitions complement the V&A’s and that we end up with a national collection that’s really strong and deep in certain areas,” says Baker. “The V&A has seven of Mikhailov’s At Dusk images, for example, so we acquired 13 different prints so that, if in future, one or other of us wants to show the whole series, we have a substantial group from it. But we also had to decide how to address the Tate’s lack of photographs, and my feeling, and the feeling of my directors and the museum, is that the way we can really make a difference is by making these collection-changing acquisitions. Mikhailov’s Red is a historically important body of work, and we have the space to show it.

“Plus photographers often work in series; it’s rare that photographers don’t have what conceptual artists think of as a great subject. Almost all photography is at some level conceptual, or thought through as project-based, whether the photographers work on these concepts from the outset or go back to the material and reorganise it into conceptual frameworks. That’s fascinating. Photography has a really interesting relationship with the idea of the conceptual project.”

As this approach suggests, Baker is interested in photobooks, and states that there’s “no way of showing Moriyama’s Farewell Photography without showing how it was originally published”, and so the book will feature in next year’s show, alongside some of Klein’s publications too.

Part of the challenge in exhibiting “straight” photography is translating it into the gallery, says Baker, and Moriyama and Klein will be shown in two separate exhibitions, linked by a room of contextual information about New York and Tokyo. For Baker, it’s just part and parcel of treating photography like any other medium. “We have this trend at Tate where we put together two different artists and see how they relate,” he says. “We did it with Rodchenko and Popova, and Matisse and Picasso, and a few others. We’ve never done it with photography, so it’s about time.”