If you're looking for a photograph, try the Daily Herald Archive

Blogger: Caroline Dempsey, Collections Assistant

Ever wondered what your sister or father looked like on the day they emigrated to Australia? Looking for photographs of how your town looked 50 years ago, or searching for images of David Attenborough in his youth. There's a good chance that the image you're searching for is in the Daily Herald Archive.

The Daily Herald archive comprises over 3 million photographs covering a period from 1911 through to the 1960s. The archive is broadly split into three sections: places, events and people.

Requests are many and varied, and although the photograph you are searching for may not be in the archive, a search is always conducted and often we find just what you were after.

Here are some of the photographs we found for members of the public last year:

Caroline Williamson emailed from Australia, her grandfather was the Welsh politician Siegfried Owen Davies who accompanied the then King Edward around the Dowlais Steel Works in 1936. Her grandfather's file of photographs, taken over the many years he spent as a Member of Parliament, included one of him at Dowlais taken by the Herald photographer Edward Malindine.





Another Australian Stephen Mole contacted us, he was looking for a photograph of his father, Patrick, on the day he emigrated to Australia in 1949. His dad was 14 at the time and kept a diary recording his trip down under. We managed to find a photograph of the whole family as they set sail for Tasmania in time for a family celebration.



Barry Flynn remembered a Daily Herald photographer coming to his house in Liverpool in 1959. The paper was writing an article about the training of police dogs and Barry, aged 8 at the time, was photographed with his father's police dog "Jet" at their Allerton home.



So whether you have a relation who was a Past Miss Ireland, an artist, pilot, sports star, boxing referee or model we may have a photograph of them in the archive. Did your relative play host to Mahatma Gandhi when he toured England in 1931? A Mrs J P Davies did and her photograph is here in the archive.

Did your parents emigrate to New Zealand on board the "Rangitata" in 1947? Were you one of the 14 members of the Jones family of Chatham, Kent who moved to New Zealand in 1960 or one of the many Over-Seas League Child Migrants?

Perhaps you are a member of the Reading based Torpedoes Football Club who emigrated to Australia on masse in 1969. Or one of the Finnegan's from Dublin who in 1966 were bound for Ontario. Or a Templeton from Kingston, Jamaica on their way to the UK. If you think we might have the image you're after contact us and we'll conduct a search for you.

The Lives of Great Photographers - A Perfect Exhibition?

The selection for The Lives of Great Photographers exhibition was a difficult one for our curators. The photographers in the exhibition were chosen according to five categories and we have displayed the best examples from each. Only photographers who had died and therefore completed their life's work were chosen as it was thought that only then could a photographer be judged.

But, there are so many photographers who could or should be 'great'. What does the word 'great' even mean in this context? Does the praise of an expert make a photographer great? Does a great life make a great photographer? Robert Capa lived a risk-taking, high-society, celebrity lifestyle and Weegee was a master of self-promotion, whilst others were more obscure during their lifetime but left a great legacy.

A couple of weeks ago, the exhibition's curator, Brian Liddy, and Anne McNeill, Director of Impressions Gallery met to discuss this question, and explore wider issues surrounding the exhibition. You can watch the video of the interview which took place in Gallery One right here:

Brian kindly agreed to write about the interview for our blog:

"I was feeling a bit apprehensive about being interviewed by Anne McNeill about ‘The Lives of Great Photographers’, which I had selected the photographs for.

"All of this was to be in front of an audience, and on top of that we were to be filmed by my colleague, Emma Shaw with a view to putting it on the web. Yikes! The whole idea for the event was Emma’s, and was arranged by another colleague, Fozia Bano. She knew it would go down well, said we should go for it and encouraged me all the way.

"So, Anne and I met beforehand to have a chat about the ‘interrogation’, but I didn’t know what questions she was going to ask me on the night, which made me nervous. Also, Anne is really knowledgeable, has strong views and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. All of this made me nervous, but I needn’t have been. Anne was great, and really put me at ease right from the start."

"Don’t get me wrong - it was a serious event, with important issues to be raised, but Anne phrased her questions as if she was more of an interested friend than an adversary. So, thanks to her I actually began to enjoy myself once we began.

"I had chosen photographs for the exhibition by famous photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Bill Brandt, Julia Margaret Cameron, Fay Godwin, Cartier-Bresson and Weegee for the show. But there are also less well known photographers such as George Davison and Edith Tudor Hart. I would have to account for their inclusion, why I had chosen the photographs I did, and perhaps explain why photographers like Ansel Adams and Cindy Sherman weren’t in the exhibition. It could have spelled trouble!

"But in the end we talked about things like the history of the National Photography Collection, and why it's shaped the way it is. I explained that as an institution we’re much older than you might think. Not everyone knows that we’re part of a wider group of museums called NMSI which includes the Science Museum, and that we moved from London 26 years ago, but the collections here have been growing since the 1880s.

