Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood of Exeter is offering a selection of photographs from Herbert Ponting, Noel Chanan, Lewis Hine and Cecil Beaton on 19 January 2016. The lots can be viewed on its website www.bhandl.co.uk in the Picture Section of the January Two Day Fine Art Sale [FS29] or through the link http://www.bhandl.co.uk/sales/assets/FS/2016/01/19/FS190116-pictures.pdf
Image: Herbert George Ponting [1870-1935], Giant Bamboos of Peradeniya, Ceylon, carbon print.
Society “Liber pro arte” in collaboration with Polish Association of Photography Historians and a yearly journal Dagerotyp is organizing an international conference Discovering “Peripheries”: Photographic Histories in Central and Eastern Europe which aims to explore the wealth of photographic practices in the region now commonly referred to as the former Communist bloc. As, generally speaking, photography in this part of the world has been understudied, the conference intends to promote discussion on its cultural, social and political characteristics in contexts such as national and state ideology, art, museums, education, business, everyday life and journalism.The event will be held from 31 May-1 June 2016 in Warsaw, Poland.
The organisers welcome applications from all disciplines and career stages for 20 minutes papers. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent by 15 February 2016 to conference2016@liberproarte.eu
For further information regarding the call for papers: http://liberproarte.eu/?page_id=422
De Montfort University's Photographic History Research Centre has announced its Spring term seminars. They are held on Tuesdays from 4-6pm, Hugh Aston Building, and are free and open to all.
‘Type-cast?’: Rethinking Studio Photography in the Hill Stations of British India
January 19 (Hugh Aston 2.08)
Professor Clare Harris (University of Oxford)
It is well known that from the 1860s onwards, individuals from all over the Indian subcontinent were photographed and classified according to ethnic, religious, and caste criteria, and thereby reduced to ‘type’ within the colonial anthropological project. This paper examines a parallel but neglected phenomenon of the late nineteenth century: the production of ‘type’ photography in commercial studios in the Himalayas and its reception in the ‘visual economy’ of the British Empire. By paying close attention to the activities and outputs of photographic studios and considering them as sites of transcultural encounter rather than of strict segregation between coloniser and colonised, I seek to reverse the process of ‘type’-casting that was inflicted on the local actors who performed within them.
Personal wartime photography in Egypt, 1898—1918
February 16 ( Hugh Aston 2.08)
Paul Fox (University of York)
Historians of the First World War have recently turned their attention to ‘personal photography’: the taking of photographs with privately owned portable cameras, and the disposal of the resulting prints in personal photograph albums or collections. The paper will contest the notion that this wartime phenomenon was without precedent by comparing First World War practice in Egypt with the way early portable cameras had been employed by British officers participating in the 1898 campaign to defeat a jihadist uprising in Sudan.
The paper will examine how privately owned portable cameras were used in the Sudan, and trace the public afterlife of photographs returned to Britain. It will then turn to the personal photography of members of the Royal Flying Corps based in Egypt during the First World War. It will explore the impact of the proliferation of camera use to include soldiers of all ranks, not least the potential to present life on active service from new social perspectives.
Travelling Memories: the Boissonnas photo-albums Salonique et ses basiliques (1913) and Smyrne (1919)
March 15 (Hugh Aston 4.15)
Dr Colette Wilson (University of Westminster)
Two photograph albums by the Swiss photographer Frédéric Boissonnas and his son Edmond-Edouard, Salonique et ses basiliques (1913) and Smyrne (1919), capture Salonica (Thessalonika) and Smyrna (Izmir) at crucial turning points in their histories before a chain of events ignited Greek and Turkish nationalism leading to their near destruction. While maintaining an awareness of the ‘locatedness of memory’ within a national context (Radstone), the albums, with their clear focus on Greek-Christian national identity and heritage, arguably function as carefully designed propaganda tools, the aim of which was to create a memory that would travel transculturally (Erll) around the world gaining support for Greece which hoped to unite all the Ottoman lands with Greek populations into a single Greek state, whose capital would be Constantinople. Greece’s ‘Great Idea’ may have died in the flames of Smyrna, but it lives on in the Boissonnas albums and their online presence.
