Colin Ford obituary | Photography

Colin Ford, who has died aged 91, was an enthusiastic promoter of images in all its kinds. As the founding head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford (1982-93; renamed the National Science and Media Museum in 2017), he aimed to make the science and artwork of images and shifting pictures accessible to all.

From 1972 he had been the inaugural keeper of images and movie on the National Portrait Gallery in London, the primary such function at a nationwide museum. During his earlier seven years as deputy curator of the National Film Archive (now the BFI National Archive), he proposed that the NPG present movie portraits of distinguished British figures.

The gallery’s director, Roy Strong, replied that that they had not even tackled nonetheless images but, however have been decided to take action. (The one {photograph} within the NPG’s main assortment was a portrait of the Victorian cookbook author Mrs Beeton.)

Despite arriving on the NPG with none photographic expertise, inside weeks Colin gave an interview to Amateur Photographer advocating a devoted nationwide museum of images. Soon after, he led a marketing campaign to cease the Royal Academy from auctioning off three volumes of 1840s pictures by the pioneering Scottish duo David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, and secured £32,000 from an nameless donor to buy them for the NPG.

A subsequent exhibition attracted 23,000 guests and was accompanied by the guide An Early Victorian Album: The Hill/Adamson Collection (1974), co-authored with Strong. Film fell by the wayside, however Colin commissioned portraits of residing topics, together with the collection The Great British by the American photographer Arnold Newman.

In 1975, an album that the portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron assembled within the 1860s for the astronomer Sir John Herschel was bought at Sotheby’s to a US collector. Colin intervened to get the export licence stopped, the primary time that the designation of excellent cultural significance had been utilized to images.

A public enchantment raised £52,000 for its buy by the NPG; it later turned the primary set of pictures to be accessioned by the brand new nationwide museum. Among the Herschel Album’s astonishingly modern-looking portraits is that of a high-cheekboned man titled Iago – Study from an Italian, a novel print that was Colin’s favorite image by Cameron.

Dame Margaret Weston, director of the Science Museum, shared Colin’s imaginative and prescient for the brand new museum, and secured a space in Bradford for the aim. Audiences flocked to benefit from the first Imax cinema within the UK, shows of photographic know-how, exhibitions by internationally famend artists, and commissions together with giant Polaroids by Neal Slavin and collages by the Bradford native David Hockney. By 1988 it had attracted 3.5 million guests.

After 10 years in Bradford, Colin was recruited to direct the National Museums and Galleries of Wales. His portfolio initially included 10 establishments, which he finally consolidated into seven throughout his five-year tenure, till 1998. In 2025 he donated his library of 2000 images books to what’s now Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

The Herschel Album marketing campaign ignited Colin’s ardour for Cameron scholarship, which he shared with the general public in lectures, exhibitions and books, culminating in a listing raisonné in 2003. Co-authored with Julian Cox, with contributions by different students, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs is a hefty, 560-page quantity.

Colin resisted utilizing the phrase “complete” within the title and, certainly, dozens of beforehand unknown Cameron pictures got here to gentle as quickly because the guide was printed. His want that an up to date, digital model of {the catalogue} be produced was not fulfilled in his lifetime however stays an ambition amongst youthful historians of images.

Having spearheaded the marketing campaign to avoid wasting Dimbola, Cameron’s residence on the Isle of Wight, from destruction in 1993, Colin served as vice-president of the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust (2005-20). In 2024, his ninetieth birthday celebration was a theatrical studying of Cameron’s life, carried out on the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the place Colin’s archive, predominantly regarding Cameron, is now out there to researchers.

Born in Battersea, south-west London, Colin was the son of Hélène (nee Jones), an novice singer, and John Ford, {an electrical} engineer. He developed a love of music and efficiency, and his brother, Martyn, turned knowledgeable musician.

After attending Enfield grammar college and graduating in English (1955) from University College, Oxford, the place he acted in and directed pupil productions, he labored for Halas & Batchelor cartoon movies (1957-58), and managed the Kidderminster Playhouse (1958-60) and the Western Theatre Ballet (1960-62).

Then he spent two years as a visiting lecturer in English and drama at California State University at Long Beach and UCLA (1962-64), earlier than returning to Britain and becoming a member of the movie archive in 1965. He remained enthusiastic about classical music, opera and theatre all his life, and his aptitude for efficiency served him properly as a lecturer, broadcaster and humanities campaigner.

In 1979, Colin wrote {the catalogue} for the primary André Kertész exhibition in Britain. It was held on the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, then led by its founding director, Sue Grayson, who had Hungarian dad and mom and have become Colin’s second spouse in 1984.

He thought of Kertész one of many biggest photographers of all time, and went on to organise additional Hungarian exhibitions, together with Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography within the Twentieth Century on the Royal Academy (2011). Two years later he acquired the Hungarian Order of Merit.

In the Nineteen Eighties and 90s, Colin was an everyday presenter on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope and incessantly appeared on that community and Radio 3 as an arts commentator and interviewer. He was appointed CBE in 1993 and made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1999.

In 1961 he married Margaret Cordwell, they usually had two youngsters, Richard and Clare. The marriage resulted in divorce.

Sue Grayson Ford survives him, together with a son, Tom, the youngsters of his first marriage, Richard and Clare, his grandchildren, Esmé and Inigo, and Martyn.