Russell Roberts is a curator and writer. Born in Cosford, Shropshire, he studied in London for his BA and MA before joining the Department of Photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum as an intern from 1990-92. Early curatorial projects included Memory & The Archive – Photographs/Images/Documents (1995) at the John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton, and the acclaimed international touring exhibition In Visible Light: Photography and Classification in Art, Science & The Everyday (1997) at MoMA (Oxford).
From 1998-2006 he was Head of Photography at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (National Media Museum), where he is now Honorary Fellow in Photography. Among the projects he worked on were: Joachim Schmid’s Face in the Desert (1999), Specimens and Marvels: The Art & Science of William Henry Fox Talbot (2000), Retracing the Image (2000), Paul Strand – Tir A‘Mhurain (2001), Picturing Landscape with Tate Britain (2001), Unknown Pleasures: Unwrapping the Royal Photographic Society Collection 1853-2003 (2003), On a Portrait (2003), Fabula (2003), A Gentle Madness: The Photographs of Tony Ray-Jones (2004), Simone Nieweg’s Landscape & Gardens (2004), Luc Delahaye’s Histories (2004), Hans van der Meer’s The Other Side of Football (2005), Julian Germaine’s Portraits (2005), The Old Order and The New: P.H. Emerson and Photography 1885 – 1895 (2006), and a retrospective of Elliot Erwitt (2006). He was the founding editor of the Museum’s magazine Archive and developed links with a number of institutions to support critical engagement with the Collection through conferences, symposia and publishing.
In 2005 he was involved in the international forum that took part in the important Picturing Atrocity symposium at CUNY Grad School in New York, and he continues to foster links between academic research and photography’s various institutions.
As a curator he has worked on projects for festivals and venues such as Arles, Photoespana and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Tate Britain, Moderna Museet and the Finnish Museum of Photography amongst others. Between 2003 and 2006: he was an advisor to Arts Council England; Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museum Research Centre at the University of Oxford; Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Newport; project director for the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council subject specialist network for photography; consultant to the National Galleries of Scotland and The Photographers‘ Gallery; and Chair of the Committee for the Jerwood Photography Prize.
In 2006 he joined the European Centre for Photographic Research (eCPR) at University of Wales, Newport, in a unique partnership with Ffotogallery, Cardiff, to work on developing a national centre for photography in Wales. Recent projects include Material Industries: The Photographs of Maurice Broomfield (2007). He is currently working on an exhibition and book on the archive and legacy of Mass-Observation in contemporary art with Photoworks and Steidl, and a book on 30 years of photographic art in Wales between 1978-2008 for Ffotogallery.