An ICA secretary, a Lyons tearoom and a borrowed exhibition, 1968–1991.

The Photographers’ Gallery was founded by Sue Davies and opened in London on 14 January 1971, English Wikipedia says. The Guardian’s obituary of Davies, published on 30 April 2020, traces the idea to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where in 1968 she worked as secretary to its co-founder Roland Penrose. There she was left to put together an exhibition from the German news magazine Stern on the subject of Woman, and she also worked on a smaller show, Spectrum, with work by Don McCullin, Enzo Ragazzini, Dorothy Bohm and Tony Ray-Jones. The obituary says both drew queues in spring 1969, and that photographers then began arriving at the ICA with portfolios, when, as Davies put it, there was nowhere to send them.

She found a home in Covent Garden: a former Lyons tearoom on Great Newport Street, with the derelict former house of the painter Joshua Reynolds next door marked as a possible extension. Tom Hopkinson, former editor of Picture Post, agreed to become chairman and later president. Unable to stage a planned exhibition on the revolutions of 1968, Davies brought in The Concerned Photographer from Zurich, supplied by its curator Cornell Capa. The obituary lists Robert Capa, David Goldblatt, Leonard Freed, David Seymour, Dan Weiner and Werner Bischof among its photographers, and says Magnum photographers soon came to treat the gallery as their London base.

The name was a deliberate choice. The Guardian says Davies turned down her original choice, “The Photography Gallery”, because she wanted a place where photographers felt at home, surrounded by photographs; English Wikipedia’s article on Davies describes the decision as made in a democratic spirit. As the gallery grew she added a café and a bookstall, a Portfolio Gallery for emerging photographers, a library and a print room. English Wikipedia dates the move into the neighbouring building to 1980, giving room for a bookshop, a café and print sales whose proceeds went to the public programme. Davies directed the gallery for two decades and left in 1991; the Guardian reported her death in April 2020.

A Soho textiles warehouse, black render and a window aimed across Oxford Street, 2005–2012.

English Wikipedia says Brett Rogers became director in 2005 and oversaw the purchase of a new venue on Ramillies Street in Soho, a former textiles warehouse. The Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey were commissioned in 2007, according to the gallery’s statement published by Dezeen on 9 May 2012, and construction began in autumn 2010. Rowan Moore, reviewing the building in the Observer on 20 May 2012, wrote that until 2008 it was to have been an entirely new building, after which the project became an extension of an existing brick and steel warehouse, delivered with the development company Stanhope.

Dezeen described the result. Black-rendered walls overhang the Victorian brickwork to hold new fourth and fifth floors of galleries, lit by a two-storey, north-facing window in one corner; a floor for lectures and workshops sits on the third storey and an environmentally controlled gallery on the second. Part of the façade is cut away and glazed to show the café, the ground floor is clad in black polished terrazzo and hardwood panels, and the bookshop and print sales room occupy the basement. The gallery’s statement named the timber as Angelim Pedra and described the large windows as apertures onto the streets around Oxford Street. Moore singled out a top-floor window aligned with a long vista across Oxford Street, and a glass wall wrapping the corner to link the café with a small square intended for outdoor photographic displays.

Inside, the statement listed a digital display called The Wall in reception, for guest-curated projects, artist commissions and work involving the public; the Eranda Studio, with a camera obscura and a Study Room holding an archive of exhibitions and events since 1971; Touchstone, a quarterly display of a single photograph; and a relaunch of The Photographers’ Gallery Editions in the print sales room, with photographers donating limited-edition prints to support the public programme. The gallery reopened on 19 May 2012, and the Observer named Edward Burtynsky’s Oil as the relaunch exhibition.

The photograph as the poster, a neutral frame around it and a city as the venue.

Photography festivals, fairs and centres face a design problem that many other cultural institutions do not: the work they show is itself made of images, and any poster, banner or cover has to decide how much room to give them. One approach lets the photograph do the talking, with a single picture filling a poster or a catalogue cover and the institution’s name kept small, set in a plain sans along one edge. The other builds a neutral frame, a fixed grid, a strong colour or a typographic block, that stays the same year after year while the pictures inside it change with each exhibition. Many organisations use both, keeping the frame for the institution and giving the image the space on anything that announces a particular show. Inside the galleries the same choice reaches the walls, where vinyl titles, wall texts and caption labels are usually quiet so that they sit beside a print without competing with it.

Much of the identity is also carried in print. Exhibition catalogues and photobooks are often designed with a different publisher or designer each time, so the house style may shrink to a spine, a logo on the back cover and a consistent credit line. Fairs add another setting: rows of booths in a large hall, where the organiser’s signage, floor plans and lanyards have to stay readable next to dozens of galleries with marks of their own. Festivals that spread across a city work at street level, with flags, maps, numbered venues and arrows that guide visitors along a trail of borrowed rooms, churches, shops and courtyards, and a system that holds together across many venues at once.

A typographic identity from 1996, a building-led identity from 2012 and a moiré stamp for fifty years.

The identity followed the building. Design Week reported on 8 May 2012 that the design practice North had created a new identity for the gallery ahead of the Ramillies Street opening. North had been appointed the year before and worked with Jane Wentworth Associates, which was developing the gallery’s brand strategy, and the magazine said North had also designed the gallery’s previous typographic identity, in use since 1996. The gallery said the new identity was inspired in part by O’Donnell + Tuomey’s design and would “boldly communicate the gallery’s vision both within the building and beyond”. Design Week pointed to the building’s large windows, which frame views into the galleries, and to the black render cut away to reveal the brick warehouse, and said the identity would run across marketing materials and signage throughout the new building. The gallery statement published by Dezeen also credited the new visual identity to North.

Anniversaries add a layer. For the gallery’s fiftieth year, the studio Brody Associates says it made a campaign identity built on a celebratory moiré-effect stamp, which locked together with the existing identity and broke out into its own graphic language across platforms, experiences and events. Print carries the programme too: English Wikipedia says the gallery publishes books for some of its exhibitions and a quarterly, Loose Associations, which commissions essays, images and artist projects related to, but not defined by, the programme.

Leadership changed in 2023. English Wikipedia says Rogers announced in July 2022 that she would leave at the end of that year, and that Shoair Mavlian, previously director of Photoworks in Brighton and before that an assistant curator at Tate Modern, became director from January 2023. The founding idea survives in the name on the door: a gallery for the people who take photographs, as Davies wanted, rather than for the medium alone.

For a design guide, The Photographers’ Gallery shows an institution whose name was chosen for people and whose identity has twice been built by the same practice, once as a typographic mark in 1996 and again around a black-rendered warehouse in 2012. Compare the Aperture and C/O Berlin guides. For this guide we use black render, warehouse brick, Angelim timber and terrazzo grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Photographers’ Gallery’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.