With the summer holidays upon us it's time to catch up on some reading. This new publication which BPH came across by chance a few weeks ago and purchased is a much needed study of an overlooked subject, from a country which has done so much to influence photography.Highly recommended!

The Japanese passion for photography is almost a cliché, but how did it begin? Although Japanese art photography has been widely studied this book is the first to demonstrate how photography became an everyday activity. Japan's enthusiasm for photography emerged alongside a retail and consumer revolution that marketed products and activities that fit into a modern, tasteful, middle-class lifestyle.

Kerry Ross examines the magazines and merchandise promoted to ordinary Japanese people in the early twentieth century that allowed Japanese consumers to participate in that lifestyle, and gave them a powerful tool to define its contours. Each chapter discusses a different facet of this phenomenon, from the revolution in retail camera shops, to the blizzard of socially constructive how-to manuals, and to the vocabulary of popular aesthetics that developed from enthusiasts sharing photos.

Ross looks at the quotidian activities that went into the entire picture-making process, activities not typically understood as photographic in nature, such as shopping for a camera, reading photography magazines, and even preserving one's pictures in albums. These very activities, promoted and sponsored by the industry, embedded the camera in everyday life as both a consumer object and a technology for understanding modernity, making it the irresistible enterprise that Eastman encountered in his first visit to Japan in 1920 when he remarked that the Japanese people were "almost as addicted to the Kodak habit as ourselves."

Kerry Ross is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University.

Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Kerry Ross

Stanford University Press

288pp  9780804795647 PB £16.99 now only £13.59* when you quote CSL815PHFE when you order from: 

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/photography-for-everyone  

The Public Domain Review carries an interesting article on photographs from the collection of Tempest Anderson, the pioneering Victorian volcanologist. It is written by Pat Hadley, Sarah King and Stuart Ogilvy from The Yorkshire Museum (York Museums Trust) which holds a collection of 5000 lantern slides which have been digitised. 

You can read the full article here: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/tempest-anderson-pioneer-of-volcano-photography/ which also carries links to further references. The digitised slides are here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Tempest_Anderson_Collection_(vulcanology)

Rare folios of cyanotypes by 19th century British naturalist and early photographer Anna Atkins, held in the Horniman Museum and Gardens’ collection, have inspired a new display by artist and academic Edward Chell.

Chell’s fascination with collecting and classification led him to these folios and in Bloom he responds to them with a series of detailed painted plant silhouettes inspired by plants, and images of plants, in the Horniman’s Gardens and historic collection.  Painted onto individual gesso panels, and accompanied by other related objects he has made, Edward’s images are shown alongside some of the artefacts that inspired them including one of Atkins’ books documenting British algae, widely recognised as the first to be published with photographic illustrations.

Bloom can be seen in the Horniman’s Natural History Gallery until 6 December 2015.  Entrance to the display is free. See: http://www.horniman.ac.uk/

Image: © Edward Chell, Photographer Peter Abrahams

This beautifully bound, large-format, 296 page hardcover book was written by Pamela Roberts to accompany her exhibition based on the unique contribution to the developing photographic aesthetics made by the pioneering artistic photographer Alvin Landon Coburn. Having been unveiled at Fundacion Mapfre in Madrid, the exhibition is now en route to George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where it will open in October 2015.

Prior to starting as a freelance writer and curator in 2001, Pamela Roberts was the curator of the RPS collection for nineteen years, until its transfer to the National Media Museum. This is the most recent one of many insightful volumes she has written on lesser known histories of photography and photographers.

Drawing on the world’s leading collections of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s prints and negatives, cameras, correspondence and ephemera from George Eastman House and the National Media Museum, along with contributions from smaller yet still significant collections, Roberts has assembled for the first time in one exhibition and one book the most comprehensive collection of his life’s work. Through a detailed understanding of his life, writings and letters, Roberts reveals a hitherto underappreciated, intellectual and creative depth and breadth to his photographic exploration and range of production. From portraits to monuments, stereographs to Vortographs, from his colourful prints and paintings to his stirring cityscapes and landscapes, the reader is led through Coburn’s decades of globetrotting and his tenaciously pioneering relationship with photography. Leaving none of his life out of focus, Robert’s coverage of the time when Coburn stepped away from the limelight to seek a more spiritual life is empathetic, revealing much more of the man himself away from the camera and photography.

