Never join any club that would have you as a member......

I have never been a great 'joiner' of clubs or societies. In a way I subscribe to the old Groucho Marx wisecrack, "I would never join any club that would have me as a member". When I was getting very serious about my photography I was advised by someone who's opinion I respected, never to join a camera club, It was good advice. 

Julia Margaret Cameron, Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die!
Portrait of Mary Hillier, 1867, carbon print from copy negative.

Roger Fenton's photographic van

I should say that I am not averse to helping genuinely passionate young photographers. I have spent the last thirty five years teaching in various institutions and giving workshops and masterclasses around the country and the world. I like to think that I have helped many young (and older) people on their way to a professional career. I have also given many public lectures to institutions and art organisations around the world that have been well received and which I also found to be full of intelligent, interested and enthusiastic members. For some reason, photographic organisations are something else.

Julia Margaret Cameron, 'Freddy Gould', 1866

I'm not sure which ones are worse, the amateur ones or the so-called professional bodies. I vaguely knew two members of the 'Master Photographers Association'. One was a postman and the other a bus driver. I'm not quite sure what they were supposed to be 'masters' of. There is another body or institute I think but if it is still around it has dropped way off my radar. In a way these organisations don't do any great harm, the same cannot be said for others.

The Royal photographic Society has been around a long time. I suppose at one time in the dim and distant past it had some credibility. Many prominent Victorian photographers helped form the society and then entrusted and donated their work to it, so it became the repository for much of the best work of the era. Roger Fenton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Francis Bedford, Lewis Carrol, Edweard Muybridge, Frederick Evans, etc. etc. etc. In reality, a huge chunk of our photographic heritage and legacy.

Edweard Muybridge, Motion Study

Sadly, for many years this was buried in the damp cellars of their London premises, un-catalogued, not conserved, out of sight and out of bounds to all but a few within the society. They treated the archive as their own personal property, not as an important national treasure and refused access to even the most distinguished photographic historians and academics. A number of so-called photography historians built  false reputations by using this archive but then refused access to others outside the society so their writings would never be peer reviewed and critiqued with reference to the primary sources. Open access since has thankfully demolished much of the credibility of their writings. It was a restriction of academic freedom not to allow access to distinguished non-member academics and the physical destruction of a unique collection.  A double tragedy. The reality was that a huge part of the collection, not just individual prints but whole albums were, with no conservation programme in place, quite literally, rotting away in the cellars. 

Frederick Evans, Wells Cathedral

We will never know what has been lost as they consistently refused access and the priceless collection was never properly catalogued. We can only speculate but needless to say they are irreplaceable. 

To say that this was a national scandal would be to understate the case. Imagine the outcry if it became known that, say, the National Gallery had allowed their collection of Turners, Constables, Reynolds and Gainsboroughs etc. to rot in a damp storeroom? What the RPS did to their collection was the photographic equivalent of this. 

When they moved to their ludicrous and ridiculously overblown premises in Bath and asked for financial aid, this was rightly refused until they handed over the soggy remnants of this fine collection. Most of what remains was transferred to the National Media Museum, Bradford, where it was conserved and catalogued but most importantly, freely accessible to all. It has now been transferred again to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The RPS has no role at all now except to attempt to sell its utterly worthless, so-called 'distinctions' to gullible members of camera clubs.