Michael Pritchard's Blog (2,020)

The latest issue of British Art Studies no. 18 has gone online and includes two papers of particular interest to BPH readers, from Sarah Parsons and Steve Edwards. 

Sarah Parsons, 'Women in Fur: Empire, Power, and Play in a Victorian Photography Album'. The craze for carte-de-visite portraits in the early 1860s established photography as…

The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons has digitised much of its collections and made them available to the public. Included are photographs and other material relevant to photographic history, including a series of letters from Francis Galton.

See:…

E. A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas, a collaboration between the National Trust for Scotland and the City Art Centre, is the first major retrospective of Hornel's art for over 35 years. Featuring photographs and paintings from Broughton House in Kirkcudbright, this exhibition shows how photography was crucial to the development of Hornel's artistic…

Photokina, the world's largest and most important fair for the photographic trade and consumers is to end after seventy years. In an email to the trade the organisers state: 'it is an extremely difficult step for us to have to suspend implementation of photokina at the location in Cologne for the time being, in light of the continuing steep decline in the…

Five unique Kinora reels - a form of early moving picture - have been digitised by the National Library of Scotland and made available online. The work started in 2009 and the reels show the fishing fleet and industry in the Scottish town of Wick in north-east Scotland from the early 1900s. Although the Kinora is best known for the published reels and viewers…

A print from an album likely to have been compiled by Roger Fenton is being offered by Chiswick Auctions online on 3 December. The anonymous portrait, by Fenton, comes from the notorious 'grey paper album'. The important album was disbound and each image was offered, and dispersed, individually, at auction between 1977 and 1984.

No record of the album…

Bristol's Arnolfini arts space is presenting two photography exhibitions as part of its Health and Well-being series, both come from the Hyman Collection. A picture of health presents a group of women photographers and Jo Spence: from fairy tales to phototherapy presents work held in the Collection. 

The first, brings together a group…

Two daguerreotypes of Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, by the London photographer J. J. E. Mayall, are being offered at auction on 17 December 2020. Both are dated c.1853-55 and are estimated £50,000-70,000 and £10,000-20,000 respectively.

Dickens was regularly photographed by Mayall and he wrote about his experiences in his publication…

Sworder's London auction is offering a lot of London photographs by James Hedderly. The eight photographs are estimated at £1000.

JAMES HEDDERLY (1814-1885)

a collection of seven photographs of Chelsea before the building of the  Embankment in 1871-3; Old Battersea Bridge (as depicted by Whistler); Chelsea Old…

On behalf of Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom, Curators of Photography, we would like to bring to your attention our current research opportunities within the…

If you have a spare £20,000 then one fascicle from William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846) - the first commercially published photographic book - can be yours. The fascicle is illustrated with two calotypes - including one view of Lacock Abbey, and one photogenic drawing of…

The Icon Photographic Materials Group is delighted to announce that this year’s fourth Round Table discussion will take place online. We hope that a virtual format will allow more people to attend, nationally and internationally. 

As in previous years, the event will consist of a series of five-minute presentations followed by questions and discussion.…

The Reece Winstone Archive is planning to become a charitable trust in order to ensure the corpus remains intact...writes John Winstone. We also have a policy of seeing continuing growth. The Archive presently holds 100,000 images of Britain from the 1930s to the 1980s and, in particular, on Bristol. Included in this tally are some 10,000 collected…

The Cinema Museum, established three and a half decades ago by Martin Humphries and Ronald Grant, is at once a visitor attraction, heritage site and sporadic cinema. While this means it carries broad appeal to a range of audiences, straddling several sectors has posed a problem when emergency pandemic funding programmes are staunchly siloed.

The venue,…

The long history of the renowned Alinari photographic firm, founded in 1852 in Florence, reached a turning point in December 2019 as the regional government Regione Toscana acquired the company's millions of photographic objects, documents, specialized publications and historical technical equipment; the acquisition of the digital assets will soon…

The University of Edinburgh's Centre for Global History's seminar series is hosting Dr Luke Gartlan of the University of St Andrews who will be presenting a paper Bringing Empire Home: St Andrews and the Global Networks of Victorian Photography on 18 November at 1600. Registration is free and open to all.  …

Rebecca Gowers uncovered a fascinating story within her family tree - that of Harry Larkyns. She learnt that Harry was an attractive cad who lived a charmed life right up until the moment he fell in love with the wife of noted photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Rebecca will discuss the scoundrel Harry Larkyns and will be joined by our The National Archives…

An online event with Dr Jan Graffius, curator of collections at Stonyhurst College, who will be talking to Gilly Read FRPS about Roger Fenton and his photographs of Stonyhurst and the surrounding countryside.  

Although Roger Fenton (1819-1869) is best known for his images of the Crimean War, he trained as a painter and photographed many varied…

BPH reported the death of Chris Killip recently. Mark Haworth-Booth, the former curator of photographs at the V&A Museum, has a written a blog which corrects that assertion in some of Killip's obituaries that he was not properly…