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The Bill Brandt exhibition is currently showing at the Victoria and Albert Museum

11 April 2012

The rise of photography in art has been astonishing over the past 25 years, with many artists and critics acknowledging the medium as the obvious successor to painting.

Gallery-goers too have taken to photography in a big way and museums and institutions now collect and exhibit more than ever before. Rather than worry about whether it is art or not, the question now seems to be: what is art without photography?

London's healthy commercial gallery scene first led the way with exhibitions. The interest filtered down to the small museum spaces, such as the Serpentine or the Whitechapel, reaching what, a few years ago, would have seemed an impossible peak, with last year's Summer of Photography, headlined by the Tate Modern's extensive Cruel and Tender survey show.

However, London still has a long way to go; it was not so long ago that Alan Bowness, a previous director of the Tate Gallery, declared: "You have to be an artist and not only a photographer to have your work in the Tate."

One of the only British photographers represented in Cruel and Tender, Martin Parr, was largely shunned in this country until recently, because of his unforgiving portrayal of " little" Britain's seedy seaside resorts and scenes of painfully tragic middleclass boredom.

"While New York has over 100 photography galleries and Paris has around 20, there are only five or so in London," says Parr. Of all the cultural capitals, he says, "London is by far the lowest in terms of pecking order when it comes to photography. Both New York and Paris have established national photography museums."

Parr has a retrospective opening in Hamburg next month and has been lured to France to curate the world's largest photography festival in Arles at the beginning of July.

There are now moves afoot to improve matters in London. This month, the city hosts its first international photography fair, photolondon, from 20-23 May at the Royal Academy's Burlington Gardens site.

The aim of this obvious successor to the specialist fair held in Bloomsbury's Bonnington Hotel for many years is to expand the scope of collecting here.

Photo-london will not be the sole preserve of the photography trade; heavyweight art dealers will be bringing work by cutting-edge artists, such as French-Albanian Anri Sala, current darling of the international scene, and Andreas Gursky, the German wunderkind whose computermanipulated landscapes have taken the art world, and the market, by storm.

The price range will start at £50 but increase exponentially for 19th century vintage photography, then go up a notch again for contemporary photosand reach the giddy heights of classic early 20th century pictures by innovators such as Man Ray that can now fetch £500,000.

London's art world has rallied around this event, adding a new annual London Photo Week to encompass the photography auctions and concurrent shows, such as Bill Brandt at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tina Modotti and Edward Weston exhibition that reopens the remodelled Barbican Gallery.

My fear is that this could be another short-lived love affair between London and photography.

Does anyone remember London's past attempts at a photography festival, the Shoreditch Foto Biennale, part of a nationwide year of celebration called Photo '98? Only those with a keen photographic memory will recall the Barbican's 150 Years of British Photography, and Picasso and Photography shows, or the Hayward's exhibitions of BrassaÃ¯, Cartier-Bresson and Julia Margaret Cameron.

What London desperately needs is not another annual or twice-yearly salute to the photograph, but a dedicated museum. The Photographer's Gallery, in the heart of the West End, has been one of the lone London mainstays since it was founded in 1971 as the first independent gallery in Britain devoted to the medium.

With around 475,000 visitors in 2003, the two tiny galleries in Newport Street have become restrictive but despite receiving a big Lottery grant, a new central London location is hard to find. One recent possibility, a capacious underground location, proved technically too demanding for the move.

While we wait for this expansion to fill the gap, London remains home to one of the top four international collections of photography, the National Collection of the Art of Photography, started by the V&A in 1856.

Unlike its rivals, the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Getty in Los Angeles, the V&A only opened a permanent photography gallery in 1998.

Even now, only a fraction of its 300,000 or more images can be displayed at the museum, for the rest, viewing is by appointment only. This only strengthens the need for more exposure and year-round commitment to photography.

A shadowy committee of the capital's cultural elite is secretly plotting to open a national museum dedicated solely to photography in London.

"There is a tremendous amount of interest in photography in this city - you had to book a week in advance to see Mario Testino at the National Portrait Gallery," says Danny Moynihan, chairman of photo-london and a member of the advisory board for the proposed museum.

The fact that Britain already has the National Museum of Photography Film & Television in Bradford, opened in 1983, does not deter Moynihan: "It has one of the greatest collections in the world, but no one goes to see it."

This is not strictly true, as the NMPFT claims around 725,000 visitors, making it one of the most visited attractions outside London. So if done properly, a London branch, or an independent national museum with similar content, could hope to match Tate Modern's five million annual attendance.

The plan for London's National Museum of Photography is to house semi-permanent displays from Bradford, as well as from the V&A or possibly Elton John's extensive collection, in a landmark building in central London.

London needs a museum with the guts and the remit to buy and display works such as the harsh images of war by photojournalist Luc Delahaye currently on display in Bradford.

Delahaye's 2001 shot of a dead Taliban soldier crumpled in a ditch is full of power, but becomes mere record if hidden away in a museum vault. Give it a proper framework and it will join the national heritage.

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