A photo museum

14 February

Sunday morning and another new week begins. Yesterday was a total waste for me, that’s why the blog didn’t get posted. It also seemed that none of us could really settle do anything with us bouncing from thing to the next. It started when we were up very late, and with the electrician not coming back we’ve not had the cooker as we thought we would, this weekend has been expensive in buying in take aways. We expect the cooker to be done tomorrow, which will help a lot with Kile being here. The worst part for Kile was that none of us really felt up to going down to Stratford.

As most of you will know, I love cameras and photography, but did you know there is a museum dedicated to it? Well, the National Media Museum(NMM) is in Bradford, and now there plans to move part of its collection to the V&A in London. The items to be moved are the Royal Photographic Society’s (RPS) 400,000 item photographic archive. The local muppet began a campaign to prevent the move and 25,000 have backed it.

NMM is another of those places that I have meant to go to but never got around to doing so for one reason or t’ther. Now if I want to go before the collection is vandalised I need to go before the move takes place in the summer. The museum hasn’t been the run-away success it was hoped it would though on the QT, and perhaps that is why this is happening. For us Bradford is a fairly long drive and without me driving now, it’s an even longer one for Jan to do by herself in one day. And that folks is one of the main reasons why we haven’t been before; it’s such a sod to get to.

Apart from centralising the collection, the idea of the move is to digitise it for on-line study. I can see the draw in doing this, yet during my time with the OU reading art history, I was taught that you can only get so far with studying pretty coloured reproductions in books, but to really get to know an art work, you need to stand in front of it. Wherever the collection is held, looking at a huge a collection of photos works fine for this, but what of the science part of photography?

How can anyone learn the science if they can only see images of it on a computer screen? That is why the OU places as much importance on the residential schools as they do, in all disciplines. It is in those schools where students could see and endless list of works in various galleries. A lot of the science schools were based on land and field work. How cameras evolved into the high tec digital wonders they are today can be done on-line, I agree, but how can students experience the smells disasters and triumphs of the darkroom without actually going into one with an exposed roll of film and processing it? They can’t, and in my view that will be gap in their education. But there’s another question for me.     

    

It’s the RPS Collection that is being moved, OK, got that? But who actually owns that collection and were they consulted on the move? Actually, who owns the museums and who makes the decisions as to what goes where. Certainly with this move the RPS is concerned that there will no longer be just one centre of photography that can concentrate on both the art and the science of photography. And yet their views are being ignored.

Is this likely to mean that other collections will not find their way to Bradford if their owners fear it will be moved to London? I would hope not. Something else I have just thought of is this; is this move the beginning of the end of the NMM as a whole? Again, I hope not.

Today’s photo …

The River Anker and a few daffs.

Today’s funny …

There was this car that was driving very slowly down the highway. A State Trooper pulls it over. "What have I done wrong, officer?" the driver asks.
"You are going 26mph on a major highway. There is a law against that," the officer says to the driver. "You must go at least 50mph."
"But when I turned on the highway, the sign said 26!" the driver replies.
"HA HA HA!" The officer laughs out loud. "That is because this is Interstate 26! The 26 isn't the speed limit!"
The driver leans back in her car seat and the cop sees another woman sitting beside her. She looked as pale as a ghost.
"What happened to her?" the officer asks.
"I don't know, but she has been that way ever since we got off of interstate 160."