Catlin Langford is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in photography.

Her work commonly focuses on women’s photographic practice, colour photography, and vernacular forms of photography, including snapshots and photobooth strips, and the intersections between these.

Catlin maintains an independent research, curatorial and educational practice, working with a range of organisations. She is presently consulting for the Victoria and Albert Museum as Co-Lead (Scenario 4, Historical Colour Photography) and Expert Advisor on Perceptive Enhanced Realities of Coloured collEctions through AI and Virtual Experiences (2023-2026), based on the V&A’s autochrome collections and is working with Gallerie d’Italia (Torino) on a project relating to the portrait photographer Eva Barrett.

Catlin has held a range of curatorial and educational positions. She was most recently Curator at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne/Naarm (2022-2024), and was previously the inaugural Curatorial Fellow in Photography, supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation (2019-2022), at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has held positions at the Royal College of Art (2021), Guildhall School/Barbican (2021) and Royal Collection Trust (2017-2019). Catlin has curated exhibitions for Photolux Festival, Photo Oxford and Landskrona Foto Festival and engaged in portfolio reviews for Les Rencontres d’Arles, Belfast Photo Festival and Photo Oxford.

Her debut publication Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochromes (Thames & Hudson/ V&A) was released in 2022, and she recently edited and contributed to Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits (Perimeter/Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2024). Her writing has appeared in 1000 Words, Amateur Photographer, Photographica, Source and The PhotoHistorian, among others. She has spoken about art, photography and visual culture at numerous international organisations, including the University of Oxford, National Portrait Gallery (London), Windsor Castle, National Galleries of Scotland, The Photographers’ Gallery, Institute of Art History (Split) and Birkbeck College. 

In 2022, she was awarded a Nicholas and Angela Curtis Cité Internationale des Arts Residency Fellowship (April-June 2023) to research the culture around autochromes in France. In 2023, she was awarded a Paul Mellon Centre project grant to research the work of Eva Barrett in Italy, working with collections in Turin, Florence and Rome.

Catlin completed her MA in Curating the Art Museum at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016, her thesis focusing on the curation of vernacular photographs. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and First Class Honours in History from the University of Adelaide. She is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Art at RMIT. Her project focuses on photobooths in urban culture.

I respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which I live and work. I recognise Elders past, present and emerging.