The Conservation of Photographs is a relatively new discipline in the cultural heritage preservation field with its beginnings in the late 1960’s early 1970’s. However, it has its roots firmly grounded in the formative years of photography as practitioners and the emergent photographic industry grappled with its inherent instability. The treatment of faults in both material systems and their chemistries and the need to develop more stable photographic processes have hugely impacted and influenced the evolution of the photographic process itself. Today the result of materials and image instability continues to present huge challenges to contemporary users, photographers, the photographic industry, collectors and collections both public and private in the wider heritage field worldwide.

This seminar will look at the conservation of photographs past and present. It will also consider the huge challenges faced by both private and institutional collections, with regard to the future preservation of both historic and contemporary photography in all its diverse material forms. The preservation and conservation of contemporary photography alone is already presenting huge challenges to collections and conservators, presenting issues that are already impacting and will continue to impact collectors, the art market and ultimately the value and veracity of contemporary images.

Admission is free and open to all.

Ian L. Moor and Angela H. Moor

The Conservation of Historic and Contemporary Photographs

17.00, Wednesday, 25 February 2015

Research Forum South Room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Ian and Angela Moor have been at the forefront of the development of photographic conservation in the UK since the early 1970s, both as researchers and developers of photographic conservation techniques, and as consultants and advisers to major collections of photography. They established The Centre for Photographic Conservation in 1981. Ian is a partner/director and Head of Conservation and Angela is Conservator Administrator at The Centre for Photographic Conservation.

James Hyman Gallery, the UK’s leading commercial gallery for vintage 19th and 20th century photography, is pleased to present the latest in a series of monographic and thematic exhibitions addressing photographs from the earliest days of the medium. 

The Age of Salt: Art, Science and Early Photography, which is open to the public from 3 February to 6 March, takes as its starting point one of William Henry Fox Talbot’s greatest works and one of the finest prints outside a museum. Entitled Veronica in Bloom (1840), this exceptional print dates from the very moment in which the birth of photography was announced. 

The exhibition traces the development of photography both through technical advance and through the forging of a new aesthetic, initially in dialogue with painting and then freed from this relationship. These pioneering moments include intimate untrimmed salt prints by Calvert Richard Jones and Edouard Baldus, remarkable salt prints made in Britain, France and Italy and, subsequently, the evolution of new techniques including collodion on glass, albumen printing and forms of photomechanical engravings from heliogravures by Charles Negre and Henri le Secq through to photogalvanographs by Roger Fenton. 

The Age of Salt: Art, Science and Early Photography anticipates Tate Britain's exhibition of early salt prints entitled Salt and Silver (25 February - 7 June 2015) and the Media Space's Revelations: Experiments in Early Photography (20 March - 13 September 2015).

See more by clicking here.

The latest V&A re-hang of the permanent collection displays focuses on the wider visions of photographers through series and sequences of images, rather than through individual photographs. The display includes photographs from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and features work by Sally Mann, Josef Sudek, Eadweard Muybridge, Lewis Baltz, Masahisa Fukase, Sian Bonnell and Sze Tsung Leong.

A History of Photography: Series and Sequences

Fri 6 February 2015 – Sun 1 November 2015

V&A Gallery 100

http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/3820/a-history-of-photography-series-and-sequences-5358/

With the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a new BBC TV programme examines his life and reviews his relationship with young girls. Towards the end of the programme an albumen photograph attributed to Carroll and in the collection of the Musee Cantini, Marseille, (click here to see it) of, allegedly, a naked teenage Lorena Liddell, the elder sister of Alice, is given as evidence of a darker interest by Carroll's in girls.

Of the photograph, conservator Nick Burnett states 'My gut instnct is it's by Lewis Carroll'. A facial recognition expert also believes it is of Lorena Carroll.  

Having seen the programme I am unconvinced by the programme's claims. At best the photograph itself and provenance requires further research: simply being albumen from a glass negative and later dealer's pencil inscription is probably not sufficient to say one way or the other.

Make your own mind up and view the programme on BBC iPlayer here Available for 28 days from 31 January 2015.

Image: Presenter Martha Kearney looks at a Carroll negative from The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford.

