A photographic collection to be proud of
Terry Grimley meets Pete James, the award-winning head of photography at Birmingham’s Central Library.
Pete James spends much of his time hidden away in the back rooms of Birmingham’s Central Library, but this week he will be in London, collecting an international award from the Royal Photographic Society.
The Colin Ford Award, named after the pioneering photography curator and first director of the National Museum of Photography, is meant to recognise someone who has made a major contribution to photographic history.
In Pete James’s case, it celebrates the work he has done over 20 years in bringing Birmingham’s remarkable collections of photography to national and international attention.
“Needless to say I’m delighted because the award is named after someone for whom I have the greatest respect,” he says.
“But Colin has also been a great supporter of projects here, and it’s nice to get that degree of recognition from your peers.”
The library’s photographic collection was already magnificent before James arrived on the scene in the 1980s, but it was a sleeping giant waiting for someone to recognise it for what it really was.
Its scale is staggering, amounting to an estimated three million items spanning original prints, negatives, lantern slides, albums and books illustrated with original photographs, plus books and periodicals on photography.
It ranges from the mid-Victorian period to the present day, having been expanded by numerous commissions in recent years.
At its core is the Sir Benjamin Stone collection, comprising photographs taken and collected by the Victorian Birmingham MP who was a pioneer of documentary photography. Together with linked collections such as that covering the Warwickshire Photographic Survey, it helps give the collection its main focus on photography as a form of documentation.
“I think the reason they hadn’t picked up on this was that there wasn’t a photography specialist on the staff, but also because of the way the library had catalogued photographs by subject,” James says.
“Photographs were distributed over seven floors of the library, with books on photography split between the arts and science floors. A lot of the material acquired in the 19th century was acquired as illustrative material rather than for being photographic. It was only when the study of British photographic history really started to take off in the 1970s that people went back and started to reassess stuff that was in the collection.
“There was a period in the 1980s when my predecessor Phillip Allen, head of history and geography, went out and acquired the Francis Frith and Francis Bedford collections. But they were collected more because of their historical use than as photographic collections.”
James, now 51, arrived in the city from London in the mid-1980s to do an MA in the history of art and design at what was then Birmingham Polytechnic.
“I had always had an interest in photography, so I chose to do the history of photography as my specialist subject,” he recalls.
“When I lived in Harrow I used to work for Kodak in my student holidays, making up batches of film, and I had been to see the Kodak museum which is now in Bradford but was then in Harrow.
“Mike Hallett, who was my research supervisor, said I should come down and look at the library collections. I started looking at Benjamin Stone, William Jerome Harrison and record photography. I began tracing all the connections and realised there was a collection of national importance here.”
Birmingham may have sleepwalked into forming one of the country’s most important photographic archives, but why should it be more significant than what can be found in other libraries in major regional cities?
