Research by Students and Other Users

The Josephy Slide Collection

My name is Molly and I am a current student at DMU on the Photographic History MA, volunteering here at the archive! I wanted to become a volunteer as the Archive is currently undertaking a project to catalogue the V&A National Arts Slide Library (NASL) which came to the university in the early ’90s. The NASL was a slide lending service that began in 1898 in which people applied to borrow slides. Magic Lantern slides and later, 35mm positive colour slides would usually be taken out to illustrate teaching and lectures. The collection, although made up of many different kinds of slides, mainly depicted items of Art History and items at the V&A.

When I first came across this collection, I had been asked to choose a box of slides to catalogue and had to choose wisely; I was going to be working on these for a while so was best to choose something interesting otherwise I would get bored! I chose a box of ‘aesthetically pleasing’ images but the more I studied them, the more I found them strange. They were… ordinary and appeared to be holiday photographs. What were a bunch of tourist photos doing in a NASL?

I later came across the acquisition file for these pictures when rummaging through the NASL documents, looking for materials to work from for an essay. They revealed where they came from, who made them and how they ended up here. The box was part of a much larger slide collection donated to the V&A in 1987 by Miss M H Borman, the executor of the estate of Miss F.L Josephy. Frances Josephy or ‘Jo’ Josephy was a liberal party activist, the British representative in the European Union of Federalists and a keen amateur photographer. The collection boasts approximately 3,400 slides and documents Josephy’s travels over a span of twenty years (from 1956-1976) over 20 different countries.

The range of images produced by Josephy portrayed many places that had not been represented in the NASL, thus the donation was accepted and placed into the library. It is unsure whether or not these images were ever used by the public but since its revaluation and rediscovery in the DMU Archive and Special collections, we have begun to piece together the story and author of the images.