James Venn was born on 30 December 1921 at Furze Platt in Maidenhead, the son of Henry Venn, who worked in the Education Officer's department of the London County Council.
James' interest in photography developed from an early awareness of the landscape and buildings observed in his childhood. By the time he was a teenager this, combined with an interest in local history and historical geography gained from listening to the recollections of his father and grandfather, led him to realise that what had seemed so permanent as a child was now changing or disappearing. This was not on the scale that was to follow in the post-1950 period, but was nevertheless a continuous small-scale erosion of familiar individual scenes.
All forms of transport had always interested him and here again the progressive disappearance of horse-drawn vehicles, steam wagons, traction engines, open-topped buses and electric trams during the 1930s further accentuated his perception of the impermanence of what was once commonplace and would soon be only a memory. Photography presented itself as a means of capturing permanent visual images for the future.
The announcement that the last trams in Reading were soon to be replaced by trolleybuses precipitated his first attempts at photography, using his father's pre-1914 small, folding ‘VPK' (Vest Pocket Kodak). He had no understanding of how to use this other than by a setting that said ‘sunshine', then looking through the small viewfinder and pressing the shutter release. More by luck than judgement the results were surprisingly successful. Encouraged by this he cycled the 120 miles from Maidenhead to Brighton and back in a day to photograph more trams and their replacement trolleybuses.
The coming of World War Two in Sept 1939 soon brought this new found activity to an abrupt end. In 1946 he joined the newly formed British European Airways and in 1949 was seconded to the Foreign Office for service as an Operations Officer with the Berlin airlift. Confronted in Berlin with so much of historical and transport interest, he resumed his interest in photography. His appointment as the British Civil Aviation Operations Office at Tegel Airport, Berlin, gave him a privileged and unique opportunity to record some of this extraordinary and remarkable operation.
He was made redundant following the sudden end of the Russian blockade, and on returning to the UK decided to read for a B.Sc(Econ) degree at the London School of Economics. In the interval between leaving BEA. and entering university he worked at Marlow railway station. Here, coming from the then most advanced technology of civil aviation, he found himself working with methods and equipment that dated from the 1890s! But once again this work gave him the opportunity to record aspects of transport working destined soon to disappear. Many of his photographs were reproduced in the book ‘The Marlow Branch' by P.Kerau and C.Turner.
Following graduation from the LSE, James followed a career in adult education, and continued to pursue his interest in photography. This interest was heightened as a result of his friendship with Stanley Freese, a very keen and able amateur photographer who between 1933 and 1950 took hundreds of photographs throughout the country of landscapes, agricultural work, trees, buildings, windmills, watermills, and railways. They shared an interest in windmills and worked together on early repairs to those at Brill and Pitstone. Stanley Freese is perhaps best remembered for his book Windmills and Millwrighting. He was still repairing windmills when he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1972. In his will he left James all his books, maps, manuscripts, notes, sketch books, a vast collection of negatives and prints, which altogether filled five tea chests and took several years to sort, catalogue, and preserve!
As he looked at this fascinating bequest James conceived the idea of continuing from where Freese had ended, but to concentrate on the county of Buckinghamshire. His plan was to make a systematic survey of the whole county, parish by parish, making a pictorial record not only the general characteristics of each place, but especially those features not likely to be the subject for other photographers. This covered factories, shops, public houses, schools, chapels, farms and filling stations, especially anything likely to disappear in the near future and the much neglected areas of 19th century and early 20th housing. Town centres had long been well recorded by professional photographers, especially High Wycombe, but it was the dreary terraced houses and back streets that were invariably overlooked.
Between about 1985 and 2002 James took between 1,000 and 1,500 photographs each year, but time and difficult domestic circumstances precluded the completion of much of the southern part of the county. Age and lack of mobility finally brought his work to an end with a final parish survey in 2002.
James Venn died in 2014
The Venn archive of over 20,000 photographs, together with the Freese archive, are both destined for public collections.
In the SWOP collection there are over 3,000 photographs taken by Stanley Freese and James Venn.