"It was good to be able to explain that although Julia Margaret Cameron’s work has been in our collection since that period, it would have been acquired as examples of albumen prints from wet collodion negatives rather than works of art. That side of her work would have been covered by the V&A Museum and the Royal Photographic Society.

"I was pleased that people asked questions, and that we were able to have a few laughs along the way. Now I’m looking forward to doing more events like last night in the future, and hope to maybe see you there."

Great Photographers Wanted - Living or Dead

On 15 April, we will be opening a brand new exhibition drawn exclusively from the National Photography Collection in our care:

The Lives of Great Photographers (15 April - 4 September 2011)

The Collection contains thousands of great works by great photographers - not all of which are represented in the exhibition. When you visit, we want you to tell us where we went wrong.

Who would you have included in this exhibition? Who is your favourite photographer? They can be still living, still working, man or woman, any nationality, any era of history. Tell us why you love their work.

We have provided feedback notepads inside the gallery, and we will be uploading answers to our Flickr channel:
Read the responses to The Lives of Great Photographers

Some of the Museum staff have already told us their favourite photographers, and you can see their comments here.

We invite you to join in the discussion right here on the Museum blog.

Picture a Museum Day 2011

Blogger: Emma James, Web Content Coordinator

Thursday 17 March was the very first global Picture a Museum Day - the purpose of which was to give people behind-the-scenes access to the world's museums and galleries through Flickr and Twitter.

What a success! The MuseumPics Flickr group now has more than 500 members. Institutions and individuals from across the globe have shared over 6,000 photographs of art, objects, people and spaces from some of the world's best cultural destinations.

Thursday also saw people using their smart phones to post photographs to Twitter using the #MuseumPics hashtag, and days later, it's still generating quite a bit of traffic - another coup for collaborative content creation through social media.

Let's hope the day becomes an annual fixture on the museum calendar. Here's a selection of our photographs from the day - see the rest on our Flickr channel, or go straight to the MuseumPics group to see images from around the world.

TV Heaven Welcomes TV's Most Famous Sheep

Blogger: Claire Hampton, Assistant Curator of Television

It's that time again - after the usual post-Christmas lull, the school holidays have kicked things up a notch. Assistant Curator of Television, Claire Hampton, has been busy preparing our TV galleries for half term visitors with a new addition to the display cabinets - television's most famous sheep.

"We've spent the last year celebrating the numerous soap anniversaries which took place in 2010: 50 years of Coronation Street in TV Heaven, a visit from the cast and crew of Hollyoaks, and there was even a display commemorating 25 years of EastEnders.

"Unfortunately the Museum's year of soap has come to an end. It's time to carefully pack up Arthur’s bench of tears, Bianca’s wedding dress and Sonia’s trumpet and return them to the EastEnders' prop and costume department. All the items will now be carefully returned to Elstree, where EastEnders is filmed.

“It will be sad to say goodbye to the Queen Vic bust and Pat Butcher’s earrings, but we're looking forward to seeing some old favourites from the National Television Collection back on display again - Zippy and George from Rainbow, the PlaySchool Toys and Gordon the Gopher all feature in the display. A selection of Gerry Anderson puppets has also been brought out of the archive to join the other children's favourites.

"I hope visitors will enjoy seeing a special item from the Collection which hasn’t been on public display before. I’m a huge fan of Shaun the Sheep and this character from the programme is a wonderful new addition to the Museum’s Animation Collection. The simple charm of the character and the attention to detail on the bail of hay are just typical of Aardman’s wonderful work."

We're dedicating half term to the wonderful world of animation - for a full list of family activities this week, visit the Families section of our website.

Annie Leibovitz Visits the National Photography Collection

World renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz visited the Museum on Tuesday - the latest stop on a personal journey she is undertaking looking at places relating to inspirational and culturally significant people.

Her travels, which will be documented in an upcoming book titled Pilgrimage, brought her to Bradford to view and photograph items belonging to Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 1879), part of the Royal Photographic Society Collection in the National Photography Collection which is held here.

Annie looked at personal letters, photographs, albums and a folio, all of which belonged to Cameron, one of the earliest pioneers of photography. Cameron, like Annie, was celebrated as a great photographer and for her work producing portraits of famous people and historical figures of the era.

Our Collection includes photographs Cameron took of Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Sir John Herschel.

Annie said:

"I am very impressed with how you care for such legacies – of Julia Margaret Cameron's work and items from the Royal Photographic Society period. There really are treasures here.

"It is one thing to take care of such work but to give this access to anyone who wants to study or see it is fantastic."

