V&A Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital

                                    

Since its invention in the 1830s, photography has radically transformed the way we document and express the world we see. Today, photographs are created and consumed at a raid race, but early on the very act of making a photograph was challenging and time-consuming, requiring scientific knowledge as well as artistic ability.

 In 1852 the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) became the first museum to collect photographs. Since then its collection has become one of the largest and most important in the world it grew significantly in 2017 with the transfer of the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, an organization founded in London in 1853 with Queen Vitoria and Prince Albert as its patrons.

The works in these galleries are highlights from the V&A’s extraordinary broad photography collection. They include outstanding examples of a range of processes, from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital images. This display traces the history if photography through the lens of collecting. It not only shows photographs collected by individuals and institutions, but also explore how the act of photographing is a form of collecting in its own right.

                       

Yamamoto creates tiny prints of different subjects and sizes. He presents these as collections, either in collage-like arrangements or loosly gathered in boxes, as in this work. A sense of touch is important to Yamamoto – he sometimes carries photographs in his pocket to give them their timeworn appearance.

We went to V&A to see the photography exhibition. The collection showed the history of photography arose to the time it developed and now the trend of contemporary of photography.  

Helen suggested me to look at Yamatomo’s prints as the reference would be useful for experimenting printing in small scale works. I found that the size he created enables you to hold his small prints in hands to feel the print as an object. He even makes the size go extremely small to represent the value of happiness when people hold his works, people think of their precious memory they have experienced. The super tiny size probably not my ideal testing if I consider the proper size for image. It would lost some of details on my image so I need to make sure the size is small enough so that the content on image embodies perfectly.

Link:

https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/a0G96BPR/history-of-photography-from-daguerreotype-to-digital