V&A Photography Gallery
When I visited the Photography Centre at the V&A. I was looking forward to something different and exciting. A real celebration of photography. A national treasure trove of the very best images. However, I was disappointed. The V&A Photography Centre is just a museum space with photographs.
The Photography Centre
The V&A Photography Centre was opened earlier this month to celebrate the Royal Photography Society collection of photographs, joining the V&A’s national collection. Both these archives are massive, and it is very sad that this national collection is not available to view. So it is some consolation then, that the V&A have rescued around 600 objects, and they are on view at the gallery.
The V&A blurb boasts that the new galleries revolutionise the way photography is presented. So I was expecting more than two rooms in the corner of the V&A with pictures on the wall and cameras in glass cases. A lost opportunity, to be more off the wall.
I know the V&A is a museum, but does it have to devote so much of its’ limited space to the first hundred and fifty years of photography. The last 70 years of photography are when cameras became more portable, and new genres of photography were let loose. Although there was some extraordinary recent photography, Martin Parr and Linda McCartney included. There were walls devoted to early photographs, but no mention of a smartphone camera or social media. Lots of Brownies, but no Huawei or Instagram
The Future
This exhibition at least recognises the importance of photography, and the V&A Photography Centre is to be extended to twice the size by 2022. So it has time to change, and space to grow into.
Around 1.8 billion images are captured each day. So every two minutes we take more pictures than ever existed 150 years ago. Essentially that is the V&A’s dilemma.
Where I Buy
I buy my equipment from Wex because I have genuinely found that they offer great advice and customer service.