The Tate project

It's almost six years since Simon Baker was appointed Tate's first curator of photography and international art, a post that many believed was long overdue. Compared with its international counterparts, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, both of which hold significant collections of photographs, Tate had prevaricated for years over whether photography should be part of its remit. Only with the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 did dedicated photography exhibitions finally appear on the programme, selected at first by outside curators and adapted from exhibitions originated abroad. So when Baker, then 36, an associate professor of art history at the University of Nottingham, took the job, the Tate was, as he admits now, "in a very unusual position of being a major museum that started its photography strategy, pretty much, with no collection".

When he arrived, there were photographs in the collection, "but more what we would consider as conceptual art" he says, "such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and artists working with photography who'd become very successful, like Cindy Sherman and the Dusseldorf School". So the strategy that he and his fellow curators set out for the collection was "to embrace photography in its breadth: photography in its broadest aspects, in terms of different kinds of practice. But also geographically. There's been a huge expansion in [Tate's collecting in] Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Africa, eastern Europe. So the strategy that myself and my colleagues presented to the trustees was an expanded notion of photography but always fitting in with the collection; trying to make connections with other media."

They were very conscious that they were adding to a national collection of photographs - not just making a collection for Tate. "We were thinking holistically, so we tried not to duplicate what the V&A has, or what the National Media Museum has, or to a lesser extent the National Portrait Gallery. We have a great relationship with our colleagues. They will lend things to us. For example, if the V&A has the most fantastic collection of [South African photographer] David Goldblatt -which it does - then if we acquire David Goldblatt it must be something that they don't already have. We must think really carefully about how things fit together."

Did they make a special case for British photography? "The remit for the British part of the collection was that it should be slightly more comprehensive. But, having said that, the V&A and the National Media Museum have done quite well with certain kinds of British practice. So recently we acquired work by Chris Killip, which was very important for us. But because the V&A has a great collection, we had to acquire works that they didn't have. Now, between us, the V&A and the Media Museum, we have a huge retrospective [collection] of Chris Killip. Not that every photographer will end up in the same way, but we will try to do the same thing where possible, to build the national collection in total.

"In the last five years [in terms of British photographers] we have also acquired bodies of work by Don McCullin, Jo Spence, Chris Shaw, and through the Franck collection" - the 1,400 photographs from the Eric and Louise Franck London Collection, donated to Tate in 2012 - "Stephen Gill. Also Paul Graham and John Riddy. We don't have the whole history of British photography but our colleagues do."

One of the obvious disadvantages of coming late into collecting photographs was that prices rose exponentially in the last two decades of the 20th century. Prints that could have been acquired for hundreds of pounds in the 1970s sell for tens of thousands today. Attempting to build, retrospectively, the accepted historical canon would be impossible. So Baker and his colleagues had to be pragmatic and look to private collectors for help.

Photo London special: The Tate project

"We are very aware of relationships that we have with potential donors. So we try not to acquire things that the market has inflated, and which we might reasonably expect to be given. To give an example: we wouldn't really fundraise £1m for one Man Ray when somebody had bought Man Rays in the 70s for a few thousand dollars. There is a sense of trying to look at what we need, what fits with our collection, what fits with other collections and what isn't a gratuitous use of resources."

They defined several areas of special interest, he says, "like trying to build a collection of photographs that relates to modernism, the Bauhaus and its global legacy, and how that is playing out in Latin America, Japan, eastern Europe".

This was the logic behind The Modern Lens, the exhibition that opened at Tate St Ives last autumn. Showing photographs from the 1920s to the 1960s, it concentrated on the influence of the Bauhaus and the diaspora of its artists across Europe, North and South America and Japan. Significant among them was a group of works by Gyorgy Kepes (1906-2001), a photographer and film-maker who moved to Berlin and joined the studio of fellow Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the mid-1930s. He followed Moholy-Nagy to London, then to the "new Bauhaus" in Chicago. Eventually Kepes moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies there in 1967.

Kepes's photographs are much less well known than Moholy-Nagy's but that was important on two counts, as Baker points out. "We managed to acquire around 40 vintage Kepes. We couldn't acquire 40 vintage Moholy-Nagys - that would be millions of pounds. But the fact that we're making a serious commitment to that kind of work means we are now able to work with a collector who is promising those works to us. So there is a sense that we are being frugal and cost-effective with limited resources. We are building a collection and we are not going into the top of any markets."

Apart from looking at what the other collections hold in this country, Baker and his colleagues also looked at the public gallery holdings in Europe, particularly in France and Germany. "Nobody in Europe had started collecting postwar Japanese or even prewar Japanese photography," Baker says. "So we thought, we can always borrow things from Paris, we can always borrow works from Germany. What could we acquire that would be useful?" Tate now has, he says, "the best collection of Japanese photography in Europe".

Is there a separate budget for photography? "There is no sense in which there is a budget for anything," he says. "We have committees, which support certain kinds of acquisitions. Photography can be bought by anybody, and in the last couple of years the Tate Americas Foundation, which is one of the largest funding bodies we have, has helped us to acquire some really important photographs.

"I would say that, over the last few years, the amount we have spent on photography has been more than matched by the value of donations. One good example is the [Franck] London Collection. That was a partial acquisition, partial donation; there have been major donations from Michael Wilson."

