Curator: Negative Selection, Hidden Histories project, Beaford A

Beaford Arts is seeking an experienced freelance Curator to manage and deliver a key programme of negative image selection within a major new heritage project ‘Hidden Histories of rural north Devon: Opening up the Beaford Archive’.

The Beaford Archive is a photographic record of people and community in rural north Devon containing more than 80,000 images covering the 120-year period 1870 to 1990. According to the Royal Photographic Society, it is “…a unique body of work, unparalleled, at least in this country, for its scale and quality”. However, few of these images are currently accessible to the public.

Beaford Arts has secured funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to carry out a major conservation and digitisation exercise that will curate and publish online around 10,000 unseen images that together illustrate the late 20thCentury social history of rural north Devon.

Hidden Histories is a three-year project and will include:

Digitising, cataloguing, archiving and publishing to the web approximately 10,000 existing 35mm black and white negatives from the James Ravilious and Roger Deakins Beaford Archives
Production of a new fully searchable website to provide a showcase for existing digitised work, newly digitised images and audio, and new work as it is produced
A programme of oral history, learning and community activity which will create new work and engage people in learning and education
The Post

There are approaching 80,000 images across these two collections: we intend to digitise approximately 12.5% of each collection (9,200 Ravilious and 800 Deakins images). The Curator will be responsible for developing the selection criteria to enable choices to be made about which negatives to digitise; the final selection of images for digitisation will be made on a set of agreed criteria that will enable academic research, as well as supporting the community, cultural and heritage aspects of the project.

A fee of £7,000 is available for this role. This work will take approximately three-four months, with completion around the end of April 2017.
http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=31&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=728&cHash=29d5cb456af09554d10b8bb54d87a245