Contact in case of queries: Professor Elizabeth Edwards eeddwards@dmu.ac.uk/ Dr Kelley Wilder kwilder@dmu.ac.uk
The Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group presents the Society's Hurter and Driffield Memorial lecture which this year will be given by Dr Sam Weller FRSA who will be talking about: Kodak Moments: A look through the rear view mirror. Sam was formerly Director of the Kodak European Research Laboratories in Cambridge.
The lecture takes place in London on 26 January 2016 from 5.30pm.
See more here: http://rps.org/events/2016/january/26/hurter--driffield-memorial-lecture
The work of photographer Frank Hurley is used on eight new stamps being issued by the Royal Mail on 7 January 2016. The set is being issued to commemorate Ernest Shackleton's polar voyage of 1914-1916. Shackleton's ship Endurance became stuck in ice and Shackleton with six companions then braved a voyage of 720 nautical miles in an open boat to the whaling stations of South Georgia to get help for his crew. They were finally rescued in August 1916.
The stamps' images have been created from the original glass photographic plates held by the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, and the Royal Geographical Society, London, and taken by Hurley. the Mint Stamps feature eight scenes captured by pioneering photographer Frank Hurley. The subjects are: Entering the Antarctic Ice 1st Class, Endurance Frozen in Pack Ice 1st Class, Striving to Free Endurance £1.00, Trapped in a Pressure Crack £1.00, Patience Camp £1.33, Safe Arrival at Elephant Island £1.33, Setting Out for South Georgia £1.52, and Rescue of Endurance Crew £1.52
See more here
The Historical Group of The Royal Photographic Society has arranged another of its popular - and useful - Research Days on Saturday, 9 January 2016 at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. The day will consist of more than twelve speakers presenting short papers about their research and work in progress. Topics range from Arthur Marshall, Isabella Bird and George Washington Wilson, to Simla and daguerreotypy amongst many others.
The day will be of interest to anyone interested in researching photographic history, students and genealogists. Places are limited. To book a place click here: http://www.rps.org/events/2016/january/09/research-day
This new publication by Steven F Joseph is the first comprehensive and richly illustrated overview of historical Belgian photographic literature. It presents comprehensive survey of both of illustrated books and of technical publications. It makes a major contribution to academic study in the field, with a corpus composed of 681 entries and, for each title, indicates locations of surviving copies in institutional collections in Belgium and elsewhere. An introductory essay plots the development of photographic publishing in Belgium, making full use of primary and secondary sources. An album of over eighty images draws on the rich iconography of early Belgian photographic literature, most reprinted for the first time. It is published in English and French.
440 pages, €69,50, published by Leuven University Press.
For more information, including a full table of contents and sample pages see: http://upers.kuleuven.be/en/book/9789462700475
The Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fonds / Rijksmuseum Fonds enables the Rijksmuseum to annually award two postgraduate Fellowships that stimulate outstanding object-based, photo-historical research by prospective curators from the Netherlands or abroad.
Fellowships are awarded for a six-month period. The focus of research should be related to the National Photo Collection held by the Rijksmuseum’s Print Room. The Rijksmuseum will endeavor to enable publication of the Fellow’s research. This could be an in-depth study of one photograph or photo book and/or its distribution; on a series of photographs or part of an oeuvre; on the aesthetic or technical aspects of photography; on the wider context of a photo book or album; or on combinations of art-historical research and research on materials and techniques.
The Rijksmuseum Fellowship Programme
As part of the Rijksmuseum Fellowship Programme, the Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fellowship is set out to train a new generation of museum professionals: inquisitive object-based specialists who will further develop understanding of Netherlandish art and history for the future. The Rijksmuseum will provide working space for the Fellows, in order to stimulate an exchange of knowledge, ideas and experience. Access will be provided to all necessary information in the museum, as well as to the library and the resources of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague.
Application and procedure
The closing date for all applications is 13 March 2016, at 6:00 p.m. (Amsterdam time/CET). Selection will be made by an international committee in April 2016. The committee consists of eminent scholars in the relevant fields of study from European universities and institutions, and members of the curatorial staff of the Rijksmuseum. Applicants will be notified by 1 May 2016. All Fellowships will start in September 2016.
For further information click here.