Michael G Wilson, who with his half-sister Barbara Broccoli produces the James Bond movies, is a private collector with a world-class collection of photographs, much of it looked after at the Wilson Centre for Photography in London. He has been an influential supporter of the Tate's endeavours. He and his wife Jane have donated works such as Taryn Simon's A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008-11) to Tate, and Bruce Davidson's entire "Subway" series of colour photographs from the early 1980s. The current exhibition (to June 7) of early salt prints at Tate Britain, Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860, is taken from the Wilson Centre in its entirety.

Wasn't this one exhibition, though, that could have been put together from 19th-century works already held in the national collection - by the V&A and the Media Museum in Bradford? "To be honest," Baker says, "borrowing 19th-century works from Bradford is quite complicated, because of the loan requirements. But we probably could have got around that. We probably could have done a 19th-century show from the V&A collection. But those institutions are doing their own exhibitions. One of the reasons for showing Michael Wilson's collection is that, unusually for a collection of its size, it has no gallery space. The idea of taking [a show] all from one collection is not usually the way that we curate but we saw it as a real opportunity to see things that had not been shown in public.

"It's not as if we're working with somebody in hopes of someday ever being helped," he adds. "We're actually working with somebody who has shown considerable generosity, to quite a staggering degree, for an English-based collector."

Wilson's influence extends outside the museum, too. Baker believes his example has encouraged other collectors to consider donating works to Tate. American collectors in particular may feel, he says, that at Tate their donated works would have a much better chance of being seen.

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"If you give photographs to some museums, and they've already got [a large number of works by the same photographer], they go into the storeroom and you don't see them again. Whereas almost everything we've acquired in the last five years, we've shown quite quickly. We've tried always to integrate photographs with all the other parts of the collection. You go through a room of paintings and sculptures and then you find photographs, and you then might find time-based media or an installation. This is how photography should be seen and it's part of the history of art."

But if that is the case, why wasn't photography shown at Tate before? Baker dispatches this briskly. "That's a purely administrative error from the past - believing that it was applied arts at the V&A and fine arts at the Tate and the National Gallery. But by the 1980s, artists' practice had overtaken any kind of bureaucratic distinction. In 2015, these distinctions are meaningless. How are you going to ask people working with cameras if they're photographers or if they're artists? Really now it comes down to where things look good and how they're shown. We're the only place in London where you can see photography in a collection that is part of sculpture, painting, installation, time-based media; which is properly where it should be. However good some of the other venues are, they are having to show photography more or less on its own."

When he started at Tate, I suggest, he must have been inundated with photographers who were desperate to have their work shown. "No. I don't think so," he says. "There is a generation of photographers, particularly British photographers, who have been overlooked, though personally I would say that very little of the blame for that lies with Tate. I think the lower part of the ecosystem of photography has let [them] down.

"If you want to have an exhibition on in a national museum you should reasonably expect to have had several smaller shows in smaller spaces first. You see that in Paris: there's Le Bal, the Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the Maison Europeene de la Photographie (MEP), so by the time you have your Pompidou show you could already have had two to three shows. But the generation who are now in their late fifties and sixties and early seventies, they haven't had the smaller shows. It is a much deeper problem than the national museums not showing photography, it's that the steps that one would expect to be in advance of that are missing.

"I'm not meaning to be dismissive of people's claims to being shown at Tate," he continues, "but it is very difficult for me to go to my colleagues and curators and say, 'This photographer is really important and yet he hasn't had any shows in London over the last 20 years.' Nick Waplington, who is showing at Tate Britain at the moment, is the first living British photographer ever to have a show at Tate Britain. His name is not so well known among curators in the art world. But when you look outside his exhibition there are tables with about 20 books that he's made, and you can see his career."

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Books, says Baker, are one of the very best ways to see new photographers and new work. Coinciding with Photo London, the Tate Turbine Hall will be given over to Offprint, the photobook fair for small publishers and self-publishers, which has become a staple "Off-Paris Photo" event at the Paris fair. Each year it draws thousands of photo fans who can buy limited-edition books and scope out new photographers.

"The reason we're doing Offprint is that we have realised that books are by far the best place to understand what's happening in photography in this country," Baker says. "Publishing is very strong here. Even the most curmudgeonly of the previous generation of photographers are still managing to get their books out, still doing brilliant books. The photobook world is younger, fresher, more resourceful, more responsive to the reality of the [current] situation than galleries… I would say, much as Tate is connected with artists and galleries [at] the top of the food chain, I think the soil that all this stuff comes from in photography is the self-publishers, the photobook."

Next year, when the new Tate Modern extension opens at Bankside, the gallery space will increase by about 70 per cent, and though there is no intention to have dedicated photography galleries, there will be much more room to show the permanent collection. "It will really be focused around the collection," Baker says, "important things that have come into the collection in the last years. I think it will be a key moment for photography. It will be a great moment to look and say, 'What did they achieve in five or six years in photography?' And I think it will be pretty impressive."

To access Tate's collection online and for information on the Prints and Drawings Room in the Clore Gallery, Tate Britain, visit tate.org.uk. Offprint is at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London SE1, May 22-25

Slideshow photographs: Tate; Estate of Gyorgy Kepes; Boris Mikhailov; Estate of Harry Callahan/Courtesy Pace/MacGill; Henry Wessel/Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Don McCullin/Tate; Paul Graham/Courtesy Pace and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

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