Making Networks in British Photography in the 1970s and 80s: The Midland Group Gallery

This keynote paper explored the photography network created by Trent Polytechnic and the Midland Grouo Gallery in the 1970s. Midland Group Photography was founded in 1972 by the Gallery and a group of photographers based at Trent Polytechnic. According to Sylvia Cooper’s introduction to New Photography’, (an Open exhibition selected by the Biblioteque Nationale’s John Claude Lemagny and the writer and curator Aaron Scharf, circa 1975), the photography group (chaired by Bill Gaskins, then a leading figure at Trent Poly) had an ambitious plan to ‘organize and present a programme of exhibitions (one-man, foreign, thematic, experimental and occasionally historical) within the general framework of Midland Group policy. The closure of the Midland Group Gallery in 1987, as a result of funding cuts and management conflicts, cut short a photography initiative in the East Midlands which , as photography began to acquire prestige and value in the 1990s, could have been an important component in the development of the medium in the UK .