In partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum this doctoral project will combine scholarly research on Maurice Broomfield’s photographic archive with the exploration of digital media (both online and in-gallery) to conceptualise new ways of curating and interpreting institutional historic photographic archives in the digital realm. This project engages with emerging questions around the materiality of institutional photographic archives, their nature as collections and/or groups of individual ‘assets’, how they might be interpreted for audiences, and their capacity to converse with other cultural content/products in the digital realm, i.e. their ability to become connected.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Broomfield archive provides an ideal locus for this research, containing around 30,000 negatives of various formats, contact prints, press cuttings, exhibition prints and works order ledgers, documenting a pivotal period in post-war British industry from the 1950s to 1970s.
The successful candidate will have a large degree of freedom in developing her/his project, but it is envisaged that this PhD will undertake theoretical and empirical action research with a variety of stakeholders to (a) explore ways of engaging with historic photographic archives through digital media, while (b) posing questions around the curatorial and interpretive mechanisms that enable and/or challenge these new potentialities of engagement.
Media, Culture, Heritage PhD Studentship – Maurice Broomfield goes digital: curating and interpreting institutional photographic archives in the digital realm
See more and apply here: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/sources/ukeustudents/sac20.html
Comments
I remember well the name of Maurice Broomfield as it always seem to cross my paths without our meeting. We were both industrial photographers in the 60'd, 70's and 90's along with another famous name, that of Walter Nurnberg. The three of us were in competition with one another until I got to know Walter and started to shoot his colour shots for him as I used flash bulbs in those days and he only worked with tungsten lighting. I am glad to see that Maurice's work is not forgotten and will help up and coming students of photography in the future. John Jochimsen