In 1925, The Victoria and Albert Museum initiated ‘a new type of publication’: a series of sixpenny picture booklets devoted to various categories of museum object called, appropriately, ‘The Small Picture Books’. Between the first publication – on English Alabasters in 1925 – and 1938 there were 55 titles in all, selling in their hundreds of thousands. In a combination of excellent museum black and white photography and good rotogravure printing, these small books aimed to please and inform in equal measure.
In this talk, Professor Edwards will discuss the surprisingly contemporary-feeling aspirations for these modest books – communicating museum collections and enabling access to them. They were carried by the quality of their photography and their printing, as is so much museum publishing today. As material objects, from paper and typography to photographic printing, they were reflective of the museum’s ethos and its ways of connecting with its audiences. Professor Edwards will explore three themes that weave their way round these small books: questions of identity, especially a clear agenda for a national narrative of art and design; questions of scale and miniaturisation as an encapsulation of museum riches; and questions of consumption – the ways that these books were represented and used. At the heart were photography and printing that made objects legible.
This is the fourth lecture in the Richard Benson Lecture in the Reproduced Image series, hosted by Richard Ovenden OBE. A drinks reception will follow this event.
Speakers
Professor Elizabeth Edwards FBA is a visual and historical anthropologist. She is Professor Emerita of Photographic History, De Montfort University, has Honorary Professorships at University College London, and University of Durham and is Research Affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford. From 2016–22 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the V&A, London. Her recent books are The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination (2012), Photographs and the Practice of History (2022) and the co-edited What Photographs Do: the making and remaking of museum cultures (2022). She is currently finishing on a book on photographs and ambient historical imaginations – which includes many museum photographs.
Richard Ovenden OBE is Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of the University of Oxford Libraries, and is responsible for their strategic oversight. He holds these posts alongside his role as Head of Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM), University of Oxford. He has published widely on the history of collecting, the history of photography and on professional concerns of the library, archive, and information world.
2026 Richard Benson Lecture in the Reproduced Image. ‘A new type of publication’: photography, the museum and the educational souvenir
Professor Elizabeth Edwards FBA
29 October 2026 at 1700, followed by a drinks reception
Free, Bodleian Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Details and booking here
