While access to the space is constricted by the narrowness and rake of the staircase. Testimony to the rapacity of 19th Century property development in central Birmingham. The exhibition space above the bookshop in the National Trust’s Birmingham Back to Backs has lately played host to some of the most interesting exhibitions about the city’s recent past.
So, I was pleased, having missed the initial exhibition at the Library of Birmingham earlier in 2022, to see that Sampad’s From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey was exhibiting at the Back to Backs as part of its current tour.
From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey uses the fabulous, and until recently criminally difficult to access Dyche collection, as a starting point for a journey into over 130 years of how Birmingham has been represented and documented through photography.
The Dyche photographic studios, located first on Birmingham’s Coventry Road and later in Balsall Heath, were a family affair, run first by Ernest Dyche and then by his son Malcolm. From their premises in the inner suburbs both men made traditional studio portraits of generations of everyday Birmingham people. Their clientele changed with the demographics of the areas where they worked, earlier generations of migrants from the rural west midlands counties, mid-Wales economically depressed areas of Staffordshire and the Welsh coalfields, giving way to new waves of incomers from Ireland, the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent after 1945.
In this way, the Dyche studio collection forms a unique record of everyday, working class Birmingham throughout the 20th Century. As relatively easy to use roll film cameras and processing laboratories reduced recourse to photo studios amongst Birmingham more established affluent white and blue collar residents, so for a range of economic and cultural reasons, so newcomers to the city living in areas like Balsall Heath, continued to use them. In addition to the studio photography, and perhaps uniquely amongst comparable collections in the UK, the Dyche business had also photographed budding musicians and other performers, as well as social gatherings, meaning that the collection is not exclusively composed of mannered and stagey studio portraits.
The value of the Dyche collection as a record of Birmingham’s social and cultural history, in particular the story of recent arrivals in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and how they oriented themselves in the city, was recognised as far back as 1990. This is when Pete James, the rightfully legendary curator of photography at Birmingham Central Library, purchased the thousands of prints and negatives that comprise the Dyche collection after the studio had ceased trading around 1980. Apparently, as is sometimes the way with old business premises, the elderly Malcolm Dyche had ceased running the business but had not disposed of anything, which meant that when Pete James came calling he was happy to arrange for the remaining images to be deposited with the library.
By the time the Dyche collection was accessioned in 1990 the Birmingham Central Library photography collection was already recognised as on the UK’s most significant. The unit was a pioneer in the use of photography not just as an artistic or art historical resource but for the creation of public social and cultural history.
Throughout the first twenty years it was in the Birmingham Central Library collection Dyche images were often used in exhibitions, publics and other social and cultural historical projects undertaken in Birmingham. Then in the 2010s the twin impact of the political turn to austerity and the Birmingham central library cash crisis precipitated by the financing of the new Library of Birmingham led to cutbacks meaning that almost all that work stopped. The Dyche collection and all the other images were safely retained – essentially under the archive equivalent of care and maintenance – secure, but difficult for most people to access let alone explore and think about using in displays. For this reason a key component of the wider National Lottery Heritage Fund project undertaken by Sampad and its partners around the From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey is measures to make the Dyche collection more accessible to the public.
The Dyche collection is the exhibition’s anchor, however, as inferred in the title; the exhibition begins with Birmingham’s position as a key node in the nexus of the British Empire as it emerged in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Through the Library of Birmingham’s photographic record from that time the exhibition unpicks and interrogates how Birmingham through its industrial and engineering prowess found itself at the heart of empire. Something that was compounded by the enthusiasm of the city’s patrician political and commercial leaders like Joseph Chamberlain.
This scene setting is important for understanding the reasons why Birmingham became a major destination for migrants from parts of the world which had been yoked into Britain’s imperial holdings. In the words of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, quoted on one of the exhibition’s decals “we are here because you are there”. The flow of postwar migrants from decolonising parts of the world into Birmingham is precisely because of the industries that were built upon the fruits and unequal terms of exchange that underpinned the British empire.
Beyond this backstory and images drawn from the Dyche archive itself, the exhibition presents photographs drawn from the Library of Birmingham’s holdings, and other key civic collections such as that of the University of Birmingham, which document the city’s growing diversity after 1945.
This includes the work of Handsworth documentary photographer Vanley Burke – one of the finest visual artists produced by Birmingham in the last half century. As well as work by photographers who made the city their home for a time, such as Nick Hedges and Janet Mendhelson, both of whom studied in Birmingham in the late 1960s.
The work of these documentary photographers broadens the scope of the exhibition from the everyday social history represented by the Dyche archive, situating the story of Birmingham’s shift from being a city of empire to a city of diversity within the wider context of Britain and its place in the world post-1945.
In addition to the photographs, other fascinating examples of material culture connected to the stories that the images connote are on display. During the research project undertaken in the process of mounting the exhibition the Dyche studio’s original backdrops were uncovered. Items which had only just been retired from active use as photographer’s props. One, a dramatic silvery backdrop showing woodland, is on display in the exhibition. A tripod strategically placed in front of it as if beckoning attendees to have their picture taken.
Combined with the display of a fantastic array of new artworks produced by participants in workshops connected to the project which respond to the themes of the exhibitions and the Dyche photographs themselves, the exhibition succeeds in giving the images, tricky to access for so long, back to the city that made them. All while also unpicking the knotted and in many ways difficult history of how contemporary Birmingham’s vibrant weave of communities and peoples came into being.
From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey packs an incredible amount into a small exhibition space above a National Trust bookshop. However, the overall impression that the viewer comes away with is that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the stories that the Dyche archive and other photographic archives in the city could be made to tell. As ever with photography and visual culture it’ll be exciting to see where and in what form the virtually important Dyche archive is deployed next.
‘From City of Empire to City of Diversity: A Visual Journey’ is on at Birmingham Back to Backs from 17 November to 7 March 2023. It is accessible from the National Trust second hand bookshop on Hurst Street (50-54, 55-63 Inge St, Hurst St, Birmingham B5 4TE).
The project was supported by:
And The Cole Trust