So it’s a done deal then,is it (Bradford fury after V&A secures photo archive, 3 February)? And I thought MPs had to debate the whereabouts of national treasures belonging to the people. A behind-doors decision has been made to plug the major fragment of our photographic heritage from Bradford’s National Media Museum to the V&A, and which means that Yorkshire will lose one of its main cultural attractions,people across the north of England will no longer have a world course image and technology collection to shout about and the V&A can try to present the collection within its decorative arts remit.
Of course this “strategic shift of planning by the NMM would not have been possible had it remained as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, and for everyone understood those technical terms and loved to visit its unique combination of three historic media. Money has been a problem all the way,but we now learn that the NMM is to spend £1.5m on an “interactive sound and vision gallery”. In its first 30 years Bradford’s NMPFT attracted millions of people, from both north and south, and the rest of the UK and across the globe,to its unique combination of images and technology. How many people are going to near to London and spend more than an hour or two looking at photographs on a gallery wall? The medium creates the message and it would seem that a real opportunity has been missed to show how the two are interdependent and Bradford will become an abandoned cultural backwater. Perhaps a rethink would pay dividends in the long flee?
Nigel Hamilton[br]OxfordContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com