Back in 2024 BPH noted that the Bodleian had acquired work from the Handsworth Self Portrait project and earlier this year reported the death of Brian…

As part of France's commemoration of the bicentennial of photography publishers have produced a number of books linked to the event and the French Ministry of Culture and the National Book Centre (CNL) have also supported a number directly. These have been published, or will appear during 2026-2027. A short selection of interest to BPH are highlighted below: 

• 900 x…

This event celebrates the publication of Dr Flora Dunster’s Hurled Towards the Future: Lesbian Photography and Queer Imagination in 1980s London (Paul Mellon Centre 2026). 

Hurled Towards the Future is the first art-historical account of photography from London’s lesbian sex-radical scene.…

In 1925, The Victoria and Albert Museum initiated ‘a new type of publication’: a series of sixpenny picture booklets devoted to various categories of museum object called, appropriately, ‘The Small Picture Books’. Between the first publication – on English Alabasters in 1925 – and 1938 there were 55 titles in all, selling in their hundreds of thousands. In a combination of excellent museum black and white photography and good rotogravure printing, these small books aimed to please and inform…

In celebration of International Women’s Day 2027,  we invite scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts to submit abstracts for participation as speakers, or panelists in a free, online, global, 24-hour online, free symposium dedicated to celebrating the contributions of women to the medium of photography from photography’s announcement in 1839 to contemporary practitioners in 2024. This unique event aims to highlight the diverse and impactful work of women and female-identifying…

AntiquarianAuctions is offering a copy of Samuel Palmer Chapman's Stolen Minutes with the Muses, printed for private circulation, in 1877. The book is illustrated with a tipped-in albumen portrait of the author by his son. What makes this book of particular interest, other than the fact only three other copies have been traced, is that Samual Chapman was a professional…

London's V&A Museum has acquired a self-portrait of Maria ‘Mia’ Jackson (1818-1892), née Pattle; 1818–92), one of six sisters of Julia Margaret Cameron. It was purchased from descendants of Julia along with a second ambrotype of a South Asian women. The collodion positive on glass, or ambrotype, is dated to c.1858 and offers the tantalising suggestion that photography amongst the Pattle sisters was not confined only to Julia. As V&A curator Marta Weiss notes the…