The architectural photographer Ursula Clark (1940-2000) is best-known for an archive of around 20,000 largely black-and-white images held by Historic England.

They were created by the Newcastle upon Tyne publisher Oriel Press during the 1960s and 1970s for a series of architecture guides featuring buildings in Britain and continental Europe.

Earlier this year, the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group hosted a talk in which I presented original research about Ursula Clark and her pioneering role in photographic history.

That research is ongoing and has focused recently on non-Oriel Press books and illustrated magazines where her architectural photographs were also published.

Endangered Buildings

From visiting the Historic England archive in Swindon, I was aware that a proportion of her output involved colour photography.

Two of her exercise book shot lists are titled ‘Colour Copies’, suggesting that Oriel Press intended to reproduce images in colour.

Perhaps, given the company’s later financial difficulties which led to a corporate take-over by Routledge Kegan Paul in 1973, any plans proved too expensive to realise.

Given this background, it’s a pleasure to share colour versions of Ursula’s 35 mm photography in this latest Pressphotoman post about her photographic career.

These images were discovered in Architecture of Europe, a guide published in 1985 in Britain by Newnes Books and by Larousse in the United States.

The guide was authored by Bruce Allsopp (1912-2000), who was Ursula’s chief collaborator at Oriel Press and hired her on its launch as the publisher’s photographic editor in 1962.

Colour photographs credited to ‘Ursula Clark’ illustrate a section of Architecture of Europe devoted to Spain and Portugal.

It appears that some were first published as black-and-white illustrations in Oriel’s Architecture of Spain and The Great Tradition of Western Architecture (both 1966).

This information helps date these images as being taken during a period when Ursula was in her mid-twenties.

The sequence starts with a striking image of Barcelona’s ‘Facade of the Casa Battló’ (1905-07) by Antoni Gaudi, perhaps best-known for the catholic cathedral Segrada Familia, also in Barcelona that is due to be completed in 2026.

Then a double page is devoted to Ursula’s photographs with a brief accompanying explanatory text to point out significant features or historical information.

I reproduce them in the order they appear with a caption identifying each location.

Seeing Ursula Clark’s photography in colour for the first time opens up another avenue of research into her professional practice.

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