Michael Pritchard's Blog (1,843)

Professor Larry Schaaf will deliver the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group's 2020 Colin Ford Lecture providing a fascinating insight to his work on The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné.

Schaaf has been examining and compiling information on Talbot images worldwide for more than four decades. Beginning in 2014, with the backing of…

A new blog by Jamie Carstairs who manages the Historical Photographs of China project draws attention to Charles F Moore, who was born in Manchester, photographed in China and married a local Chinese woman.  He was a member of the London Amateur Photographic Association. Some of his surviving negatives are held in collections in Canada. 

The blog can…

The exhibition Pages from Photographic History is running at the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre a the Hermitage, St Petersburg. It acquaints visitors with the most important stages in the development of photography and touches on the technical, documentary and artistic sides of its evolution.

The exhibition is…

Numerous references to travelling photographers and mobile studios are sprinkled throughout the literature dedicated to photography. Robert Taft refers to photographic studios on board ships that sailed American rivers in his book Photography and the American Scene (Taft, 1938, p. 65-67). He recounts an undated anecdote about a confrontation…

BPH has just learnt of the death of Bill Barnes, the film history and collector who died in July at the age of 99 years. Barnes, along with his twin brother John, who died in 2008, was a collector and historian of early British cinema. For a time their outstanding collection was on display as as the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives. John managed the…

Just over a year since its acquisition, a taster of the vast MacKinnon Collection will be exhibited at the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG). The two institutions joined forces to purchase the collection — made up of more than 14,000 photographs dating from the 1840s to the mid-20th century in Scotland — in May…

In the early 19th century, the ideas of reform pedagogues such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) gave rise to a didactic turn towards the visual that criticized an exclusive textual mediation of knowledge through books and lectures (Depaepe 1999). The pedagogues and policymakers who strove for a more…

The current issue of Source magazine has a number of articles of interest to British photographic history. Sarah Macdonald, Heritage Collections Manager at the Royal Horticultural Society, looks at the RHS's photography collections. It includes over 400 cartes of horticulturalists.

Elsewhere, Richard West provides a useful overview…

Hans Rooseboom writes... On behalf of Mattie Boom I would like to bring your attention to our current research opportunities within the …

A forgotten cache of 13,000 Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) pictures has been rediscovered in an attic and is being "preserved for posterity". The photos were found earlier this year in a large dusty pile in the organisation's headquarters in Poole, Dorset. Work has been started to preserve the pictures, the earliest of which are from the 1920s,…

Terry O’Neill, the photographer who chronicled London’s 1960s culture by capturing the celebrities and public figures who defined the era, has died aged 81.

O’Neill, who was awarded a CBE last month for services to photography and was known for his work with the likes of Frank Sinatra, David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, died at home on Saturday night…

International photographer, designer and lecturer Janine Freeston discusses colour photography in Britain before the First World War and the beautiful Autochromes of Lionel de Rothschild. Janine is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and currently undertaking a PhD on early colour photography at…

This exhibition celebrates an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired and shared by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. The photographs were amassed by collector Murray MacKinnon and represent Scottish life and identity from the 1840s through the 1940s – a century of dramatic…

The photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983) and sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) first crossed paths during the Second World War, when they both created images of civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. Taking these acclaimed ‘shelter pictures’ as a starting point, this major exhibition will trace for the first time the parallel and…

Bristol Vintage Photograph Fair is a new event; offering for the first time in the West of England, an opportunity for collectors of early photography to meet the leading specialist vintage photograph dealers…

The Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) and the International Centre for Sports History and Culture (ICSHC), de Montfort University, in collaboration with the National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT) are currently offering a PhD position on the photographic history of the Paralympic community in Britain.…

As part of Scotland's Season of Photography the University of Glasgow has published a blog which explores the photographs contained within its business collections, and considers their unique value in archival research. The blog uses the Scottish Business Archive, part of the…

Daniel Meadows, who's archive is now housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is the subject of a short BBC film which was made at the launch of his Bodleian exhibition last month. In it Daniel and John Payne - the young boy holding the pigeon - are reunited after 45 years, John was one of Daniel's sitters at his photography bus in the 1970s.…

Stills gallery is to present a selection of photographs from The AmberSide Collection, a unique archive that continues to grow out of the documentary production, commissioning, exhibition and touring work of Newcastle-based Amber Film & Photography Collective. The group established itself in North East England in 1969 and opened Side Gallery in…