Photography
Lambton Visual Aids
Developed as a strand of income generation in the 1970s, an extraordinary slide collection combining both original photography and other imagery.
LVA is an educational slide collection, its main categories being Illustration, Advertising & Publicity, Painting & Sculpture, Architecture, Interior Design & Garden Design, Photography, Fashion, Graphic Design and Industrial Design. A Miscellaneous category brings together slide sets from Decorated Tin Boxes, Floral & Traditional and Fairground Art to British Tattoos and Juvenile Jazz Bands.
It was founded in the early days of Amber as a way of generating revenue for film and photography projects. From offering a technical slide-making service to a local college and then getting requests for new lecture material, the scope of the project grew. High quality slides were taken from books, magazines and catalogues; photographers such as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Graham Smith, Karen Melvin and Chris Wroblewski originated new sets of work, documenting particular territories. Graham Denman, a founding member of the collective, who was adept at technical innovation, created a slide copier that produced higher quality work than any of the systems available on the market.
At present we don’t have the resources to digitise the slide sets, even where we have the relevant permission. We’re working on it, however, and will probably begin with Architecture, in particular the northern work, documented between 1971 and 1980. Amongst the joys of this territory, LVA includes slide sets of the following:
Architecture of Newcastle upon Tyne, Regency
Architecture of Newcastle upon Tyne, Early and mid-Victorian
Architecture of Newcastle upon Tyne, Late Victorian and Edwardian
Architectural Embellishments (Newcastle upon Tyne, mainly Victorian), parts I & II
Architecture of Leeds
Architecture of Leeds, red brick & terracotta
Architecture of Manchester, red brick & terracotta, parts I & II
Working Class Terraced Housing, Leeds & Newcastle upon Tyne