If a picture speaks a thousand words, then what would the movement of a quarter of a million photos from Bradford for London say? Enough, surely, to cancel out any amount of waffle about a northern powerhouse. That, in essence, is the argument of Bradford-born David Hockney and the 82 other cultural luminaries who together wrote to the Guardian to complain about the prospective plundering of the Royal Photographic Society collection from the National Media Museum in West Yorkshire, to pave the way for a new photography centre at the V&A, a large museum in a capital city which already creaks with more exhibitions and other attractions than any other corner of the UK. Yes, there are questions about the use – or rather the lack of it – that the NMM has recently made of the breathtaking RPS collection, which starts with founding fathers of the form, such as Talbot, and traces a path to such instantly recognisable modern classics as Steve McCurry’s Afghan girl, taking in pioneering war photography from 1850s Crimea, the introduction of colour and much more along the way. But then the NMM has long been squeezed, and has at times been threatened with closure. It has suffered, too, from the loss of its original SLR-like focus on the art and science of photography. The need now is to restore that clarity, and to do so in the north.
