Sparkling pictures big as life
35mm slides and the Design Council Slide Collection
from the Manchester School of Art Slide Library
22.02.25-26.04.25
at the modernist
58 Port Street, Manchester M1 2EQ
open 11am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday
By the mid-1960s a ‘slide library’ had become part of the landscape of British Art Schools and Colleges, providing an essential visual resource for staff and students, allowing them to borrow slides for use in lectures, seminars and for visual research.
The slide library established at the Manchester College of Art and Design was one of the largest in the country. It benefited from having a professional photographer on the staff, who created unique images, especially of the changing Manchester cityscape, alongside the more usual images copied from library books or bought from stock suppliers.
Whilst the library at Manchester held a small number of early 20th century glass slides, mostly from collections established by retired academics, the vast majority of the over 300,000 slides held were in the 35mm format.
In 1995 a significant addition was made to the slide library at Manchester when the Design Council Slide Collection was relocated, on long term loan, following the closure of the Council’s London based Design Centre. This collection had its origins in the Photographic Library set up by the Council of Industrial Design in 1945. By the time it came to Manchester it consisted of over 22,000 35mm slides.
Most of the images show products of various kinds, including tableware, furniture, lighting, toys, domestic appliances, textiles, wallpapers, office equipment, engineering components and machinery. The collection contains examples of the best of modernist object design, recorded in often starkly beautiful photographs, preserved on an object perfectly designed to display them as ‘sparkling pictures big as life’.
Jeremy Parret
This exhibition is based on the article 'Sparkling pictures big as life : object/image' by Jeremy Parret, which appears in the modernist magazine issue 53 published in March 2025.
Images reproduced courtesy of Special Collections at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Thanks to Jane Pendlebury (Manchester Met Special Collections) and John Davis (formerly curator of the Design Council Slide Collection and Visual Resources Curator at Manchester Met) for their help in preparing the images and the text for this exhibition.
All images copyright: Design Council and The Manchester Metropolitan University.