The V&A Photographs department will be producing a display in Gallery 38A titled: The Camera Exposed. It will explore themes around the presence of ‘the camera’, or some trace of it, in photographs. Spanning the history of photography, the display will present works that explore this theme different ways, from photographers’ self-portraits with their cameras to more conceptual pieces. Artists featured include Charles Thurston Thompson, Lady Hawarden, Bill Brandt, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Image: Charles Thurston Thompson, ‘Venetian mirror circa 1700, from the collection of Mr. John Webb’, 1853
Bronwen Colquhoun, Assistant Curator of Photography at the V&A, London, is leaving to take up the recently advertised post of Senior Curator of Photography at the National Museum of Wales in February 2016. The role was noted on BPH in October - click here to see the job description. Bron has been with the Photographs Department since 2012.
Her PhD, which she was awarded earlier this year from Newcastle University, examined how photo-sharing website, Flickr The Commons, supports community engagement and builds new knowledge and meaning around historic photographic collections.
She has previously worked at the Library of Congress, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, English Heritage and volunteered at the National Media Museum.
The Science Museum is to present a major exhibition exploring the work of British photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph, which opens in the Museum’s Media Space in April, will present the birth of photography in Britain within its industrial and social context, and reveal the extent of Talbot’s remarkable experiments as the figurehead of a new and influential medium that changed the way people saw themselves and the world.
The Science Museum Group, as custodians of the world’s most comprehensive and important collection of work by William Henry Fox Talbot, is uniquely placed to tell the story of how photography was borne out of a 19th century desire to experiment with emerging ideas and technologies. Photography was one of many fields in which Talbot was working, but it was his invention of the negative-positive process which formed the basis of photography around the world for over 150 years, that immortalised him as the father of the medium.
Five years after making his discovery public he published The Pencil of Nature, the first commercial publication to be illustrated using photographs. Alongside his artistic and scientific aspirations for the medium, Talbot had one eye on its commercial potential. The exhibition is a testament to Talbot’s magical and industrial visions for his invention, ranging from the delicate capture of natural specimens to functional ambitions for photography as a means of mass production.
In 1934, Talbot’s granddaughter Matilda organised an exhibition marking the centenary of his first photographic experiments at Lacock Abbey, the site of production for what is considered to be the earliest photographic negative - the latticed window - taken using an improvised ‘mousetrap’ camera. Shortly after this exhibition, approximately 6,500 items were transferred from Talbot’s former home to the Science Museum so that his unique and valuable works, including some incredibly fragile items, could be preserved for the nation. Some of the earliest examples of his processes will be displayed for the first time in this exhibition.
Russell Roberts, co-curator and Reader in Photography at the University of South Wales said: ‘Photography without question was one of the most profound inventions of 19th century Britain. Talbot not only set in motion a new way of seeing but, through his writings and experiments, identified the distinctiveness of photography as an art, science and industry. He left an extensive visual record of the medium’s possibilities that reveals a sophisticated consciousness at work. This exhibition allows us to fully appreciate the extent of his achievements and to reinforce the impact of his invention on social and cultural life.’
Greg Hobson, co-curator and Curator of Photographs, National Media Museum said: ‘William Henry Fox Talbot wasn’t only one of the key figures in the invention of photography; he anticipated its uses and usefulness with intelligence and a vision for its critical role in modernity. It is a delight to be able to examine these significant contributions through our remarkable holdings in the National Photography Collection.'
Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph explores how the work of this pioneer bridged art, science and industry to define what was possible in the formative moments of photography. The Science Museum’s industrial collections will complement the early Talbot work in the exhibition. They will situate Talbot’s experiments in the context of other contemporary innovations and set the scene for how people shared ideas at the time.
The exhibition also explores the relationships between a network of photographers who gravitated towards Talbot’s process but who each took photography into different territory. Assessing their artistic contribution and social legacy, it reflects on how enthusiasm for photography was initially limited to a small close-knit, elite group of people.
Towards the end of the exhibition, the work of Talbot’s contemporaries including Anna Atkins, Hill and Adamson, and Calvert Jones will be displayed in an exploration of how technology, techniques and practices were shared or inspired others in different parts of the country to a variety of ends.
Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photography
14 April – 11 September 2016, Media Space, Science Museum, London
Admission £8, Seniors £7, Concessions £6 (prices include donation)
William Henry Fox Talbot, a special catalogue published to accompany the exhibition will feature 100 high-quality reproductions of Talbot’s work, RRP £27.95.
