This is an archive website listing and describing the projects that Val Williams has worked on since the 1970s. Drawing from materials held in the Val Williams Archive, now housed at the Library of Birmingham, and from other archives owned by individuals and organizations, it will narrate a story of development and change in the British cultural sector from the early 1970s onwards. It will be a story of people and event, as well as of photography, curatorship and writing, charting the beginnings of the emergence of British independent photography and curatorship, examining the ways in which projects were begun and developed, looking at a landscape which altered as tastes changed and cultural policies fluctuated.
A gathering at 6 Wimbolt Street, Bethnal Green in c 1993 to discuss the possibility of founding a new photo agency. Clockwise from Left: David Brittain (Creative Camera); Anna Fox (photographer); VW; Brigitte Lardinois (Barbican Art Gallery); Michael Collins (Telegraph Magazine). Paul Reas is reflected in the mirror. Photograph by Paul Reas, from his archive.
Val Williams is a writer and curator. Since 2005 she has been Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the University of the Arts London and Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) at the London College of Communication. She is a founder editor of the Journal of Photography & Culture and among projects which she has initiated or co-founded are Impressions Gallery of Photography (now Impressions) 1971-1981; the Shoreditch Biennale, 1996 & 1998; the Oral History of British Photography at the BL National Sound Archive (1992- 96); the Moose on the Loose Biennale of Research (2013&2015); the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (2003-) and the Journal of Photography & Culture (2008- ). She was the Curator of exhibitions and collections at the Hasselblad Centre, Goteborg from 1999-2002. She has written widely about photography across media, from journalism to academic texts, and has specialised in curatorship, in exploring British photography in the 20th and 21st centuries, in the history of women in photography, vernacular photography, war and conflict and the family.
From 2003, she has led the Photography & the Archive Research Centre at LCC, using the centre as a platform to enable and mentor research by a wide cross section of UAL academics and practice- based researchers and establishing PARC as a lovely and impactful presence in the UAL landscape and externally.