The one hundred and eighty photographs featured in the book are meticulously reproduced to show the subtle nuances in tones and colours between each of the many processes Coburn chose over his lifetime. His breathtakingly beautiful images are exquisitely framed by Robert’s meticulously detailed and exhaustive text that brings to life the man behind the camera, pen and paintbrush. Her closely observed, rich contextualisation far exceeds Coburn's own painstaking autobiography or his collaborations with others in the latter part of his life. That which Coburn either dismissed or forgot Roberts has evoked to enrich our perspective of his life’s work.

Once Roberts has covered the early works and portraits, the layout and structure of the catalogue have been designed, due to Coburn’s apparent wanderlust, in geographical chronologies ending with his later work and paintings.

This book is unique and beautifully crafted, rendered with a similar spirit of craft, passion, consideration and empathy for Coburn as he had for his photography. As a catalogue it is an amazing permanent record of a unique exhibition. As a book it is a beautifully rendered biography in words and deeds, and comes highly recommended.

Janine Freeston
Chair of the Historical Group of The Royal Photographic Society

Alvin Langdon Coburn
Pamela Roberts and Anne Cartier-Bresson
Fundación Mapfre, 296 pages, 
ISBN 978-8498444988

Available from: FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE or from Amazon.

In 113-pages Rita and Jack Tait relate the story of Ifor and Joy Thomas and the Guildford school of photography. Part biography and part a history of early post-war photographic education the book shows the importance of the Thomas’s and their influence across a large swathe of photographers and educators – including Jane Bown, Tessa Traeger, Julia Hedgecoe and Adam Woolfitt.  The Guildford school influenced a generation of photographers many of whom are still involved in the field.

The book is believed to be the first in-depth study of photographic teaching.

Guildford Photography. The life and work of Ifor and Joy Thomas
Rita and Jack Tait
Bronydd Press, £10 plus £3 p+p
Order from Jack Tait: machinedraw@btconnect.com

Released early in 2015 and shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June Eadweard is a psychological drama centred around the British photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his studies of motion who is recognised as the godfather of cinema. Along the way he murdered his wife’s lover, and was the last American to receive the justifiable homicide verdict.

See the trailer here:

Read more here: http://www.motion58.com/films/eadweard/

As the cradle for both global and domestic photographic talents, Britain has always been a frontier in British photography education, which keeps focusing on the critical thinking and creativity in their students under the principle of interdisciplinary speculative knowledge. Graduates from such education usually impress the public as well as enrich the entire British photography with their personal ideas and practices into new curriculums. Based on a research on the modern British photography history, this lecture is about to conduct the audience through the changes and stages of its photography education under the influence of British politics, and to explore the current cases in nowadays universities featuring how different teaching modes make a difference to the photographers.

Talk given by Yining He
Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
19:00, 7 August 2015

The J. Paul Getty Museum has announced the acquisition of thirty-nine French and British photographs from the 1840s through 1860s, representing some of the most impressive architectural and landscape prints and negatives produced in photography’s early years. The works were acquired from Jay McDonald, a Santa Monica resident who has actively collected photographs since the 1970s and has amassed one of the finest private collections of 19th-century photography in the United States.

“With this acquisition, the Getty Museum is poised to become one of the most important resources for the sustained study of early negative/positive photography that came out of the revolutionary first generation of experimentation with the new medium. It represents one of the rare moments when science and art come together to produce something totally unexpected – indeed a totally new art form,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This acquisition also reinforces our commitment to collecting photography that spans the full history of the art form and places the Getty among the most significant repositories of early paper negatives in an American collection, rivaled only by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the George Eastman House.”

