The Victoria & Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum is the largest and most influential museum of decorative arts in the world.

Its 146 galleries reflect centuries of achievement in such varied fields as ceramics, sculpture, furniture, jewellery, metalwork, textiles and dress, from Britain, Europe and Asia. The inspiration behind museums of art and design the world over, it has an international reputation as a centre of excellence.

The magnificent building also contains the National Collections of furniture, sculpture, glass, ceramics, watercolours, and portrait miniatures, photography and houses the National Art Library.

The Collections constitute a unique international resource; some four million objects are held by the Museum, ranging from Constable paintings to Oriental ceramics, and include the finest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture outside Italy.

The Museum was founded in 1852 as a Museum of Manufactures, to motivate and educate British manufacturers and designers by building upon the fantastic success of the Great Exhibition of the previous year. In 1857 it moved from Marlborough House in the centre of London to the fields of Brompton, where it was renamed The Victoria and South Kensington Museum. In 1899 it was renamed The Victoria and Albert Museum in honour of the widowed Queen Victoria, who laid the foundation stone of the building in that year in what was to be her last public appearance.

As well as the main 11-acre site at South Kensington, the V&A also administers the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, the Wellington Museum at Apsley House and the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.

Photography has always been important to the V&A. It was the first museum to have a full time in-house Photographic Studio. The first photographer was Thurston Thompson and there has been a Photographic Studio from 1856 to the present day. A major advantage for the V&A is that all photographic records have been held centrally in the Picture Library. This is an almost unique occurrence in National museums. This continuous record illustrates the history of the museums objects, the history of photography and the development of museum photography.

The publishing policy of the V&A combines the academic and the popular and the contribution of extremely high quality photography both technically and creatively have contributed greatly to the success of its publications.
The V&A Photographic Studio has fifteen staff and the Picture Library seven staff working full time on image production and image management. During the last five years the V&A has digitised a large volume of its analogue photography. There are now 30,000 digital images held on its image database. These images can be searched by visitors and picture researchers in the Picture Library. The Photographic Studio has undertaken some digital image projects with its Phase One digital camera and is producing both rotational movies of objects and panoramic views of its galleries for its web site.

The V&A is a consortium member of the ARTISTE project the results of which it hopes will assist clients finding V&A images in a novel and efficient way. The V&A will extend its experiences in ARTISTE into ARCO. Approximately 2000 images of museum objects can be seen on its website www.vam.ac.uk. Extension of this website into 3D is a V&A goal in ARCO.

James Stevenson

James Stevenson is the Photographic Manager of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has responsibility for the management of all image creation within the museum and the exploitation of those images via the Picture Library. James Stevenson has been at the V&A for eight years where he has managed the change from a traditional analogue service to a modern where electronic cataloguing and image creation is becoming the norm. The V&A is a partner in the ARTISTE project, which it feels will give it an advantage in search techniques for its images. A direct result of his management is the growing emphasis on a more creative approach to museum imagery where the contribution of the photographer directly relates to the understanding of the object by their creative input. He is currently engaged on installing a colour management system for controlling all of the museums image creation.
James Stevenson was previously at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich as Chief Photographer. He has been employed as a photographer since 1974.