Join Anne McNeill, Director of Impressions Gallery, and Dr Pippa Oldfield in conversation for a special event hosted online by the Royal Photographic Society. Anne is the recent recipient of the RPS award for curatorship.
Anne McNeill, in a career spanning over three decades, has played a pivotal role in British photography as curator, editor and writer. She began her career in 1984 in the darkrooms at Camerawork (London) and worked throughout the 1980s as both a photographer and educator in the field of community photography. In 1993 she joined the Cross Channel Photographic Mission leading the organisation through a period of change and establishing it as Photoworks (Brighton) in 1995, where she was the founding Director and curator. During this time Anne was also an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts.
Anne was the Artistic Director of Photo98, the UK Year of Photography. Since 2000, Anne has been the Director and curator of Impressions Gallery. She was the driving force behind relocating Impressions from York to Bradford, opening the first ever purpose built photography gallery in the UK in 2007. Anne’s most recent curatorial project In Which Language Do We Dream? (2021) considers the power of authentic representation from the photographic perspective of a Syrian refugee family.
Dr Pippa Oldfield is a curator, photo-historian and Senior Lecturer in Photography at MIMA School of Arts and Creative Industries, Teesside University. She is particularly interested in the ways in which photography intersects with gender, conflict, politics and history. Pippa began her career at The Print Sales Room at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, where she curated her first exhibition, Lee Miller: A Life Less Ordinary (2000). Since joining Impressions Gallery, Bradford, in 2003, Pippa has curated numerous national touring exhibitions including No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War (2017), Melanie Friend: The Home Front (2013), and Bringing the War Home (2010).
In her former role as Head of Programmes at Impressions, Pippa worked with many contemporary photographers and artists, including Chloe Dewe Mathews, Broomberg & Chanarin, Edmund Clark, Oscar Muñoz, Farhad Ahrarnia, Zed Nelson HonFRPS, Lisa Barnard, Fiona Crisp, Juan-Pablo Echeverri, Stefan Ruiz, Paul Floyd Blake and Tessa Bunney. Her writing has been featured in numerous books and catalogues published by Dewi Lewis, Rose Issa Projects, and MuseumsEtc among others, as well as in journals including History of Photography and Source. Her monograph Photography and War, published by Reaktion (2019), is described as ‘essential reading’ by Sophie Wright, former Global Cultural Director at Magnum Photos.
The conversation will last for around 45 minutes and will be followed by an opportunity for questions.
Free, booking required, visit RPS website to book tickets.
Image: © Carolyn Mendelsohn. Portrait of Anne McNeill, 2022.
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In conversation: Anne McNeill and Dr Pippa Oldfield. Runtime 1 hour.
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