The group of works includes six prints and four negatives by Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880), four prints by Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (Bisson Frères) (French, 1814-1876 and 1826-1900), three prints by André Giroux (French, 1801-1879), three paper negatives by Louis–Rémy Robert (French, 1810-1882), a print and negative by Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882), a print and negative by Captain Linnaeus Tripe (English, 1822-1902), as well as single works by Édouard Baldus, Eugène Cuvelier, Louis De Clercq, Roger Fenton, Frédéric Flacheron, John Beasley Greene, Louis-Adolphe Humbert De Molard, Gustave Le Grey, Charles Marville, Léon-Eugène Méhédin, Dr. John Murray, Victor Regnault, Captain Horatio Ross, Benjamin Brecknell Turner, and an unknown photographer. All works are in excellent condition, underscoring the degree to which early practitioners became invested in the craftsmanship of the medium.

Created by some of the most significant photographers of this period and primarily featuring landscapes and architecture, the works reflect the active debate on aesthetic and scientific aspects of early photography that animated the medium at the time. The experimentation and bold compositional choices of these photographers became foundational for subsequent generations who sought to capture the natural and man-made wonders of the world. Subjects include important architectural sites around the world, from Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Roman Coliseum to the Taj Mahal and sites in Burma; as well as historic examples of early photojournalism, including a flood in Southern France, the aftermath of an earthquake in a Swiss village, and one of the battlefields of the Crimean War. Other scenes depict villages, ruins, and tree-lined roads across Europe.

The acquisition also ensures that the Museum’s photography holdings will better complement its collection of paintings from this period. Because many early photographers were trained as painters, there was a sustained dialogue between the two media. The spirit of experimentation in photography played a critical role in the development of modern art, and the Getty will now be an important West Coast resource for the study of this relationship, both as established during photography’s early decades and as demonstrated by practitioners working today who apply similarly experimental approaches that revel in the immediacy of the materials and potential of the medium. The work of seven such artists can be seen in the current exhibition, Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography, on view at the Getty Center through September 6.

“As rare as it is to find individual prints and negatives of this quality, it is all the more extraordinary to have the opportunity to acquire a collection that has been so expertly assembled and preserved,” says Virginia Heckert, curator and department head of the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs. “The sixteen paper negatives in the group comprise a particularly important component of the acquisition, as they triple our holdings of paper negatives by French makers and add four excellent negatives by British makers.”

Selected French works from the acquisition will be included in the Getty exhibition and publication Real/Ideal: Photography in France, 1848-1871 (working title) in preparation by assistant curator Karen Hellman for fall 2016.

Images (Left to Right):
Taj Mahal, 1862, Dr. John Murray (British, 1809 – 1898). Paper negative, sky opaqued with ink and graphite, 37 x 47 cm (14 9/16 x 18 1/2 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015.42

Notre-Dame, Paris, about 1853, Charles Nègre (French, 1820 – 1880). Waxed paper negative, 33.6 x 24 cm (13 1/4 x 9 7/16 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015.43.1

Village Scene with Geese, about 1855, André Giroux (French, 1801 – 1879). Salt print from a paper negative, 21.5 x 27.5 cm (8 7/16 x 10 13/16 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015.35.3

There's just over one week left to apply for two roles available with Candlestar and Photo London. Candlestar which manages the Prix Pictet Prize and PhotoLondon is seeking to appoint two individuals to important senior roles.

The first is for a Project Manager for Prix Pictet and the second will join the Photo London team as Gallery Development Manager.

Candidates for both roles will need a thorough understanding of the international photography and art markets and will be enthusiastic, diplomatic project management professionals who have a considerable track record of achievement.  The successful candidates will need to be able to deliver high quality results for complex projects on time and on budget. They should be used to meeting deadlines and working under pressure.  A minimum 3 years managerial experience gained working in a gallery, auction house, art fair or art production environment will be particularly important in both instances.

Find the Job Description and Person Specification for the role of Project Manager for Prix Pictet by clicking here

Find the Job Description and Person Specification for the role of Gallery Development Manager by clicking here

The closing date for applications is Monday 3rd August and interviews will take place in the week commencing 10th August.

