Michael Pritchard's Blog (1,936)

The second release of historic photographs of people, equipment and events, mostly from the early history of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, up to about 1970, is now available on line. The combined PhotoArchive now contains 406 images, 367 in black and white and 39 in colour. The first release contained images of many famous pieces of…

Today, the V&A announces the appointment of renowned photography curator and scholar Duncan Forbes as Director of Photography. Forbes will take up the newly-created role in April 2020 to drive forward the V&A’s reputation as one of the world’s leading institutions for the research, exhibition and understanding of international…

Hyperallergic has reported that Paris Musées is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums on open access — free of charge and without restrictions —…

How do scholars use photography in their research? What can they learn from photographs? What can we understand from them about our relationship with the photographs that we make and those that we encounter almost everywhere we go?

Edited by Dr Gil Pasternak from the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University (UK), The Handbook…

Dr Kelley Wilder, Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University has been awarded a Professorship in Photographic History at the same university. Details of her inaugural lecture will be announced in due course.

More to…

A new photography fair which will be held during Photo London has been announced. The Classic Photograph Fair London will offer a wide range of images from early paper negatives and daguerreotypes to press photographs documenting the stormy 1960s.  

The fair will take place on 16 May 2020 from 0900-1800 at the Arcade, Bush House, 60 Aldwych, London…

A new exhibition at the Stonehenge Visitor’s Center, is celebrating the nation’s memories of visiting the prehistoric site. A 1875 snapshot of Isabel, Maud, and Robert Routh, who made the journey there by horse-drawn carriage was unearthed by descendants of the Rouths in response to English Heritage’s request for family photographs taken at Stonehenge over…

Cambridge School of Art has announced a symposium Telling our tales through ambiguous photography: Decolonizing the visual library of the African continent as part of the Stories of Kalingalinga exhibition programme at the Ruskin Gallery. The symposium is designed to trigger conversations between academics, practitioners and students and…

Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography is a conference within a conference, hosted by the National Stereoscopic Association at the 46th annual 3D-Con in Tacoma, Washington.

In the last thirty years, scholarship on stereography has moved from the margins to a more central position in the…

Sport in its modern form developed contemporaneously with photography, and the growth of sport into a global phenomenon has been decisively influenced by its mediation in visual culture and photography. Photographs of sport, and of its most popular athletes, have long been essential not only to sports reporting but also to the commercial exploitation of…

The National Trust photography collections include around 550,000 objects located at 250 properties in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Dating from the 1840s through to today, they include prints, albums, cased objects, negatives, slides and photographic equipment. The in-situ nature of the collections sets them apart in the UK, offering rich…

You will work as a research assistant on a Paul Mellon funded project conducted by the National Trust and the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.  Your primary role will responsibility for co-ordinating a number of workshops involving academics and museum professionals, which are intended to explore approaches to the extensive…

In response to the exhibitions presented in the Photography Season at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, this conference will address the politics of photography in terms of its relationship to consumerism, capital and culture. The…

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…