For more about the exhibition, visit www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/foxtalbot
Anthropology & Photography is a new open-access publication series edited by the RAIPhotography Committee. Emerging from the international conference of the same name organized by the RAI at the British Museum in 2014, the series will highlight and make available to the widest possible audience the best new work in the field.
The RAI Photography Committee consists of:
Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University)
Haidy Geismar (University College London)
Anita Herle (University of Cambridge)
Christopher Morton (University of Oxford)
Christopher Pinney (University College London)
Patrick Sutherland (University of the Arts)
Ariadne van de Ven (independent photographer)
Volume 1 Daniel Miller, Photography in the Age of Snapchat (published December 2015)
From the 1850s to the 1950s, photography was one of the most open avenues for Jews in Britain to make a living, as well as to contribute to mainstream culture. If one’s picture was snapped for a price in Britain, the person behind the lens was more than likely born a Jew. Through the 1970s, Jews were prime movers behind nearly all things photographic in Britain, including photojournalism, portrait studios, collecting, applications of photography to the fine arts, and the emergence of photography criticism and history as distinct fields. Yet despite Jews having played such remarkable roles, far out of proportion to their number and in all facets of photography, little attention has been paid to ethnic-religious difference in studies of British photography.
Richly illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, Jews and Photography in Britain is the first-ever historical investigation of this topic, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to Queen Elizabeth’s controversial photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz in 2007. Michael Berkowitz explores subjects such as the attempts of H. W. Barnett to unsettle portrait conventions, the spectacular photo editing of Stefan Lorant, the influence of Erich Salomon on Fleet Street, the inception of the “Gernsheim Corpus” (a seminal resource for art historical research) conceived by Walter and Gertrud Gernsheim, the innovative photography practices at London’s Warburg Institute under Fritz Saxl, and the pioneering efforts at collecting and publishing about photography as history and art by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim.
Jews and Photography in Britain
Michael Berkowitz
University of Texas Press
Hardcover
392pp, 96 b&w photos
ISBN: 978-1-4773-0556-0
This is new book that looks at the developments of motion picture film technology from a British perspective between 1895 to 2015. Renowned film historian Kevin Brownlow says: 'the book is not only unputdownable - it's heavy enough to be unpickupable!' The book will be of interest to film archivists and those interested in the technical side of film and includes chapters on How It Worked; The Film Business Gets Going; The 1920s - Time of Change; A Quest For Colour; The 1930s and 40s; New Film, New Colour, New Sound, New Screens of the 1950s and 60s; The Film Laboratory, and Slow Fade Out covering from the 1970s to 2015.
The chapters cover the very first cameras and projectors and how they worked; the development of equipment for both professional and amateur film making; colour and sound; Kodak and other manufacturer’s motion picture film stocks; how film was developed and printed at the laboratory; and cinema, non-theatric and home projection.
How Films Were Made and Shown
David Cleveland and Brian Pritchard (no relation!)
453 pages, over 900 illustrations
Price: £45 including delivery in UK, for overseas delivery, please email: brian@brianpritchard.com
and remit by Paypal to brianrpritchard@aol.com
See more about the book here. and a flyer can be downloaded here..
On the occasion of Professor Elizabeth Edwards’ retirement, the 2016 PHRC Annual International Conference will address themes from her complex and wide ranging scholarship on the cultural work of current and historical social photographic practices. Thus, Photography: Between Anthropology and History aims to showcase scholarship driven by engagements with research methodologies that informed the material and ethnographic turns in the study of photographic history, and opened up a variety of innovative critical spaces for the re/consideration of photography and its history.
We welcome applications from all disciplines and career stages, and would like to invite abstracts for 20 minute papers on topics such as, the colonial-era photographic image, photographic museum practices, photography’s printed ephemera, the sociability of photographic knowledge, its development and dynamics of exchange, and the local, national or trans-national photographic imagination. Applicants might also consider different subject matters, related but not limited to the following themes:
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to: phrc@dmu.ac.uk by the 20 January 2016.
See more here.
The successful candidate for this post will have a track record of internationally-recognised research, including successful grant bids as well as published work of a calibre which meets the standards of the Research Excellence Framework, and clear plans for future research. They will be able fully to contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and programme development, undertake senior administrative duties, and be prepared to work collaboratively with colleagues across the School.