Please send all CVs and a covering letter to Kathryn Hill at Kathryn.hill@candlestar.co.uk if you are interested in applying for either role.

Read more about Candlestart here.

Early scientific ‘photographs of the invisible’ — from x-ray to photomicrography, motion studies to pictures of electrical charges — have had a profound effect on the development of modern and contemporary art.  Bringing together world-renowned artists, curators and academics, and coinciding with the final days of Revelations: Experiments in Photography, this one-day symposium examines the importance of early scientific photography for the creative arts and the ways in which its meanings have shifted across time and space.

Speakers include:

• John Blakinger, Stanford University / National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
• Marta Braun, Ryerson University
• Ben Burbridge, University of Sussex / co-curator Revelations
• Ori Gersht, artist
• Marek Kukula, Royal Observatory Greenwich
• Corey Keller, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Sarah Pickering, artist
• Kelley Wilder, De Montfort University  

Panels will be chaired by: Greg Hobson (National Media Museum / co-curator Revelations); David Alan Mellor (University of Sussex); and Sean O’Hagan (The Guardian).

Organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Visual, University of Sussex.

Beyond Vision: Art, Photography and Science
12 September 2015
10:30 – 17:30

£15 adult/ £12.50 senior/ £10 concessions

For more information and to book tickets visit the Science Museum website here.

Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Professor of Photographic History, Director of Photographic History Research Centre, at De Montfort University, Leicester, has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). The honour is given in recognition of outstanding research and it is the first time that a photographic historian has been recognised by the Academy in this way.

Edwards is retiring from DMU at the end of the year and her post has been advertised and applications remain open until 18 September.  

The IS&T Archiving Conference brings together an international community of imaging experts and technicians as well as curators, managers, and researchers from libraries, archives, museums, records management repositories, information technology institutions, and commercial enterprises to explore and discuss the field of digitization of cultural heritage and archiving. The conference presents the latest research results on digitization and curation, provides a forum to explore new strategies and policies, and reports on successful projects that can serve as benchmarks in the field. Archiving 2016 is a blend of short courses, invited focal papers, keynote talks, and peer-reviewed oral and interactive display presentations, offering attendees a unique opportunity for gaining and exchanging knowledge and building networks among professionals.

You can see more here or download the attachment here: Archiving2016_Call_for_Papers.pdf. 

York, and more recently Bradford-based, Impressions Gallery, along with London's The Photographers' Gallery, are the United Kingdom's oldest extant photography galleries. They have both survived the years and continue to produce exciting, ground-breaking and simply, interesting, exhibitions of photography, albeit with significant Arts Council England funding. 

To coincide with the transfer of its archives, which date back to its founding in 1972, to the National Media Museum, Impressions Gallery has produced an 80-page book summarising its history and outlining its current activities and ethos. Compiled by Director Anne McNeil and Head of Programme Pippa Oldfield, the book is part history and part hagiography. It may also be a justification for the Gallery's existence - despite the fact that Impressions Gallery hardly needs a book to justify itself. In the current declining public funding climate it probably does no harm to show national and local politicians and funding bodies such as ACE what it has achieved over its forty-plus years. The pages are interspersed with inserted sections showing where its exhibitions have toured to, the photographers it has exhibited, and its reach in its new home in the city of Bradford. 

This book is not the history of Impressions Gallery that some would want, but it is far more than simply a justification for why the Gallery exists. The book will prove to be a starting point for historians looking at Britain's still modest photography scene and it does much to show why Impressions Gallery has justified its funding over the years. 

As for the Impressions Gallery archives these are now, in theory, accessible to researchers and the public through Insight at the National Media Museum. It is from those that a fuller history of Impressions Gallery and the UK's post-1970s gallery scene will need to be based upon.

Visit Impressions Gallery here: http://www.impressions-gallery.com/

The History and Archives department of the German Photographic Association (DGPh) is awarding a grant concerning the history of the German-language photobook. This grant, which, initially, is going to be advertised over a ten-year period at two-yearly intervals, is intended specifically to promote historical research into all aspects of photojournalism as a part of general photography history. The grant owes its existence to the initiative and legacy of the internationally renowned designer, curator, collector and photography promoter Manfred Heiting (DGPh).

