Professor Val Williams

Biography

Val Williams is a curator and writer based in London and is Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the University of the Arts London, founder Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (2003-2018) and of the Moose on the Loose Biennale of Research (2009-2016). She is also an editor of the Journal of Photography & Culture and member of the Board of Fast Forward, Women in Photography, and co- convener of its biannual conference. She teaches on the MA Photography course at London College of Communication.

Val was the founder director of Impressions Gallery of Photography in York in the early 1970s, established and co- directed two series of the Shoreditch Photo Biennale with Anna Fox in the 1990s and began the Oral History of British Photography with the British Library National Sound Archive. She was curator at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg from 1998 to 2001. Val's personal research revolves around photography with particular interests in women and photography and British Photography, especially post -1950s. She is also the author of Anna Fox Photographs - a mid career retrospective of the work of Anna Fox, published by Photoworks in 2007, of Daniel Meadows : Early Photographs (Photoworks, 2011) and of Martin Parr (Phaidon 2002). She curated the exhibition and conference at the University of Sussex: Hidden Photographic Archives from the 1970s (October 2005) and received AHRC Funding for The New British Photography 1967-1981 and ROAD: Artists and the Stop the M11 Link Road Campaign. In 2005 she was joint curator of Magnum Ireland for the Irish Museum of Modern Art and joint author of Magnum Ireland (Thames and Hudson). She was awarded the Dudley Johnstone medal for curation by the Royal Photographic Society in 2005.

Curated and co-curated/co-authored projects and publications include How We Are (Tate Britain); Daniel Meadows: Early Photographs (Library of Birmingham and touring); Warworks (Victoria &Albert Museum and touring); Martin Parr (Barbican Art Gallery, London and touring); The Dead (National Media Museum and touring); Who’s Looking at the Family? (Barbican Art Gallery); Look at Me: Fashion and Photography in Britain (British Council and touring); The Other Observers: Women’s Photography in Britain (National Museum of Photography); Ken: To be destroyed (Schwules Museum, Berlin and touring; Soho Archive and Soho Nights (Photographers Gallery, London); Tish Murtha (Photographers Gallery, London).

Val has co-curated Seaside: Photographed, with Karen Shepherdson which opened in May 2019 in Margate and is currently touring the UK. and co-authored the book of the same title, published by Thames and Hudson. She has written numerous essays for books, catalogues, magazines and journals.

She is currently working with photographer Corinne Silva on an exploration of the work of landscape historian W. G. Hoskins.

Val established Parakeet Books in 2018 to publish archive collections and monographs, beginning with Grace Lau: Portraits from a Chinese Studio, in 2019.

Research/teaching skills include: writing, editing, curating, oral history,photobooks.