Drawn by Light: The Royal Photographic Society Collection – Science Museum

Drawn By Light is an exhibition at the Science Museum‘s Media Space encompassing the collection of the Royal Photographic Society. It focuses chiefly on early photography, the invention of which was publicly announced in 1839, but also includes some later works of significance.

The Great Exhibition, coming soon after the invention of photography, acted as a catalyst for the formation of the Royal Photographic Society owing to the increasing popularity of the new medium. The inaugural meeting was held on 20 January 1853, with Sir Charles Eastlake as the chair and Roger Fenton as the honorary secretary. One of my favourite pictures in the exhibition is of members of the RPS Club on an outing to Hampton Court in 1856, looking dapper in suits and top hats. The Society began to collect photographs in 1892, and has gathered donations from the time as well as earlier periods and later works, including Steve McCurry’s iconic 1985 Afghan Girl, an image which has been in the news again recently.

The works are unusual, often experimental: this was a new medium, after all, and pioneers were still working out how best to use it. Abstract images sit alongside human expressions: the pictures of the inmates of Surrey County Asylum in the 1850s, taken by Hugh Welch Diamond, are fascinating, while Erna Lendvai-Dirksen’s images of blond-haired, blue-eyed children in 1930s Germany have sinister overtones considering the rise of Nazism. The poster image, a red-cloaked, windswept girl on a beach, was, extraordinarily, taken in 1913, by Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman. Very early photographic images from the early nineteenth century are included, as are beautiful images of familiar and exotic places. This is one exhibition for which I certainly want to buy the accompanying book.

The exhibition has now closed at the Science Museum but is moving to the National Media Museum in Bradford, where it can be viewed between the 20th of March and the 21st of June.