Contexts for photography collections at the National Media Museum

A museum decides to transfer its collections to another museum. After assessing its financial situation, reviewing its priorities and strategic aims, its opportunities and contexts, the museum makes the difficult decision to enter into negotiations with another, better-resourced institution in order to safeguard the collections in the public interest. Both museums agree to collaborate closely, and enable the former custodians to use the collection when appropriate in their exhibitions and displays.

The museum in question was Brooklyn Museum and Art Gallery, which in 2007 transferred their sizable costume collections to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1] Accumulated over a number of years, the collections were considered to be important, but the Museum, which cares for over 1.5 million works of art across all disciplines, increasingly felt that it was not possible to sustain the levels of investment in collections care and curatorial resources that such a significant collection required. After a review of different potential destinations Brooklyn decided to work with the Met, whose costume institute has a staff of over twenty specialists and where the collection would complement their own holdings of costume, creating the ‘largest and most encyclopaedic costume collections in the world’.[2]

The focus of this paper is another transfer of museum collections in similar circumstances – the 2016 transfer of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection from the National Media Museum[3] (NMeM) in Bradford to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. This collection of over 250,000 images, pieces of equipment, books and papers, contains work by many celebrated photographic artists including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, George Davidson and Alvin Langdon Coburn. The decision by the National Media Museum, and its parent body the Science Museum Group was announced in early February 2016 and, unlike at the Brooklyn Museum, the NMeM decision resulted in considerable public comment, campaigns by local politicians and a petition opposing the transfer that was signed by over 25,000 people.[4]