LomoAmigo: Susanna Brown

Susanna Brown is the Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She curated the exhibition “Horst: Photographer of Style” as well as recent V&A shows “Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography” and “Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton.” We lent her an LC-A+ to test out her own photography skills and asked her a few questions about this fascinating job.

Hello Susanna! Tell us about your role as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The museum is home to the UK’s National Collection of the Art of Photography, one of the most important collections in the world. The Collection is international in scope and unique in covering the history of photography as a fine and applied art. I’ve been Curator of Photographs since 2008 and the V&A is an incredible place to work. I’m part of the small curatorial team responsible for making new acquisitions, researching and planning displays for the permanent collection galleries, curating touring exhibitions and writing and teaching on photography and its histories. It’s a really varied role and each day is different from the last.

Where did your interest in curating start?

I grew up in London and loved visiting the V&A and the other museums in South Kensington. As a teenager, I learned more about the role of curators in preserving and interpreting artworks. The profession held particular appeal because it combines analytical and academic skills with intuition and creativity.

How do you approach these big projects to make sure an artist’s work is represented in the best possible way?

The V&A plans major exhibition several years in advance. We first started thinking about the exhibition “Horst: Photographer of Style” five or six years ago. In my research for project, I was allowed access to the Horst Estate and the extensive Condé Nast Archives in New York, London and Paris. The Paris Vogue archive contains his earliest black and white pictures, from the thirties, while New York houses thousands of later photographs and exquisite colour images. By reading many of the letters and telegrams Horst preserved throughout his life and talking to the people who were closest to him – his friends, assistants and favourite models – I was able to learn a great deal about his character and his approach to photography, the particular skills he employed to draw out the best out of his sitters. I wanted to tell the story of his whole career, bringing to light the lesser known images such as his stunning travel pictures and nature studies, as well as the famous fashion photographs.

The most recent show you curated was the Horst exhibition. What challenges did you face doing this?

When selecting photographs for the exhibition and book, one of the biggest challenges was editing down so much material – there are so many brilliant pictures and we simply don’t have space to show everything. Many of his colour pictures only exist as transparencies, which are difficult to display and many of them are discoloured and scratched. I worked closely with the expert team at the Condé Nast Archive in New York, and with a brilliant printer in Brooklyn, to create new colour prints from the original transparencies. There’s a film on the V&A website which documents that process and reveals more about Horst’s mastery of colour.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to pursue a career in curating?
Curators develop their expertise and knowledge throughout their careers and there’s no shortcut. Always remain curious, think beyond the confines of the museum and listen to artists.

If you weren’t a curator, what career path would be an alternative option?

It was my ambition to work in a museum for many years, but I studied three-dimensional design at art college before studying art history and might have become a jeweller or a designer.

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written by hannah_brown on 2015-01-26 #people #v-a #analogue-photography #photographer #uk #lomography-gallery-store #multiple-exposures #gallery-store #analogue-cameras #exhibitions #lomoamigo #eastlondon #35mm-films #120-films #londonsoho