UPDATE: A leading Carroll scholar has stated he is 'unconvinced' by the programme's conclusion and notes that the size of the plate/print suggests it dates from Carroll's Christ College period by which time Lorena would have been a more mature woman. 

Are you organised, professional, approachable, great at engaging a diverse range of people with new ideas and opportunities? These are the key qualities we are looking for in our Volunteer Coordinator at the National Media Museum in Bradford. You will work closely with people across the Museum to continue to develop our volunteer programme, taking a strategic approach to maximise and deliver beneficial and engaging opportunities for the volunteers and for the Museum. You will have successful experience working independently to co-ordinate an established volunteer programme and demonstrate enthusiasm and commitment to further developing this area.

Click here to see more

BBC Radio 3's The Essay is running a series of five programmes each evening between 16-20 February 2015 at 2245, under the banner of 'The Five Photographs that (you didn't know) changed Everything'. The photographs being discussed are not generally found in the history books; they are not generally art; and the photographers who made them are not generally known beyond a small coterie of photographic historians.

The five photographs discussed in this series of essays changed the way we see ourselves and our place in the world. They had an enormous impact in the fields of medicine, architecture, astronomy, law and cultural history. The series has been supported and developed in association with De Montfort University's Photographic History Research Centre and The Royal Photographic Society. 

The programmes, with their provisional transmission dates are:

Monday 16^th February.

1. A woman’s left hand.  Kelley Wilder on the x-ray that changed medicine.

The photograph of Anna Bertha Ludwig Rontgens left hand taken in 1896 astounded the scientific world and alarmed the public. For the scientists it signalled the beginning of medical radiography. For the public it gave rise to fears about intrusion and privacy in much the same way as  the introduction of the TSA  body scanner did in 2007. From medical imaging to airport security, Kelley Wilder shows how  x-ray photography changed the world.

Kelley Wilder is Reader in Photographic History,  De Montfort University, Leicester

Tuesday 17^th February.

2.  . Draper’s Nebula. Omar Nassim on  how a photo of space changed our view of the universe and our place within it.

Today high-resolution  photographs of nebulae or galaxies saturate our culture to such an extent that they are almost kitsch. But  when Henry Draper took the very first pictures  of a nebula in 1880 it was one of the greatest achievements of photography.  Omar Nasim tells the story of how this photograph defied the imagination and raised questions not just about the size of the universe but about the very origins of humanity.

Omar Nasim is lecturer in the School of History at the University of Kent.

Wednesday 18^th February.

3. . The Dogon.  Jeanne Haffner on how aerial photography changed the spaces we live in. The  birds-eye photograph of the Dogon tribe working their fields in Mali was taken by the French Africanist Marcel Griaule.   He’d trained in aerial photography during the first world war and he argued that the Dogon landscape, seen from the air, revealed the patterns and  secrets of the lives of its inhabitants, patterns which could teach Western city planners and architects how to build  a happier society. 

Jeanne Haffner is lecturer in the Department of History and Science at Harvard University.

Thursday 19^th February.

4. The Broom cottages. Elizabeth Edwards on the photo that changed the way we see ourselves.

The man who took the photo, W. Jerome Harrison, launched a scheme for recording the country’s past in which amateur photographers up and down the land took pictures of the buildings which were important  them. Wiki-buildings and English Heritage do this now on a much grander scale. But Elizabeth Edwards argues that the mass participation of people  in defining what matters  about the past began  with Harrison, and changed the way in which a nation viewed  itself. 

Elizabeth Edwards is Research Professor of Photographic History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester

Friday 20^th February.

5. The Tichbourne Claimant. Jennifer Tucker on the photo that changed the law.

In 1863 a butcher sat for his photograph in the remote town of Wagga Wagga, Australia. Three years later this likeness had Britain transfixed.   Jennifer tucker tells the story of  how it was central to the longest legal battle in 19th century England,  and  sparked  a debate about evidence, the law, ethics and facial recognition that has continued ever since. 

Jennifer Tucker is Associate Professor of History and Science in Society at Wesleyan University, USA

The programmes will be available on the BBC iPlayer after transmission.