Treatment of the following, related topical fields is conceivable, for instance:

• History of photomechanical printing methods as well as of the associated industries (printers/graphic arts institutions/block factories, paper makers, press builders) in the late 19th and 20th century
• History of photographic publishers
• The photographer and the book
• On the relationship of photographers and publishers as image suppliers and image exploiters

To read more and to apply, see: http://www.dgph.de/preise/dgph-stipendium-zur-geschichte-des-deutschsprachigen-photobuchs

Christina Riggs, FSA, will discuss the use of photography in the excavation of the legendary Egyptian tomb, which Howard Carter discovered in 1922. How did photography shape the way the excavation was conducted, the presentation of the find in the press, and the archaeologists’ own ideas about what they had found? This lecture will present work-in-progress on Dr Riggs’ current project, ‘Photographing Tutankhamun’, a study of the tomb’s 3,000-strong photographic archive.  The project has been supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.

Image: Howard Carter peers into the gilded shrines surrounding the burial of king Tutankhamun. Photograph by Harry Burton. Copyright the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford.

See more and book (tickets are free) at: https://www.sal.org.uk/events/2016/02/the-camera-and-the-king-photographing-the-excavation-of-tutankhamuns-tomb/

The status of photographs in the history of museum collections is a complex one. From its very beginnings the double capacity of photography - as a tool for making a visual record on the one hand and an aesthetic form in its own right on the other - has created tensions about its place in the hierarchy of museum objects. While major collections of 'art' photography have grown in status and visibility, photographs not designated 'art' are often invisible in museums. Yet almost every museum has photographs as part of its ecosystem, gathered as information, corroboration or documentation, shaping the understanding of other classes of objects, and many of these collections remain uncatalogued and their significance unrecognised. 

This volume presents a series of case studies on the historical collecting and usage of photographs in museums. Using critically informed empirical investigation, it explores substantive and historiographical questions such as what is the historical patterning in the way photographs have been produced, collected and retained by museums? How do categories of the aesthetic and evidential shape the history of collecting photographs? What has been the work of photographs in museums? What does an understanding of photograph collections add to our understanding of collections history more broadly? What are the methodological demands of research on photograph collections?

The case studies cover a wide range of museums and collection types, from art galleries to maritime museums, national collections to local history museums, and international perspectives including Cuba, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Together they offer a fascinating insight into both the history of collections and collecting, and into the practices and poetics of archives across a range of disciplines, including the history of science, museum studies, archaeology and anthropology.

Editor(s): Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher Morton

See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/photographs-museums-collections-9781472533661/

Bromley House Library, Nottingham, is opening The Pauline Heathcote Archive at Bromley House Library on 29 July at 2.30pm. Bromley House was the home of the first commercial photographic studio in Nottingham and was in use from 1841 until 1955. Eric Butler has been working with Bernard Heathcote and Bromley House to set up a research centre for the history of photography based on Pauline Heathcote’s extensive and thorough research notes. There is also a small photographic museum celebrating the important photographic heritage of Bromley House.

The main archive and other exhibits are housed on the third floor. The reception will be held on the first floor where some examples from Pauline’s Archive together with some exhibits will be displayed. There is, unfortunately, no lift access.

If you are interesting in attending the opening RSVP by 22 July 2015 to Bromley House Library, Bromley House, Angel Row, Nottingham, NG1 6HL. t: 0115 9473134 w: http://www.bromleyhouse.org/

Bry-sur-Marne, France, the birthplace of Louis Daguerre, which has done much to reclaim his legacy in recent  years, will be the venue for The Daguerreotype Symposium organised Daguerreobase in collaboration with the European Daguerreotype Association (EDA). It will take the them of Outside the Studio. Landscape and Cityscape Daguerreotypes. It will take place from 8-9 October 2015. 

Read more here.