Terry Grimley meets Pete James, the award-winning head of photography at Birmingham’s Central Library.

Pete James spends much of his time hidden away in the back rooms of Birmingham’s Central Library, but this week he will be in London, collecting an international award from the Royal Photographic Society.

The Colin Ford Award, named after the pioneering photography curator and first director of the National Museum of Photography, is meant to recognise someone who has made a major contribution to photographic history.

In Pete James’s case, it celebrates the work he has done over 20 years in bringing Birmingham’s remarkable collections of photography to national and international attention.

“Needless to say I’m delighted because the award is named after someone for whom I have the greatest respect,” he says.

“But Colin has also been a great supporter of projects here, and it’s nice to get that degree of recognition from your peers.”

The library’s photographic collection was already magnificent before James arrived on the scene in the 1980s, but it was a sleeping giant waiting for someone to recognise it for what it really was.

Its scale is staggering, amounting to an estimated three million items spanning original prints, negatives, lantern slides, albums and books illustrated with original photographs, plus books and periodicals on photography.

It ranges from the mid-Victorian period to the present day, having been expanded by numerous commissions in recent years.

At its core is the Sir Benjamin Stone collection, comprising photographs taken and collected by the Victorian Birmingham MP who was a pioneer of documentary photography. Together with linked collections such as that covering the Warwickshire Photographic Survey, it helps give the collection its main focus on photography as a form of documentation.

“I think the reason they hadn’t picked up on this was that there wasn’t a photography specialist on the staff, but also because of the way the library had catalogued photographs by subject,” James says.

“Photographs were distributed over seven floors of the library, with books on photography split between the arts and science floors. A lot of the material acquired in the 19th century was acquired as illustrative material rather than for being photographic. It was only when the study of British photographic history really started to take off in the 1970s that people went back and started to reassess stuff that was in the collection.

“There was a period in the 1980s when my predecessor Phillip Allen, head of history and geography, went out and acquired the Francis Frith and Francis Bedford collections. But they were collected more because of their historical use than as photographic collections.”

James, now 51, arrived in the city from London in the mid-1980s to do an MA in the history of art and design at what was then Birmingham Polytechnic.

“I had always had an interest in photography, so I chose to do the history of photography as my specialist subject,” he recalls.

“When I lived in Harrow I used to work for Kodak in my student holidays, making up batches of film, and I had been to see the Kodak museum which is now in Bradford but was then in Harrow.

“Mike Hallett, who was my research supervisor, said I should come down and look at the library collections. I started looking at Benjamin Stone, William Jerome Harrison and record photography. I began tracing all the connections and realised there was a collection of national importance here.”

Birmingham may have sleepwalked into forming one of the country’s most important photographic archives, but why should it be more significant than what can be found in other libraries in major regional cities?

“Some other libraries have collections, but not on the scale we have them,” says James. “What I think is unique about Birmingham’s is you have such a vast range of contextual material. For example, we have 242 of Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War, but what we also have is a full set of the London Illustrated Times with the journalist W.H. Russell’s reports and charts which show all the battles. So rather than photographs in isolation, which is the case in most collections of photography, the contextual material gives a unique opportunity for people to engage in a different way.”

Another thread James began to unravel was Birmingham’s commercial involvement in photography. He argues that there is a photographic pre-history in Boulton and Watt’s mechanical paintings, and the experiments of the Lunar Society came close to the invention of photography decades before Louis Daguerre.

Later the city produced much of the hardware associated with photography. Recently he has been researching George Shaw, a patent agent and professor of chemistry at Queen’s College, who is believed to have taken the first photograph of Birmingham.

Shaw was typical of Birmingham, he argues, in being interested in both the aesthetic and commercial potential of photography.

“The only known collection of his work is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

“It was sold in the 1980s, and no-one here had recognised its importance at that time.

“I have just turned up a small family collection of his daguerrotypes in Devon, and it would be fantastic to put on a show of those in Birmingham with the photographs from Paris.”

In 1989, which happened to be the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography, James went to see the then city librarian, Pat Coleman, and asked whether she was aware of the importance of the collection. She wasn’t, but was sufficiently impressed to fund an initial part-time and subsequent full-time post for him to carry on his researches.

A lengthy series of exhibitions drawing on the collection was inaugurated with one dedicated to William Jerome Harrison, the Birmingham-based pioneer of the Warwickshire Photographic Survey, which was first shown in the foyer of the former Post & Mail building in Colmore Circus.

“I’ve been developing work around the collections here since 1989, and a landmark show for us was Coming to Light, an overview of the collection which we did in 1998.

“The British Library has only just opened its first exhibition from its photographic collections, so I like to think we have done some ground-breaking work which has encouraged other institutions to go down the same path.

“We’re getting a much better grip on the collection now, and a key is the work we are doing at the moment to bring it all together under one archive management system.”

The current Gas Hall exhibition Birmingham Seen, which puts painting and photography side by side on a scale never previously seen to show the changing face of the city over two centuries, is one benchmark of progress.But in a few years time there is the prospect of the move to the new Library of Birmingham, with improved storage facilities and a gallery similar in scale to the Waterhall where exhibitions can be shown.

“We will bring all the collections into one environmentally-controlled area,” says James. “The aim with the new building is to make the collections work for the library, the city and the region as a photographic history research and archive centre, to improve access so we can get more out on display.”

The new building project in itself will be documented, with Michael Collins and Andrew Lacon already commissioned to record the new building as it goes up in Centenary Square. Stuart Whipps, well known for his images of the deserted Longbridge factory, has been assigned to document the existing building before it is demolished.

And the collection continues to grow. In the storeroom, James shows me some of the latest acquisitions, including 36 prints from the 1980s by Brian Griffin, possibly the most internationally-admired living photographer from Birmingham. He has recently been commissioned to make a series of portraits linked to the Olympics, ranging from Lord Coe to apprentices working on the building site.

There are photographs by Daniel Meadows and Homer Sykes, both of whom were directly inspired by the rediscovery of Sir Benjamin Stone’s work when it was exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the 1970s. There are also four prints from the American photographer Paul Fusco’s series recording the crowds which turned out to witness the passing of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train in 1968.

The library was able to acquire these effectively at cost price in gratitude for its staging of the whole exhibition at Curzon Street Station in 2007, thought by Fusco to be the best presentation on its international tour.

“There’s a lot of support for what we do here, and a lot of photographers like to have their work in the collection and let us have it for knock-down prices,” says James. We also recently acquired work from Stuart Whipps’s work at Rover and photographs from Simon Roberts’s book We English, a study of how the English spend their leisure time. We’re trying to be more pro-active, but the more you acquire the more you want to get it out there so the public can see it.”

* Birmingham Seen is on view at the Gas Hall, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, until January 3.

* ‘A tribute to the archive’

The Colin Ford Award, created in 2003, is named after the photography historian who created the National Museum of Photography (now the National Museum of Media) in Bradford and was its first director.

Before that he was the keeper of photographs and film at the National Portrait Gallery, the first holder of a post dedicated to photography in a national museum.

Now retired, he was commissioned by Birmingham City Council to produce a report on its photography collection for the original Library of Birmingham project.

Emphasising that he plays no part in selecting recipients of the award named after him, Colin Ford said: “The general view is that you have a collection in Birmingham of national, not to say international, importance.

“Pete James has spent a very long time trying to get that recognised, and that’s why he’s been recognised by the Royal Photographic Society. The award is almost a tribute to the collection as much as to Pete, and I hope it will help to get it the recognition it deserves.”