Michael Pritchard's Blog (2,047)

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…

A BPH correspondent has been trying to find a reference to a photographer whose glass negatives were found in a friend's loft. The negs are all apparently marked 'H.M. & S.' and appear to date from the late 1890s or early 1900s. Does anyone recognise the initials?…

In 2021 The Photographers' Gallery, London, celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. A new online resource looks at…

Cambridge University's Whipple Museum collections are now fully online. Like other museums, only a small proportion of our collection is on display at any one time and, in the current public health situation, physical access to museums has become very challenging. But now you can search and browse through records and images of close to 7,000 objects, as well…

A free new online picture archive from Reach plc, the owners of The Mirror and The Express newspapers, has been launched as the nation goes into lockdown. Despite events being cancelled nationwide the new tool allows people to celebrate and share historical moments like fireworks night, Remembrance Sunday. Memory Lane is backed by…

A new resource describes the history of photography and photographic studios in South Africa. It is accompanied by a gazetteer of studios for the same period. The text and resource has been compiled by Carol Hardijzer. 

See:…

The latest edition of The Classic - a free magazine about classic photography is now available. In addition, the publishers have also launched The Classic Platform, an online resource with articles from Denis Pellerin and Richard Meara, and more due to go up shortly. Also available is an auction calendar. …

An early album of salt prints by Rev George Bridges is being offered in an online auction by Sotheby's from 3-17 November 2020. Bridges was a contemporary of Talbot and these show some of the first Calotypes of Greece, Turkey and Italy. It is estimated at £20,000-30,000. 

The lot description reads: 

BRIDGES, GEORGE WILSON

Album of…

Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books.…

Rachel Nordstrom from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Victor Flores, from Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal, Denis Pellerin and Rebecca Sharpe, from the London Stereoscopic Archive, have joined forces to organise this free online Zoom event, a celebration of Stereoscopic 3D. They have invited photo historians,…

Sophie Gordon, head of photographs at the Royal Collection Trust (RCT), Windsor, has now confirmed publicly that she is accepting voluntary redundancy. She has been at the Collection for 15 years. The RCT is undertaking a significant restructure following a fall in visitor numbers and revenues as a result of COVID-19. The Trust is also making compulsory…

In this talk I will discuss my work to draw to together the disparate photographic archive of the West India Regiments. Scattered across the Atlantic in public and private collections, photographs of the men who formed the first 'official' British Army regiment made up of men of African descent represent the men in contradictory…

A short post on BPH has drawn attention to the current owners of the Hills and Saunders negative archive selling off negatives individually on eBay. The collection is - or was - owned by Pete Boswell who posted on BPH about his acquisition…