This exhibition traces the evolution of photography, as a scientific process, as a social record and a medium for artistic expression. The photographic material on display dates from the mid-19th to mid-20th century and shows how the history of photography relates to our own collections and the visual history of Wales.

Discover the story of the Dillwyn Llewelyn family who were based at the Penllergare estate near Swansea in the mid-19th century. Their pioneering experiments in the new medium created astonishing images of the south Wales landscape and of their family life and social activities.

Part of the display will also look at how photographic processes actually work, exploring the chemistry behind the images. You will also be able to view a wider selection of the images now digitised as part of the project, via the on-line database which will be available in the gallery.

The project of digitising historic photographs and the research of the subjects in these images has been generously funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. 

National Museum Cardiff
24 January-19 April 2015

See: http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/cardiff/whatson/?id=7801

Related events and activities

Next month the V&A will present a display of over 50 recently acquired photographs that explore the experiences of black people in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century, enhanced by excerpts from oral histories gathered by Black Cultural Archives.

Over the last seven years the V&A has been working with Black Cultural Archives to acquire photographs either by black photographers or which document the lives of black people in Britain, a previously under-represented area in the V&A’s photographs collection. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Museum has been able to collect 118 works by 17 artists ranging from Yinka Shonibare’s large-scale series Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), to studies of elaborate headties worn by Nigerian women, by J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, to black and white street photography of 1970s London by Al Vandenberg.

Staying Power will showcase a variety of photographic responses to black British experience. On display will be intimate portrayals of British-Caribbean life in London in the 1960s-70s by Neil Kenlock, Armet Francis, Dennis Morris and Charlie Phillips. Music, style and fashion are documented in Raphael Albert’s depictions of the black beauty pageants he organised from the 1960s to the 1980s to help celebrate the growing black community in Britain and Norman ‘Normski’ Anderson’s colourful depictions of vibrant youth culture of the 1980s and 90s.

The display also features more conceptual explorations of race and identity. Yinka Shonibare’s series, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, depicts the artist playing the role of a dandy. The work demonstrates Shonibare’s identification with the dandy as an outsider or foreigner who uses his flamboyance, wit and style to penetrate the highest levels of society, which would otherwise be closed to him. Maxine Walker also draws attention to racial stereotypes by photographing herself in a variety of guises. In her Untitled series (1995) she presents herself with different skin tones and hairstyles as though they were instantaneous transformations made in a photo booth.

To complement the photographs, Black Cultural Archives have collected oral histories from a range of subjects including the photographers themselves, their relatives, and the people depicted in the images. To coincide with the display at the V&A, Black Cultural Archives will also present an exhibition drawn from the V&A’s Staying Power collection (15 January-30 June 2015) at their heritage centre in Brixton.

Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s
16 February – 24 May 2015

vam.ac.uk/page/s/staying-power/

#InspiringPower

Image: High Street Kensington, 1976, © Al Vandenberg

The Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fund enables the Rijksmuseum to annually award two postgraduate fellowships that stimulate photo-historical research by prospective curators from the Netherlands or abroad. The research is based on the National Photo Collection held by the Rijksmuseum’s Print Room. It will form the basis for an essay on classical photography pertaining to original works from the Rijksmuseum’s rich holdings of photographic works and, where possible, to objects in other collections.    

The Rijksmuseum Research Fellowship Programme

As part of the Rijksmuseum Research Fellowship Programme, the Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fellowship provides support for pre-doctoral, doctoral and post-doctoral candidates. It 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 office space in which the fellows can work, 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 and the University of Amsterdam.

Application and procedure

The closing date for all applications is 15 March 2015, at 6:00 p.m. (Amsterdam time/CET). Selection will take place in April 2015 by an international committee. Applicants will be notified by 1 May 2015. The fellowship will start in September 2015.

