Sir Benjamin Stone legacy collection

Sir Benjamin Stone was a renowned Victorian amateur photographer and his immense archive of photographs was gifted to Birmingham Libraries in 1914. Stone's documentary photographs inspired a new generation of photographic activists - including Daniel Meadows and Homer Sykes. This legacy collection with 12 prints by each photographer complements the earlier gift beautifully. Meadows travelled around England documenting aspects of English life ‘threatened by the apparent necessity for rapid social changeÂ’. He eventually published the collection of pictures, portraits and stories amassed en route in the book Living Like This, Around Britain in the Seventies. In 1969 Sykes set out on what was to become a seven year project photographing events in England, often re-visiting the customs and festivals that Stone had photographed some eighty years earlier. This work was acquired with the support of the Art Fund with the assistance of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.