Photograph Collections
The Pitt Rivers Museum has collected photographs as an intentional policy
ever since its foundation, with its first curators often going to great lengths
to procure images of native peoples and cultural activities in order to provide
context to the artefacts on display. This collecting activity continued strongly
ever since, and in the 1980s lead to the establishment of a distinct curatorial
department within the Museum.
Portrait of a Plains Omaha boy called Iga-she
(Traveller), 13 years old. Taken in Paris at Le Jardin
d'Acclimatation, for Prince Roland Bonaparte, 1883.
PRM 1945.5.95.17.2
Particularly strong in nineteenth– and early twentieth–century photography, the collections also contain important fieldwork archives of professional anthropologists, such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, as well as the photography of travellers such as Sir Wilfred Thesiger, whose collection alone numbers some 38,000 images.
As a department of the University of Oxford, staff also contribute teaching to the University’s postgraduate degrees in Visual Anthropology and Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. Both of these degrees draw upon the Museum’s photograph collections in their teaching, and a number of students have gone on to conduct further research on the collections.
The Museum’s distinctive material culture approach to photography has led to a number of highly successful research projects in recent years, two of which, focusing upon the Southern Sudan and Tibetan collections, were recognised by their funding body the Arts and Humanities Research Council as of ‘outstanding’ quality.
The department curates two temporary exhibition spaces within the Museum,
the Long Gallery on the ground floor (mostly contemporary photography), and
an archive display case at the entrance to the Lower Gallery for small exhibitions
of historical material.
Entry of the Sudan People's Liberation Army in Juba,
December 2005. Photograph by Leben Moro. 35mm
film negative, donated December 2007.
PRM 2007.137.58
Research enquiries
The department strongly encourages potential researchers to consult the Museum’s online database for photograph collections before making a research enquiry or appointment to view material. Further enquiries and requests for a research appointment should be addressed to the Head of Photograph Collections (Dr Chris Morton) via ms-photo.colls@prm.ox.ac.uk
Reproductions and licenses
For information about obtaining reproductions of photographs from the Museum’s collection, and licenses to reproduce, please visit http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/researchservices.html
