The photographic record of student work complements the RCA archive and provides a visual resource of work produced by students for the graduate degree shows across the College over the past half-century. The earliest years (1950s) are represented by a select number of images, but more recent shows are comprehensively recorded, with thousands of new images added each year. All departments and disciplines are represented and many of the College’s most notable design alumni are covered, including Thomas Heatherwick, Tord Boontje, James Dyson and David Adjaye. Textile designers from Zandra Rhodes to Alice Temperley, and painters from David Hockney to Chantal Joffe also feature. The collection can be used to trace student origins of now-established careers or to study the evolution of design of a given product or in a particular field, from vases to vehicles, throughout the second half of the 20th century.
Most of the collection is in slide format, although the College has used digital photography for shows since 2003, uploading the images to the Intranet to create a searchable resource with high-quality metadata. The resulting resource, the Show Gallery, is available on the College Intranet and is currently in development for a public launch with all images made available for learning and teaching under a Creative Commons licence.
Digitisation of the slides is also under way in order to make images of earlier student work more widely accessible; in the meantime, researchers are welcome to consult the collection by appointment. Both slides and digital images may be browsed on site.