James Downs

Dr James Downs has worked as an independent researcher, museum curatorial assistant, monastic archivist and rare book librarian, and in 2018 completed a doctoral thesis entitled 'Ministers of "the Black Art": the engagement of British clergy with photography, 1839-1914.' He is currently Archivist of the Middle East Collections at the University of Exeter’s Special Collections Department, also home to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum in which he worked for almost a decade in various capacities.

He has written and presented conference papers about Anton Walbrook on several occasions, as well as being interviewed at the actor’s grave for the ‘Life and Death in Hampstead Sound Trail’ and curating the 2013 exhibition ‘Anton Walbrook – Star and Enigma.’ In addition to experience of teaching film adaptation and cataloguing archival material relating to other German émigrés, he has written two books and over thirty articles on a range of topics relating to the history of film and photography, visual culture and religious history, and since 2018 has been the editor of the magazine 'Photographica World'.

His writing and research projects explores various aspects of visual culture - including both the history of photography and film studies - as well as church history, media archaeology, book illustration, postcard collecting, Victorian curios and other antiquarian ephemera.

Posts on a wide range of these topics can be found on his website www.darklanecreative.com.