somewhat personal
December 13, 2023
🍋 Making lemonade series: the Alan Bartram Collection
That this year was challenging is an understatement. But I don’t want to go into details now. I want to do the opposite exercise, one where I focus only on the good times. An exercise where I take the lemons and make lemonade. A sweet, stingy, fresh lemonade. Let’s take this as an uncompromised, uncommitted, no-chronological, sometimes happy, sometimes painful, lemonade advent calendar.
Alan Bartram Collection
This year, I was lucky enough to work for a few months at the Museum & Study Collection at Central Saint Martins, cataloguing Alan Bartram’s photographs.
In the 1970s and 80s Alan Bartram (1932–2013, British graphic designer and writer) regularly toured the British Isles and Europe on his bicycle. On these slow travels, nothing escaped Bartram’s sharp eye for lettering, from the monumental to the mundane. Through his camera lens, he preserved a slice of history that speaks to lettering craftsmanship of a bygone era. His insights and images formed the basis for a series of publications on lettering, starting with Lettering in Architecture (1975).
In 2002, Bartram donated his photographic collection to the Central Lettering Record — at Central Saint Martins. The Alan Bartram Collection comprises 33 boxes containing around 2,000 photographs and films.
The cataloguing work followed Catherine Dixon’s descriptive model. It was about describing the lettering on the image rather than just using a classification. The result is online, in the UAL digital catalogue, but the photos have not been digitalised yet. That will happen in 2024. In the meantime, these are some images of going through the boxes, organising the photographs by location, and finally describing them.