About the Department
For further information about the department and, please visit the following website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history/
Further Information
Salary: Grade 9 (Senior Lecturer/Reader) of the College's London Pay Scale which is £52,780 rising to £58,939 per annum.
The British Journal of Photography has been digitised up to 2005 with the remainder to be completed early in 2016, BPH first reported on the project here back in 2013. The digital archive is currently only available to colleges, universities and institutional subscribers via Proquest.
The publisher of the BJP, Apptitude Media, is intending to make the digitised BJP from 1854 to the present day accessible to the wider public in 2016, although BPH understands that the charging model has yet to be determined.
See the Proquest Art and Architecture catalogue here.
BPH will report when the BJP becomes publicly available but in the meantime from its January 2016 issue the BJP is delving in to its digital archive for a regular back page feature.
This one-day conference will present new research on the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron's social, religious, colonial and artistic contexts. International speakers will explore themes such as Cameron’s experimental techniques and exchanges with other artists and her lasting impact and relevance for contemporary practitioners.
Programme
10.00 -10.30 Coffee and Registration
10.30 Welcome and Introduction, Matilda Pye, Department of Learning
New Research
Marta Weiss, Curator of Photographs, V&A
Erika Lederman, Researcher, V&A
11.15 Chance. Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
11.45 Little Holland House. Barbara Bryant, Independent Scholar
12.15 Discussion
13.00 Lunch Break
14.00 Religion. Joanne Lukitsh, Professor, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
14.30 Class and Colonialism. Juliet Hacking, Programme Director, MA Photography, Sotheby’s Institute
15.00 The Herschel Album. Colin Ford, Founding Director of Bradford in conversation with Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs, V&A
15.45 Refreshments
16.10 Legacies.
Cameron and Sri Lanka. Sunara Begum, Visual-Anthro-Mythologist
Cameron and Dimbola Lodge. Tracy Shields, Screenwriter
17.00 Closing Remarks
17.15 Close
£35, £30 concessions, £15 students
See more here and book: http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/5919/julia-margaret-cameron-at-200-275264027/
The year 2015 marked the bicentenary of the birth of Calcutta-born photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. In eight short statements, researchers and curators will reflect on the status of the Victorian photographer in the history of photography at large while also using her work as a springboard to think about the present and the future of an increasingly globally conceived historical field. Besides historiographical contributions, some speakers will contemplate on their previous research on Julia Margaret Cameron and how they see it today, while others will present new insights, for example on her colonial work made in Ceylon or her intellectual connections with networks of scientists, artists and collectors. Chaired by Geraldine Johnson and Richard Ovenden, with contributions by Mirjam Brusius, Elizabeth Edwards, Nichole Fazio-Veigel, Colin Ford, Pamela Roberts, Larry J Schaaf, Emilia Terracciano and Marta Weiss.
This symposium is accompanied by a small display, 'Julia Margaret Cameron: The Henry Taylor Album', in Blackwell Hall, Weston Library, from early January.
The photographs of Victoria photographic pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) can be found in a number of albums held at the Bodleian Library, amongst them an album, which she had compiled for Sir Henry Taylor. But beyond her friendship with the dramatist, the Calcutta-born photographer was connected to a wide range of 19th century artists and savants. Some of these friends received albums as gifts specifically compiled for them while others collected her photographs for pleasure or as a means of support of the contested photographer. This display showcases works by Cameron, supplementing the Taylor Album by letters and further photographic items. Tracing the individual histories of these objects reveals much about the movement of photographs over decades and about the intellectual ownership networks in which they circulated.
This event is free but places are limited so please complete the booking form to reserve tickets in advance.
In March 2016, the V&A will present the first retrospective of the American artist Paul Strand (1890-1976) in the UK for over 30 years. Revered as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Strand defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practiced today.
Part of a tour organised by Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the V&A exhibition will reveal Strand’s trailblazing experiments with abstract photography, screen what is widely thought of as the first avant-garde film and show the full extent of his photographs made on his global travels beginning in New York in 1910 and ending in France in 1976. Newly acquired photographs from Strand’s only UK project will be shown – a 1954 study of the island of South Uist in the Scottish Hebrides supplemented by further works already in the V&A’s own collection.
Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century will encompass over 200 objects from exquisite vintage photographic prints to films, books, notebooks, sketches and Strand’s own cameras to trace his career over sixty years. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition will broaden understanding to reveal Strand as an international photographer and filmmaker with work spanning myriad geographic regions and social and political issues.
Martin Barnes, curator of the exhibition said: “The V&A was one of a handful of UK institutions to collect Paul Strand’s work during his lifetime and the Museum now houses the most extensive collection of his prints in the UK. Through important additional loans, the exhibition will not only explore the life and career of Strand, but also challenge the popular perception of Strand as primarily a photographer of American places and people of the early 20th century.”
The exhibition will begin in Strand’s native New York in the 1910s, exploring his early works of its financial district, railyards, wharves and factories. During this time he broke with the soft-focus and Impressionist-inspired ‘Pictorialist’ style of photography to produce among the first abstract pictures made with a camera. The influence of photographic contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn as well European modern artists such as Braque and Picasso can be seen in Strand’s experiments in this period. On display will be early masterpieces such as Wall Street which depicts the anonymity of individuals on their way to work set against the towering architectural geometry and implied economic forces of the modern city. Strand’s early experiments in abstraction, Abstraction, Porch Shadows and White Fence will also be shown, alongside candid and anonymous street portraits made secretly using a camera with a decoy lens, such as Blind Woman.
The exhibition explores Strand’s experiments with the moving image with the film Manhatta (1920 - 21), the first time it has been screened in its entirety in the UK. A collaboration with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Manhatta was hailed as the first avant-garde film, and traces a day in the life of New York from sunrise to sunset punctuated by lines of Walt Whitman poetry. Strand’s embrace of the machine and human form is a key focus of the exhibition. In 1922, he bought an Akeley movie camera. The close-up studies he made of both his first wife Rebecca Salsbury and the Akeley during this time will be shown alongside the camera itself. Extracts of Strand’s later, more politicised films, such as Redes (The Wave), made in cooperation with the Mexican government are featured, as well as the scarcely-shown documentary Native Land, a controversial film exposing the violations of America’s workforce.
Strand travelled extensively and the exhibition will emphasise his international output from the 1930s to the late 1960s, during which he collaborated with leading writers to publish a series of photo books. As Strand’s career progressed, his work became increasingly politicised and focused on social documentary. The exhibition will feature Strand’s first photobook Time in New England (1950), alongside others including a homage to his adopted home France and his photographic hero Eugène Atget, La France de profil, made in collaboration with the French poet, Claude Roy. One of Strand’s most celebrated images, The Family, Luzzara, (The Lusetti’s) was taken in a modest agricultural village in Italy’s Po River valley for the photobook Un Paese, for which he collaborated with the Neo-Realist writer, Cesare Zavattini. On display, this hauntingly direct photograph depicts a strong matriarch flanked by her brood of five sons, all living with the aftermath of the Second World War.
The images Strand took during his 1954 trip to the Scottish Hebrides reveal his methodical and meticulous approach to photography, much like a studio photographer in the open air. Strand conjured the sights, sounds and textures of the place steeped in the threatened traditions of Gaelic language, fishing and agricultural life of pre-Industrial times. The intimate set of black and white photographs include the V&A’s newly acquired image of a brooding youth, Angus Peter MacIntyre, South Uist, Hebrides; the patinated geology of Rock, Lock Eynort, South Uist, Hebrides and the all-encompassing expanse of the Atlantic Ocean depicted in Sea Rocks and Sea, The Atlantic, South Uist, Hebrides.
From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Strand photographed Egypt, Morocco and Ghana, all of which had gone through transformative political change. The exhibition will show Strand’s most compelling pictures from this period, including his tender portraits, complemented by remarkable street pictures showing meetings, political rallies and outdoor markets. The exhibition will conclude with Strand’s final photographic series exploring his home and garden in Orgeval, France, where he lived with his third wife Hazel until his death in 1976. The images are an intimate counterpoint to Strand’s previous projects and offer a rare glimpse into his own domestic happiness.
Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century
19 March – 3 July 2016
Supported by the American Friends of the V&A
vam.ac.uk/paulstrand | #PaulStrand
Image: Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides, 1954, Paul Strand. © Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation. Photograph Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
