The new V&A center explores the key role photography plays in reflecting and shaping our world

In May in London Victoria and Albert Museum began the long-awaited second stage of its activity Center of Photography. It will probably be the largest everlasting exhibition of photography in the UK and will survey the past, present and way forward for the medium. Plans to rotate exhibitions across seven galleries reflect the V&A’s renewed commitment to photography.

The center has the character of a museum inside a museum and is clearly designed to cultivate debate, because it also houses a dedicated reading room and research room designed to explore the relationship between photography and the book as a publishing form. The center’s archives have been made available to researchers and the public.

Not only will the center change into the new home for the V&A’s extensive photography collection (which dates back to the nineteenth century), but it’s going to also go some strategy to cementing photography’s status as a number one type of expression in contemporary visual culture.

The new V&A acquisition will probably be just like one which has long been established in London Photographers Gallerycontribute to understanding the key role photography has played in reflecting on and shaping our world.

Quick trip

Leaving aside the pitfalls of categorization by genre, the opening rooms of “Photography 1840 – Now” present a more specific collection of images. Visitors are presented with juxtaposed images in a program of fixing themes, starting with Energy: Sparks from the collection.

The theme prompts visitors to meditate on the way the medium reflects the energy of the object in the painting. It also asks them to contemplate how images are manipulated through photochemical processes.

It will probably be interesting to see the extent to which this approach creates new insights into the diversity of paintings in the V&A collection. Moving through the darkened galleries with illuminated exhibitions, it becomes clear that these unique commissions and new acquisitions will change into a spot for developing knowledge of the medium – expanding notions of photographic practice by creating connections between historical and future techniques and processes.

The works chosen for one more theme, Photography Now, set a political agenda and reflect the pressing themes of our times: climate change, socio-political conflict, gender and identity, and the legacy of colonial history.

An example of an try and decolonize the canon is the work: Sammy Baloji. In his mirror prints, fragmented images of raw copper ore float above archival photographs of Congo’s colonial past.

The evocative images of “Speak the Wind” are also fascinating, Hody Afshar a mixture of poetic landscapes and human themes that try and make visible the invisible power of the mythical, malevolent wind often called “Zar”. These works expose the physical and cultural traces of the Arab slave trade from Africa to the Persian Gulf.

Elsewhere, the emphasis is on the fascination of many contemporary photographers with the medium itself. Many of the featured artists enter into dialogue with the past, adapting a few of the earliest techniques in revolutionary ways.

The performances Self-portraits by For Tarrah Countrywhich mixes the displayed images with cyanotype process. It is an early type of photographic printing using coated paper and light, later commonly often called blueprinting. Krajnak uses them to explore personal identity in relation to Peru’s traumatic political past.

Collotypes (nineteenth century graphic technique based on photography) by Anthony Cairns they constitute a “translation” of old and new, taking images of urban spaces frozen on now-defunct Kindle screens and then reproducing them on paper.

A positive thing is that a major variety of female photographers are represented at the Photography Center.

Vera Luther the radio telescope’s unique monochrome negative – inscribed directly onto light-sensitive paper through an extended exposure time using a big pinhole camera – is a reminder that photography is inextricably linked to time through actual processes (exposure times, developing, printing and soon).

The culmination of those rooms is a monumental sculptural photographic installation by Giant Phoenix VI Noémie Goudal. Her complex process explores deep time paleoclimatology, which reconstructs the atmosphere of ancient history. Goudal photographs trees, then inserts the scaled photographs back into the real world and rephotographs them.

The resulting images are then superimposed as fragments on tall metal panels which, when viewed from different positions, concurrently break up and transform the image plane, alluding to the fragility of the image and the subject it depicts.

An enormous undertaking

Photography is deeply entangled in our contemporary experiences, playing a key role in capturing and informing our understanding of the world. This implies that photography has many overlapping histories: as a technology of vision, a social document, and an aesthetic practice.

So how can we begin to choose apart and present these intertwined stories in a way that does not leave one overshadowed by the other? And how can we best present each photograph to stimulate pondering and motion beyond the confines of the gallery? It will probably be interesting to see how the V&A’s new Center for Photography deals with these challenges now that the gallery is open to the public.