Photography in All Its Guises (New MUSEUM ACQUISITIONS‪)‬

Since its inception in 1983, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, has avoided making value judgements about the different uses of photography. Instead, it has acquired and exhibited the rich diversity of practices that characterise the medium, as Russell Roberts, the museum's curator of photography, explains in this survey of new acquisitions of vintage photographs. Despite its relative youthfulness as a national museum, the origins and evolution of the collection of photography at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT) are historically complex and slightly curious. Following the success of the Great Exhibition in 1851, where photography from around the world was offered up to the general public for the first time, a government committee decided to create a new type of institution dedicated to industry and the applied arts. Subsequently the South Kensington Museum, this was founded in 1857. Here, photography--as it has done since the public announcement of its invention in January 1839--had different identities, various disguises and aspirations that both reinforced and unsettled the established cultural order of things. Photography's primary role in the museum was the documentation and dissemination of collections, although there were also, from time to time, exhibitions of photographs by serious amateurs in the pursuit of high art.