One sunny morning in February I took the London Underground to Pimlico Station, avoiding the commuters at a relaxed 11 a.m., and saw the signs the underground gave me for my destination. “Tate Britain,” the white font and yellow arrow implored me to follow. A short hop across a busy road, through picturesque Victorian London streets, and past the Chelsea College of Art campus, and suddenly I was there.
Pimlico London Underground sign with Tate Britain arrow. Unless otherwise noted, photos are provided by the author.
Reaching out from London’s quiet Millbank area towards the River Thames sits one of the largest museums in the U.K. Designed by architect Sidney Smith and built on the site of the former Millbank prison, the National Gallery of British Art opened in 1897 before officially becoming the Tate Gallery in 1932 (after its founder, Sir Henry Tate), and then the Tate Britain in 2000.
Front entrance of the Tate Britain.
The Tate Britain welcomes over half a million visitors a year, making it the 48th most visited art museum in the world.1 Its collection presents British art from 1500 to today, including works by the Pre-Raphaelites,2The Bloomsbury Group first met in 1905, and continued to meet for the next thirty years in Bloomsbury, an area of central London where many of them lived. They were known first and foremost for their liberal and bourgeois lifestyles, and secondarily for the art and writing they produced. Members included writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, art historian Roger Fry, and economist John Maynard Keynes.
It was my first time visiting the Tate Archive. I work as an art historian, primarily focused on the works of women and queer photographers. It is my research into Barbara Ker-Seymer that brought me to the Tate Archive. Born in 1905, Ker-Seymer was a 1920-30s photographer with a studio on Grafton Street, London. Her photographs were published in Harper’s Bazaar, Tatler, and The Sketch. Ker-Seymer took photographs of the aristocratic partying group The Bright Young Things, producing many posed and candid images that encapsulated the attitudes and atmosphere of the social elite in the interwar years. There are 126 Ker-Seymer records in the Tate Archive; a combination of photographs, albums, letters, and diaries. Although the photographs I was interested in had been digitized and were available in the Tate Archive’s online database, I knew there was more to be gleaned from an in-person visit.
I arrived at the museum and checked my bag into the free cloakroom, and from there made my way to the library, within which the archive viewing room is housed. A couple of people were working in the library, a fairly spacious single room with books lining the walls and large desks. On the other side of the room was a door I had been instructed to knock on. Feeling like I was about to enter a secret society, I knocked tentatively, the door clicked open, and I entered the archive viewing room.
Tables and computers ready for researchers in the Tate library space.
Behind the desk of the archives room was Archive Curator Peter Eaves, who helped me greatly during my visit. He already had the records I requested online prior to visiting, and I was able to take them one by one to view. He encouraged me to think of any additional items I might like to see while there, as they could also be collected for me that day. There were many negatives to examine, which are the processed film from the camera before it has been printed into a full image. When only one photograph is chosen to be printed, a batch of negatives can reveal the many different takes and photographs that were originally taken, and are therefore a source of many additional images. Negatives invert the light and dark on the film and are on a transparent plastic, meaning they need to be viewed with a light source coming from behind. This gives an interesting different quality to photographs, forcing us to look closely at an image and notice differences in the inverted light and dark. A lightbox was set up for me to view the negatives I had reserved. A lightbox is a flat surface with bright, diffused light coming out of it, which you can lay photographic negatives on to see the image they contain. I laid out the small, fragile pictures, peering into the worlds they revealed.
Negatives on lightbox. Three photographs of Nancy Cunard taken by Barbara Ker-Seymer, 1929.
Art history research can occasionally fall into the trap of viewing everything through a digital screen. Many photographs are digitized, so why not view them online? Visiting archives is a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with physical objects, and remember that artworks are artifacts too. Not only do photograph sizes, paper textures, and coloring become obscured online, but the residues of an object’s life can be omitted in “pristine” versions of images online. I know this only too well, as when I scan vintage photographs to share online the coloring is often slightly different to the original, and do I share the backs of images in my work? Rarely.
