Light Years: the exhibition proving photography is an art form

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. It was the city’s first exhibition space dedicated to photography; its aim, Davies wrote in her original proposal, was “to gain recognition for photography as an art form in its own right”. “It became a place of pilgrimage, almost.” Oliver Chanarin, a winner in 2013 of the gallery’s annual Deutsche Börse prize, says that the greatest success of the Photographers’ Gallery “was, in a way, to make itself redundant,” noting that it had paved the way for many other dedicated exhibition spaces and museum shows to open around Britain. “Sue had to remortgage her home and went without a salary for 18 months,” Brett Rogers, the gallery’s director since 2005, says in a telephone interview. The challenge for the institution, she adds, is to say, “Well, yes, but what makes a memorable photograph of the kind that lasts centuries?” Despite all the changes, this sounds a lot like Davies’s mission when she started the gallery 50 years ago: to bring exciting photography to the public and to make them want to come back for more.