To view a selection of items from the National Photography Collection including Cameron's work, visit our website:
http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/Collection/Photography

Simon Roberts: We English Exhibition on Tour

Our temporary exhibition galleries are now closed while we prepare for two brand new exhibitions to open on 15 October.
Robbie Cooper's Immersion will be replaced by Land: Revisited, to mark the 25th anniversary of Fay Godwin's Land, a celebration of the British landscape.
Simon Roberts' We English will be replaced by From Back Home, a body of work by contemporary Swedish photographers Anders Petersen and JH Engström, which became an award-winning book and is being exhibited in this country for the first time in our Gallery One space.
If you enjoyed We English, you'll have another opportunity to view the work when it tours to Croyden Clock Tower - not the only National Media Museum exhibition to go on tour...
Ruth Haycock, our Senior Exhibitions and Partnerships Organiser, has developed a Touring Exhibitions strand whose aim is to increase public access to our Collections both here and abroad, develop cultural partnerships, boost the profile of the Museum and champion our world-class Collections.
We English and three other exhibitions taken from our photography Collections are available to tour: Lives of the Great Photographers, The British Landscape and The Art of Arrangement: Still Life and the Photographic Tradition.
Our exhibition and design teams will create a graphics and identity package for the exhibition, and while we provide core pieces, the host venue may extend and compliment the exhibition with work from their own collections to make it their own - we can work with the host venue to develop layered interpretations to meet their requirements and the needs of their audiences.
If you're interested in hosting a National Media Museum exhibition, or would like to find out more about our Touring Exhibitions programme, talk to Ruth Haycock:
Tel: 01274 203 343
Email: ruth.haycock@nationalmediamuseum.org.uk.

Simon Roberts in Conversation with Greg Hobson

Simon Roberts, whose We English exhibition is currently running in Gallery One, returned to the Museum yesterday to sit in conversation with Greg Hobson, curator of photographs.

The event is one of many organised by the Museum to complement our temporary exhibitions, and yesterday began with Greg asking Simon why he took up photography.

When he was 14, Simon went on a family holiday to Yosemite National Park, California and during their stay visited the Ansel Adams Gallery. Simon described the ‘extraordinary experience’ of viewing YNP through the eyes of Adams, which opened up the landscape and revealed elements which Simon hadn’t previously observed.

Simon studied Human Geography, at Sheffield University - a useful framework for documentary photography. He described himself as a ‘transient person’ interested in exploring social issues; photography enabled him to adopt his preferred lifestyle.

Simon explained that he didn’t enjoy the ‘quick turnaround’ nature of newspaper photography, so he began working on his own project, following the career of a young boxer from Sheffield. This earned him the Sunday Times Magazine Young Photographer of the Year Award in 1998.

After a bad experience with a John Prescott photograph, Simon decided to take a departure from magazine work and produce his first major project, Motherland. Simon and his wife travelled across the country for a year, cataloguing the landscapes and people they came across, trying to capture the spirit of ‘Russianness’.

Simon had preconceived ideas of what the experience would be, but wanted to challenge these stereotypes. Published images of Russia tend to focus on the despondent, and Simon wanted to move away from this, without trying to paint a ‘rosy picture’. “I was trying to make the person complicit in the act of representation.”

During the event, Simon described his technical choices, logistical planning, and the obstacles he met along the way, including an undesirable camping trip, and several short stays in prison!

Find out more about the Motherland project by visiting www.motherlandbook.com

Experiencing the ‘unbelievable sense of patriotism’ which exists in Russia led Simon to begin questioning his own sense of belonging, and this influenced Simon’s decision to being a similar project back home, We English.

Currently on display in Gallery One of the National Media Museum, We English is a very personal exploration of the English at leisure, which opens up a dialogue between people and the landscapes in which they choose to spend their free time.

Simon and Greg discussed technical aspects of the project, including the decision to photograph from an elevated position, and revisited the notion of representation. During his tour of England, Simon encouraged people to invite him to events all over the country, which helped build an audience, and acts as an archival document in its own right.

Simon presented a selection of the images, explained how he is fascinated by the editing process, and talked about the framing decisions he made for some of the photographs.

“We’re so saturated with images all the time so I try to create images where you’re rewarded the more you look at it.”

You can find out more about We English by visiting our exhibition website www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/simonroberts.

Simon was selected as the official election artist for 2010, the results of which will be exhibited in the House of Commons this summer.

With this project, Simon took the idea of representation even further, by inviting people to produce their own images of what the election process means to them. These pictures will be displayed alongside Simon’s own work.

Simon used social media to generate as many photographs as possible in a short space of time, the results of which can be seen at www.theelectionproject.co.uk. Simon feels that this process helped generate an archive of the political landscape created by the public.

After the discussion, Simon and Greg led the audience on a tour of We English to further discuss his work, and the images he drew on for inspiration.

You can download or listen to a podcast of the event on the National Media Museum Podcasts page.

Today, Simon returned to the Museum for a Portfolio Review Session, which gives aspiring photographers the opportunity to have their work reviewed by a panel of experts who offer guidance, a personal perspective, and advice on how to succeed in the field.

To find out about forthcoming events at the National Media Museum, sign up to our newsletter and tell us what you’re interested in by visiting http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/TalkToUs.