The Brontë Suite (ongoing)
In the early 1980s, I started building up a collection of photographs of things directly or indirectly connected with the Brontë family. The pictures are in both colour and black and white, shot on different cameras, using a variety of pictorial strategies.
The one rule is that the photograph must contain the word ‘Brontë’.
By the end of the decade, the collection was big enough to be exhibited and it was shown in three venues in 1988-9: Watershed, Bristol; Impressions Gallery, York and the Ffotogallery, Cardiff.
Since then, the project has been slowly and steadily added to, as and when I have come across examples. Throughout this period, I have also undertaken research into the history of the representation of the Brontës and their landscape, particularly in photography.
In 1996, I put my research together with these photographs into a book dummy. Publication proved not to be possible at that time, but, in 2006, a copy of the dummy was acquired by the Insight Research Centre at the National Media Museum in Bradford.
The Brontë Suite has, by now become a sort of ‘archive’ and I hope that, at some point in the future, it might see the light of day again in an updated form.