See more here: https://news.rijksmuseum.nl/2/4/158/1/8Zu9eP-rYJDD6km6qREiF4dZPLgdzMsfyMLQs5SrdY13KfNbVRfOWsoNJ0vdq-fF

Michael Portillo in his BBC Great Railway Journeys programme on Monday, 26 January, takes a look at John Dillwyn Llewelyn, a founder member of the Photographic Society in 1853, and an early Calotypist, with RPS Director-General Michael Pritchard. The two Michaels discuss JDL's work as a photographer and take a look at some of the beautiful albums of his work held by Swansea Museum. You will also be able to see a demonstration of the wet-collodion process by Tony Richards 

See more about the programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0517pyg If you miss the transmission it will be available on the BBC iPlayer for up to a month. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world’s finest museums, seeks an Assistant/Associate Curator who will be a full-time member of the curatorial team of the Department of Photographs, whose principal focus will be nineteenth-century French and English photography and the active building of the department’s Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library.  He/she will be responsible for performing all curatorial duties, including: researching, studying, and publishing works in the collection under his/her curatorial responsibility; recommending acquisitions to complement the existing collection and the department’s library; proposing future exhibitions, installations, and publications; and maintaining positive and fruitful relations with colleagues in the museum and academic worlds, with Museum trustees and other supporters, and with dealers, booksellers, and auctioneers.  The ideal candidate will be a well-published scholar familiar with the entire literature of photography, passionately interested in connoisseurship and in improving the collection through gift and purchase, and deeply committed to the Museum’s mission and public outreach.  To perform these duties the Assistant/Associate Curator brings to bear his/her working knowledge while striving to develop increasingly comprehensive understanding of the objects in the collection and in its library.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES And DUTIES

Application Deadline: February 13, 2015, 6:00pm

The Assistant/Associate Curator Photographs is a full-time position and includes full benefits. Salary will be commensurate with experience.

Please Send Cover Letter, Resume And Salary History To

Careers@MetMuseum.org

with “Asst/Assoc Curator Photographs” in the subject line.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides equal opportunity to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, age, mental or physical disability, pregnancy, alienage or citizenship status, marital status or domestic partner status, genetic information, genetic predisposition or carrier status, gender identity, HIV status, military status and any other category protected by law in all employment decisions, including but not limited to recruitment, hiring, compensation, training and apprenticeship, promotion, upgrading, demotion, downgrading, transfer, lay-off and termination, and all other terms and conditions of employment.

Job Requirements

Experience And Skills

Knowledge And Education

• Ph.D. in the History of Art with a specialization in Photography preferred.
• Fluency in a second language.

See: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/40156040?trk=jserp_job_details_text

BPH noted the forthcoming publication The Victorian Photographs of Dr. Thomas Keith and John Forbes White by John Hannavy. The book is now being printed as the photograph shows. The book is strictly limited to 500 copies and it should be ordered direct from John Hannavy. 

The Victorian Photographs of Dr. Thomas Keith and John Forbes White will be published in April in a strictly limited edition by John Hannavy Publishing price £20.00. The 144 page hardback book is illustrated throughout in full colour to capture the beauty of Keith and White's original salt prints.

To order contact John Hannavy Publishing, 8 High Street, Great Cheverell, Wiltshire, SN10 5TH. www.johnhannavy.co.uk or e:john@johnhannavy.co.uk.

Gawain Weaver Art Conservation has two process identification charts available for free download. The charts cover photomechanical processes and nineteenth century photography. Click the link to take a look and download. http://gawainweaver.com/processID

Photographer and teacher Paul Hill MBE has launched a petition to protect the Library of Birmingham's internationally important historic and contemporary photography collections and archives. They are in danger of being closed and mothballed and the photography collections team will be made redundant. 

The petition states: Birmingham City Council is proposing swingeing cuts at the recently opened Library of Birmingham reducing the whole library hours to 40 hours per week and staffing by just over 50 percent by April 2015.

When I, and other depositors, who include such renowned British photographic figures as Daniel Meadows, Martin Parr, John Blakemore, Brian Griffin, Vanley Burke, John Myers, Nick Hedges, and Val Williams, agreed to the library acquiring our archives or collections we were assured that they would be accessible to the public as well as specialist researchers.

As the proposal currently stands there will be no Photography Collections Team. Indeed there may not be anyone left with any specialist knowledge of these nationally and internationally significant collections in the near future. There will be no conservation department to undertake the vital work of preserving these fragile treasures, there will be little if any cataloguing undertaken, and the exhibition programme will disappear entirely.

The emphasis in the new structure is on maintaining “counter transactions” to the exclusion of other activities.  

