A story that has been live for a while is the proposed sell off of the archive of the now-closed Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow. The story of the CCA and its closure, and relationship with Creative Scotland, the Scottish government and Glasgow City Council, is outside the scope of BPH. Check out the museum press and The Herald websites for more on this.The recent threat to 103 Trongate, Glasgow, which houses Street Level Photoworks and other arts organisations is a…

Since photography's invention in 1839, people have tried to photograph what cannot be seen: ghosts, dreams, prayers, sickness, sin, psychic forces—even the human soul. The images they produced are beautiful, unsettling, and often absurd. The experiments behind them are stranger still. Leading scientists, artists, physicians, and thinkers took these investigations seriously. Yet today…

Traditionally stories of culture and society have been held and told by institutional collections. But what about the everyday material which is hidden, forgotten or displaced outside of these traditional records? Who tells these stories and decides who they belong to, how they are looked after and what their value is? Who are they for? Whose Archive is it Anyway? is the first in a three-part series of events exploring the future of archives and archiving. This one-day event on…

To celebrate World Photography Day, on the 19 August 2026, photo historian and researcher Denis Pellerin, from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy, will be giving a free online 3-D talk: ‘The Weetabix Stereoscopic Cards and their Photographers‘. Discover the photographer who took the images for four of the six Weetabix cards sets with photo historian Denis Pellerin.

Everyone has their own personal story about how they got hooked for life on stereoscopy. The most widely known of those…

From the moment they were introduced, photographs were seen as fragile objects and their instability soon attracted the attention of scientists and photographers. During the industrial revolution, manufacturers took up the challenge of developing sensitive surfaces; and by the end of the 20th century, conservation institutes were conducting their…

This placement will contribute to the cataloguing and research of the V&A’s recently acquired Yu-Chee Chong Collection of Southeast Asian Photography (1860–1920), an outstanding collection of early photography unrivalled in its scope and significance. Spanning Southeast Asia and beyond, the collection documents a wide range of architectural, topographical, portrait and ethnographic…

We invite you to submit papers to our session, Intersections: Hong Kong and Photography from the 1840s to the Present at the College Art Association Annual Conference/CAA115 in New York City (Feb 3-6, 2027). 

During the First Opium War (1839-1842), the coastal fishing village of Hong Kong was ceded to the British Empire. From that moment, it occupied a singular place in the global circulation of goods, people, and ideas, emerging as an entrepôt of exchange, mobility,…

Inconjunction with an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery, London, is this associated publication. Whippersnappers is the first book to tell the history of children as photographers, from school societies in the 1880s, via…