PHOTOGRAPHIC LIBRARY

The museum has a collection of many thousands of photographs of the area from as early as 1870 and actively collects works by photographers working today, including artistic, landscape, genre and press photographs.


St Michael's Mount

Much of the collection is available via an image database which includes not just photographs, but also illustrations of works of art in the collections when they are not on show. A public terminal allows for limited searching using a selection of key words covering a wide variety of subject areas. For serious researchers supervised access to the reserve collections is usually possible by prior arrangement.

Penzance Beach 1890

The collection includes works by photographers such as Frith and Valentine, and also by local photographers such as Preston, Moody, Gibson, Richards, Penhaul, etc. There are also a number of important photographic albums held within the collections, including albums originally owned by the Branwell family, an album of photographs of the Newlyn artists at work and play and, for example, an album containing snapshots of a visit by two women in 1925, who visited the ancient sites such as Chun Quoit and Chysauster.

Copies of the photographs can be ordered for personal use (copyright permitting), and we are happy to deal with specific requests from publishers.

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