Exploring the The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection at the RIBA

The RPS Historical Group continues its series of online talks about collections and archives of photography in the United Kingdom. The speaker is introduced by Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS, editor of the Historical Group's The PhotoHistorian.
Buildings and the built environment were among the first subjects the camera lens focused on when photography was in its infancy, and photography has since become the principal means of communicating architecture. Throughout its history, architectural photography has gone through many phases, influenced by cultural changes as well as different and often contrasting approaches in photography per se. All these phases provide us with an invaluable contribution to our understanding of architecture, of photography, of social history, and photographic archives are essential to facilitate study in this field. The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world, spanning the whole history of the medium and including most types of photographic processes. International in scope, its subjects include not only buildings but also townscape, landscape, social history, product design, portraits and more. This talk will provide an introduction to the Collection and to the many aspects of architectural photography.
Valeria Carullo is Photographs Curator at RIBA. Her principal area of research is the relationship between modern architecture and modern photography in the inter-war years. She has curated or co-curated several exhibitions, both in Britain and abroad, including Eternal City: Rome in the Photographs Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Vittoriano, Rome, 2018) and Rationalism on Set: Glamour and Modernity in 1930s Italian Cinema (Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 2018, and The Mac, Belfast, 2019). Valeria regularly writes and lectures on both architectural and photographic subjects, and in 2019 she published the book Moholy-Nagy in Britain 1935-1937. She is currently working on an exhibition on architecture and photojournalism in the late 1960s, which will open at the RIBA in September.
Image: © Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Collections / RIBA2760-20