Meet Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photography at the V&A

Q: Hi Martin, you’ve worked at the V&A since 1995 – how did your career at the museum begin, was photography always your passion?

A: As a teenager at art college, I enjoyed working in the darkroom, printing my great grandfather’s glass negatives. I then completed a degree in art history, English and psychology and an MA in museum studies and worked as a volunteer at museums in Liverpool.

I began working at the V&A as a Curatorial Assistant, moving between departments to help with storage and cataloguing behind the scenes. I started with furniture and then moved to photography in 1998, the year the V&A opened its first photography gallery. I learnt so much by looking at original prints in the collection, working as an apprentice with the curators and hanging exhibitions in the gallery.

Q: In your current position as Senior Curator of Photography, what would you say a typical day looks like? 

A: Curatorial work is hugely varied, which is what I like so much about it. On different days I can be meeting artists and collectors, answering enquiries, attending exhibition openings, sorting through archives, moving boxes in stores, giving talks, costing a digitization strategy, researching in the library, writing labels or texts for a book, putting together funding bids, working on future ideas for books, web content and exhibitions, supporting and managing colleagues, supervising PhD students, giving valuations for works going on loan or writing acquisition proposals. Currently, I’m part of a group looking at how sustainability issues impact curatorial work.

Q: What have been some of your greatest career highlights to date?

A: Seeing the completion of the beautiful new V&A Photography Centre after many years of planning. Overseeing the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society collection. Building the permanent collection with other significant bodies of work by some of the classic photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Brassaï, Bert Hardy, and Curtis Moffat.

The privilege of meeting and learning from so many great photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Goldblatt, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller and so many others, and helping support emerging artists. Forming the V&A Photographs Acquisition Group; patrons who purchase new works for the collection to keep it up to date. And working in this inspiring setting with so many knowledgeable and talented colleagues.

Q: Can you discuss the significance of photography as an art form, and how the V&A aims to showcase its importance?

A: Photography is a powerful and internationally accessible visual language that can be used in so many different ways, from simple information sharing to journalism, and as a means of creative expression.

While photographs are now easy to make and proliferate everywhere, the best photographers understand the subtlety of the medium and create works that inspire us to see the world around us afresh. The V&A showcases a very wide range of approaches to photography, showing its importance as a complex witness and interpreter of history and as a tool for artists.

Q: Could you explain the process behind selecting images for the permanent collections and how you curate displays in the Photography Centre?

A: The permanent collection is already filled with many great historic works, so the team of curators now looks to contemporary photographers and to how their work expresses current ideas, topics and debates. We look to redress imbalances, consider issues of equality, diversity and inclusion, and think about how new acquisitions might link visually, technically or conceptually to works from the past.

Since 2022, the V&A has employed the Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography. We discover work through art fairs, galleries, artists’ submissions, social media, reading widely and seeking recommendations from artists and colleagues. Each acquisition proposal requires a written justification outlining practicalities such as storage and conservation needs, and how we envisage the work being used for upcoming displays, research, and by other curators across the museum in future. 

In curating displays for the Photography Centre, the other curators and I always try to show original or ‘vintage’ prints, as well as other ways in which photography exists and is experienced: in the form of negatives, cameras, printed pages, albums, stereo imaging, projected images, ‘born digital’ works and artist installations. In the Photography Centre as a whole, we try to show a wide range of processes, techniques and conceptual approaches from the time of photography’s invention up to the present. 

Q: How does the V&A make photography accessible to diverse audiences, including those with varying levels of familiarity with the medium? 

A: The Photography Centre galleries show such a huge range of types of photography that hopefully chime with people from many different backgrounds. We have interactive works, such as stereo viewers and a walk-in camera obscura, displays explaining camera technologies, a browsing library space, a space for digital works and films about processes and techniques.

However, the Photography Centre is just one pillar of activity in photography at the V&A which also includes lectures and courses, touring exhibitions and loans, commissions and prizes, internships, fellowships, research and training. Ongoing digitization is crucial for unlocking further public and global access to the collection as a resource. We have future digitization plans that will facilitate preservation, research and enable new stories to be told, engaging audiences in the visual literacy and diverse cultures of photography.

Q: Can you share with us the unique journey of how the Curtis Moffat collections came to be a part of the V&A’s holdings?

A: Curtis Moffat (1887-1949) was an American artist who worked with Man Ray in Paris in the early 1920s before moving to London to set up his own portrait studio and fashionable design emporium in Fitzroy Square. In 1939, he travelled to visit his dying mother in America. War broke out and he decided to stay. His archive remained in Fitzroy Square, where it was bombed. Later, it was salvaged and placed in storage in the city.

Its journey to join the collections of the V&A began in the late 1970s, when my predecessors visited Moffat’s wife, Kathleen, who was willing to donate photographs to the museum. However, the acquisition policy at the time was to represent artists by a small group of important works rather than by collecting whole archives. The Moffat material was eventually decided against, and time passed by. Nearly thirty years later, in 2003, the thought of a donation was revived and finally and generously realised in 2007 by Curtis and Kathleen Moffat’s daughter, Penelope Smail.

Q: Do you have a personal favourite from the Curtis Moffat collection, if so could you tell us more about the photograph?

A: Moffat made a wide range of innovative works: abstract ‘photograms’, pioneering early colour still lifes, advertising images, studio society portraits, and personal snapshots. One of my personal favourites is the double portrait of Ms. Greville (about 1925). While little is known about the sitter, her clothing, jewellery and hairstyle epitomise the radical modernity and glamour of the ‘roaring twenties’ and the London society of ‘Bright Young Things’ which circled around Moffat’s studio.

Ms. Greville’s pose – her frontal gaze, both right way up and upside down – makes for an arresting pair of images. It appeared as the front and back cover of the book I edited, Curtis Moffat: Silver Society. Experimental Photography and Design, 1923-1935, which gathered for the first time an extensive set of images from Moffat’s archive and was published in 2016.