Project description: Axis: a tale of two stories

This installation is based on a discovery made by me in the mid-1990s in the Victoria and Alberta Museum Picture Library of the existence of several hundred "lost" photographs by the British photography pioneer, Roger Fenton. Fenton, who was the world's first "official" museum photographer - hired by the British Museum in the early 1850s - didn't actually work at the V & A (then called the South Kensington Museum) but his negatives were transferred there and printed after his departure from the British Museum in 1859. It was an ill-fated attempt to centralize photography resources for London museums at the South Kensington Museum. The project was abandoned and Fenton's negatives were sent back to the British Museum, where they were trashed at the end of the 19th century.

The installation, Axis: a tale of two stories, addresses the interesting situation of Fenton's photographs at the V & A. In the institutional archives (the Picture Library) they functioned in their original form as museum documentation, while upstairs, in the collection of art photography, some of the