To read more about what is being proposed: http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/news/regional-affairs/photographers-petition-halt-library-birmingham-8357877 and BPH's previous report here: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-library-of-birmingham-and-its-photography-collections-severel

To sign click here: http://alturl.com/d6exw

The V&A Photographs Department has issued its latest newsletter giving details of recent and forthcoming exhibitions and activities. A copy is available to download here V%26A%20Newsletter%202014.pdf. To receive it directly email Bronwen Colquhoun in the department.

Of particulate note are the forthcoming Linnaeus Tripe and Cameron exhibitions in 2015 and the permanent gallery re-hang which is titled A History of Photography: Series and Sequences and opens on 6 February which looks at series in photography. 

Image: Edgar Scamell, street hawker selling baked potatoes in London, 1892.

The V&A is holding a major exhibition to explore the contribution of Julia Margaret Cameron's contributions to the art of photography. Cameron (1815-1879) was one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century. Criticised in her lifetime for her unconventional technical approach, she is now celebrated as a pioneering portraitist. 2015 will mark the bicentenary of Cameron’s birth and 150 years since her first museum exhibition – the only one in her lifetime – held at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1865. Drawing on the V&A’s significant holdings, which include photographs acquired directly from Cameron and letters she wrote to Henry Cole, the museum’s founding director, this exhibition will explore Cameron’s innovative contributions to the art of photography.

The exhibition will tour internationally before and after its presentation at the V&A November 2015-February 2016 to the following venues:

• Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 18 November 2014 – 1 February 2015
• Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, 14 March – 14 June 2015
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 August – 25 October 2015
• Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid, 8 March – 8 May 2016
• Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo, 29 June - 25 September 2016

The accompanying catalogue will be published by MACK in association with V&A Publishing.

Project Lead:

Marta Weiss, Curator

Project Assistant:

Erika Lederman, Factory Project Cataloguer

Paul Goodman, Head of Collections Projects, at the National Media Museum , Bradford, left the museum on 23 December 2014, following a restructuring of staff posts. Goodman had been responsible for leading on specific major collections-related activities.These had included managing the museum's three recent large acquisitions: the Impressions Gallery collection, the Ray Harryhausen archive and the Lewis Morley archive,. In addition he had been responsible for a digitisation programme of the Royal Photographic Society Collection which is held at the museum. He also oversaw the museum's collaborative conservation project with the Getty Conservation Institute.

Paul Goodman had been at the museum since 1990 when he joined as Registrar and he had held a series of jobs during his career there including managing the museum as part of a three-person team following the departure of the previous Head, Colin Philpott. 

• 1983 - 1990: Assistant Curator, Transport, Science Museum
• 1990 - 2003: Registrar, National Media Museum
• 2003 - 2007: Acting Head of Collections, National Media Museum
• 2007 - 2012: Head of Collections (& Knowledge), National Media Museum
• 2013 - 2014: Head of Collections, Projects, National Media Museum

During his career at the museum Goodman managed a number of significant acquisitions including The Royal Photographic Society Collection in 2002 and the BBC Collection in 2012. In addition to his work at the museum he is founder Trustee of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield and he is serves on the board of the Chambre-Hardman Photography Collection in Liverpool.

He received a the Royal Photographic Society's Colin Ford Award in 2003. 

At the time of writing he was unavailable for comment. 

Image: © Michael Pritchard. Paul Goodman, April 2014.

In case you missed it there's a fascinating article as part of the Guardian's Science The H Word series by Mirjam Brusius. She explores new archive evidence that tells a different story about the history of photographs and questions the idea of invention and 'firsts' in photography.

Well worth a read. 

http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2014/dec/22/the-many-inventions-of-photography-mirjam-brusius

The renowned Observer newspaper photographer Jane Bown has died, aged 89. Bown began working for the Observer newspaper in 1949 and she was working almost up until she died. Her style was direct and she relied largely on natural light and her Olympus OM1 camera and, of course, her technical knowledge and personality to produce her outstanding portraits. 

She gave her entire archive to the Guardian/Observer newspaper. 

See more here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/dec/21/jane-bown-a-life-in-photography-in-pictures

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/21/jane-bown

Image: Jane Bown, self-portrait.