Nearly 6,000 black and white negatives of Piper’s photographs celebrating Britain’s countryside and architectural heritage have been published online from the Tate Archive, spanning 50 years from the 1930s to the 1980s.
The collection brings to light an important yet lesser-known area of Piper’s work and while many places depicted were documented by Piper when Tate acquired the collection in the 1980s, locations in nearly 1,000 photographs remain to be identified.
The new items are published as part of the Archives and Access project, supported by a HLF grant of £2 million.
John Piper’s unpublished photographs of Britain have been made available on Tate’s website in the hope that many unidentified snaps can be properly catalogued.
John Piper originally began taking the photographs when he worked with John Betjeman on the Shell County Guides, capturing shots of ruined abbeys, churches, old shop fronts and country inns, often fascinated by remote or forgotten places.
For further information on John Piper’s photographs, visit www.tate.org.uk/johnpiper. And email [email protected] with details of unidentified locations in John Piper’s photographs referencing the Tate Gallery Archive number for each image.
Tate Archive Digitisation
This is the final stage of the digitisation process with the publication of collections relating to a further 25 artists throughout 2015 including:
Robert Adams, Conrad Atkinson, John Banting, Stuart Brisley, Edward Burra, L.S. Lowry, Eileen Mayo,F.E. McWilliam, Bernard Meninsky, Henry Moore, Ronald Moody, Cedric Morris, John Nash, Paul Neagu, John Piper, Donald Rodney, William Rothenstein, Kurt Schwitters, Stanley Spencer, Stanhope Alexander Forbes, Julian Trevelyan and Aubrey Williams.
