A unique and irreplaceable visual record of twentieth-century Exeter has been secured for the South West Heritage Trust thanks to a £178,579 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. A project is underway to conserve, catalogue and digitise the collection - and to make it available online and directly across the region.
The Isca Photographic Collection Project will rescue and preserve 24,000 images depicting the city and its inhabitants during the first half of the twentieth century. The acetate negatives are suffering from vinegar syndrome; an irreversible chemical deterioration process that destroys the negative. The project to save the collection will digitise the images before they are lost forever, and make them available to researchers.
In the 1970s the Wykes archive was purchased by local photographer and historian Peter Thomas, who created the Isca Photographic Collection, supplementing Wykes’ work with other collections of local interest (including a photographic archive from the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital). Thomas added his own photographic work capturing Exeter’s story in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, notably 4,500 images recording the demolition and rebuilding of Exeter’s Princesshay Shopping Centre.
The full collection of almost 50,000 images is mainly comprised of the life’s work of the Australian-born photographer Henry Wykes (1874-1964). Wykes opened his first studio in Exeter in 1914, quickly establishing himself as the city’s foremost photographer, a status he held until his retirement in 1962, by which time he was Britain’s oldest working photographer. Wykes’ images chart the growth of the city in the 1920s and ‘30s and the wartime carnage wrought by the devasting ‘Baedeker’ raids. The collection is also a uniquely personal record of the residents of Exeter with thousands of images of individual and family portraits. Many hundreds of other images document local residents at work and play in shops, factories, at weddings, sporting and other social events. It captures the lives of inhabitants of the city whose stories have too often remain unexplored, including those of the residents of St Loye’s College and School of Occupational Therapy, who navigated physical disabilities and learning difficulties.
The project to catalogue the images and make them available online will be supported by a team of volunteers. There will be an exhibition at Custom House in Exeter and community events will take place. The images will be used for reminiscence sessions in residential homes and for work in schools to raise environmental awareness.
See more here: https://swheritage.org.uk/news/isca-collection-of-photographs-saved/
The role of Isca Project Officer is also be advertised (closes 3 March 2025). See her: https://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/job-isca-photographic-collection-project-officer-closes-3-march-2
Image: Workers at the Bodleys Foundry on Commercial Road, Exeter.
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