robert elwall and the riba photographs

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This article was downloaded by: [University College London]On: 20 May 2013, At: 02:42Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

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Robert Elwall and the RIBA PhotographsCollectionAlan Powersa School of Architecture and Construction, University of Greenwich,London, UKPublished online: 12 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Alan Powers (2012): Robert Elwall and the RIBA Photographs Collection, The Journal of Architecture, 17:5, 667-669

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/13602365.2012.724851

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Robert Elwall and the RIBA

Photographs Collection

It is hard now to imagine how neglected photo-graphs were among the collections of the RIBA inthe late 1970s when Robert Elwall, a history gradu-ate from Oxford, was a young member of the librarystaff. In the process of helping the then Librarian,David Dean, to assemble material for an exhibitionon the 1930s, a small room was discovered at 66,Portland Place with four or ve ling cabinets con-taining images left over from pre-war exhibition dis-plays (such as the International Architecture showfor the opening of the new building in 1934) andfrom the RIBA Press Ofce. This was the core ofwhat is now one of the nest archives of photo-graphs of its kind, whose acquisition was Robertsoutstanding achievement.

The collection was built up almost entirely fromgifts, sometimes from architects who came in tomake enquiries, and then increasingly by trackingdown the working archives of photographers,beginning with John Maltby, whose completearchive was acquired with a grant. Henk Snoek, amajor gure of the 1950s and 1960s, followed,

with the three Westwoods and Eric de Mare ,whose work is now divided between the RIBA,English Heritage and the Architectural Association.A dening gift came from the Architectural Press,including the glass negatives of Dell & Wainwrightand a mass of other material acquired as aworking photographic library for two magazines.One of the later accessions was the archive ofEdwin Smith, given by his widow, the writer Olive

Cook whom Robert approached at a book launch,fearing she had already promised the negativesand prints (whose use she administered over manyyears) to the V&A. If so, she changed her mind,and Robert repaid the kindness with exhibitionsand a ne book, Evocations of Place : the photographs of Edwin Smith (London, Merrell, 2007).

After a certain amount of pulling from bothsides, he got the photographs that were at onetime led among drawings at the RIBA DrawingsCollection, and resisted moving his collection toSouth Kensington, arguing that the materialneeded the proximity of the printed pages ofbooks and journals for identication and research.

With no regular purchase funds, the collectionstrategy, such as it was, depended on a snowballeffect, leading to more substantial gifts, and itworked. Thecoveragenaturallyfocused on Britishsub- jectsand photographers, butneverinanexclusiveway.

The collection is distinctive in that museums,including the V&A, regard prints as the collectibleitem, while the National Monuments Record at

English Heritage in Swindon is more focused onnegatives. The RIBA values both equally, and hasalso collected a number of colour slides. These arehoused in a specially conditioned storage space inthe basement at Portland Place that allows for rela-tively speedy access and is admired as an exemplarby other curators.

For anyone coming with an enquiry, it alwaysseemed as if the whole collection was led in

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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 17 Number 5

# 2012 The Journal of Archi tecture 1360-2365 http:/ /dx.doi .org/10.1080/13602365.2012.724851


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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 17 Number 5

robert elwall and the riba photographs

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