Being able to handle Ker-Seymer’s prints and negatives gave me fresh insights into her working approach. Perhaps one of the most valuable areas were the backs of the photographs, where hand-written annotations (often over multiple instances, as shown by the different pens and pencils being used) not only provided information on sitters, dates, and printing decisions, but also revealed the editing that took place in the photographic process. It is always jolting to turn over an image you are completely familiar with, and find fine scrawled pencil on the back by the photographer, shining a new light on the photograph you thought you understood. An example is the photograph below of out-lesbian, socialite, and sitter for Ker-Seymer, Nancy Morris.3 This photo can be viewed on the Tate website, but the back of the photograph has not been made digitally available. Viewing the back in-person revealed the editing notes: “ONLY remove line from nose to mouth. Lighten a little under the eye. NOTHING ELSE.” Photograph manipulation and retouching can be traced back to the mid-1800s (with slightly differing dates depending on your definition), and so it is no surprise that Ker-Seymer also partook in retouching her work, but it is heartening to see so little editing made to such an androgynous portrait. Ker-Seymer evidently wished to show Nancy Morris as she was, not trying to reduce or highlight her masculine or feminine qualities, but instead leaving Morris’ profile to speak authentically for itself.
“Nancy Morris” by Barbara Ker-Seymer, 1930. Photo provided by the Tate Britain.
I’m looking forward to introducing Ker-Seymer’s work on Sisters of the Lens, an ongoing project dedicated to raising the profile of women photographers. As one of the contributors, I research and write on different women photographers active from 1850-1960, and share short biographies on their work and sitters on the @sistersofthelens Instagram account.
The back of the Nancy Morris photograph by Barbara Ker-Seymer, 1930, with hand-written annotations. Photo provided by the Tate Britain.
Tate Britain’s prime location on the River Thames gave my trip to the archive a sense of occasion. Once finished, I walked along the river towards Westminster, about twenty minutes away. The route took me over the Thames beaches where mudlarks (river scavengers) search for remnants of the past millennia of London, and through Victoria Tower Gardens, a park sitting to the side of the Palace of Westminster. Although I live and work in London, it is rare to see the “touristy” spots as a non-tourist. It was nice to be reminded of the fact that I really do live in this city, seeing the familiar London Eye and Big Ben before I took the Underground to my next destination.
Walking along the Thames.
Contingent Magazine is grateful for the assistance and guidance of Tate Britain in the development of this field trip. We particularly thank Louise Burley, Picture Library Executive at Tate Images, for the acquisition of two high-resolution images.
- José da Silva, “Visitor Figures 2021: the 100 most popular art museums in the world—but is Covid still taking its toll?” The Art Newspaper, March 28, 2022.
- The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of 19th century English artists who rejected the aggrandizement of the Renaissance painter Raphael among their contemporaries, and, as their name suggests, sought to create work that was ‘pre-Raphael’. They painted works which drew on nature, poetry, and myth, producing highly realistic and detailed compositions. Famous Pre-Raphaelite works on display at the Tate include Ophelia (1851–52) by Sir John Evertt Millais and The Lady of Shalott (1888) by John William Waterhouse. J. M. W. Turner, and two rooms dedicated to the sculpture of Henry Moore. I, however, was not there for its masterpieces on display. Instead I was there for what sits behind the countless displays: the Tate Archive. For every piece on display, there are thousands of works, papers, audio files, photographs and cuttings produced by artists or relating to the production of art quietly whispering in the archive. Some of the most popular collections in the archive are the papers of art historian Kenneth Clark, leading member of the BLK art group Donald Rodney, and surrealist artist Ithell Colquhon. There are also several collections relating to the Bloomsbury Group, an early 20th century group of artists, writers, and intellectuals.
- Francesca Wade, “A Collar, A Tie and an Eton Crop: Who Was Nancy Morris?” Frieze, Jan. 14, 2020.
