Museums And Archives

Beaford Archive: The Lost Decades

The project will cement the Beaford archive’s position as the ‘go-to’ photographic archive of rural communities in SW England. It will fill a 30-year gap in its scope, completing the story of rural North Devon between the emergence of camera technology and the present day, while putting in place a framework for contemporary collecting. The project will reinforce relevance, accessibility and sustainability, ensuring the archive's continuation as ‘an unrivalled artistic and historical resource for the people of North Devon and beyond, now and in the future’ (Business Plan). It will create a legacy of personal photographs and memories of those who lived and worked in rural North Devon between WWII and the UK joining the European Communities, catalogued to national standards, tracking the rise of photography as a popular medium. It will place the archive on robust technical foundations, creating an open, accessible archive on a single online platform.