| Birth Date: | 1951 |
| Nationality: | British |
| Occupation: | Visual media historian |
Stephen Herbert (1951-2023) was a British visual media historian, author, editor, publisher and projectionist. He was head of technical services at the National Film Theatre and the Museum of the Moving Image.
Herbert was a projectionist at various London cinemas from 1969-1973, before spending sixteen years as a technician in audio-visual education. He joined the British Film Institute's National Film Theatre in 1989, first as Deputy then as Head of Technical Department. This included responsibility for projection at the London Film Festival and the Museum of the Moving Image. He was also a development team member for the BFI IMAX from 1995-97.[1]
In the mid-1990s, Herbert set up a small publishing business, The Projection Box, with partner Mo Heard. They published books and booklets on early film and media history, including titles written by Herbert himself, notably a biography of Edwardian visual media pioneer Theodore Brown (1997) and Industry, Liberty and a Vision (1998), on inventor and political theorist Wordsworth Donisthorpe.[2] As an editor he compiled a trio of three-volume sets on pre-cinema, early film and early television for Routledge, and co-edited Magic Images, Servants of Light and The Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern, all published by the Magic Lantern Society, for whom he was Research Officer 1988-2000.[3] He produced a number of websites, including Who's Who of Victorian Cinema (based on the 1996 book co-edited with Luke McKernan), The Compleat Muybridge and The Optilogue.[4]
He was a consultant on the development of moving image museums in Dubai and Qatar, and was a Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University, home to the Eadweard Muybridge archive. He was a board member of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter, 1997-2000. He was a technical consultant on two feature films, Merchant-Ivory's The Golden Bowl (2000) and Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011).
Most of Herbert's websites are no longer available on the open web but can be accessed via the Internet Archive. His sites have also been preserved on the UK Web Archive.