Not so long ago the idea of a radio programme devoted to discussing photographs might have seemed a bit odd. How effective could a presenter be in describing the images? In fact, the idea has worked well in the past. Earlier this year Radio 3 did a series of five programmes which discussed The Five Photographs That (You Didn’t Know) Changed Everything.  With the right presenter radio is often a more effective medium than television in discussing with visual media. These days, of course, for much of the audience radio is supported by online resources and the images can be viewed before or during the programme. For many, of course, the images will already be familiar, part of our personal visual memory.

This programme uses the photographer and former Picture Editor at The Guardian, Eamonn McCabe, to curate his personal photography exhibition on the radio. He has selected ten images that have inspired or moved him during his fifty years in the business.

The selection includes Don McCullin’s The Guvnors, Finsbury Park, London  (1959). This was the image that launched McCullin’s career with a half-page in The Observer and inspired McCabe who came from a similar background just a few streets from McCullin. David Bailey’s The Kray Twins (1965) and Chris Smith’s Mohammed Ali in Miami are each powerful portraits. By contrast Willi Ronis’s Le Nu Provençal, Gordes, 1949 is an intimate portrait of his wife. Nickolas Muray’s Soldiers of the Sky which McCabe first discovered in The Royal Photographic Society Collection applies a fashion aesthetic to war propaganda;  and McCabe’s former Observer colleague Jane Bown’s portrait of Anthony Blunt, 1979, is perceptive, revealing more than her subject would have wished.

There are four photographs that are not portraits: J H Lartigue’s Automobile Delage, Circuit de Dieppe, 26 June 1912 marks a start in photo-journalism and clearly resonates with McCabe. Joel Meyerowitz’s  Assembled panorama of the World Trade Center site, Fall 2001 captures a high-definition view of Ground Zero showing a detail and stillness that remains gut-wrenching and painful to observe nearly fifteen years on.  The final two: Michael Kenna’s Curraghs, Dingle, 1982, and Raymond Moore’s Pembrokeshire, 1967, both provide a sense of peace and calmness and a view into other worlds.

So what does McCabe’s selection tells us as viewers of photography? The interviews with some of the photographers and the use of the own words adds a background to the images. The photographs reflect McCabe’s own interests as a photographer and photo-journalist. As someone who has looked at millions of images he concludes that, ultimately, photography is not about freezing a moment in time, nor about the equipment used. The best photographs are about capturing an emotion and connecting us with the past. Bailey says as much ‘it’s the emotion that counts’ and McKenna’s black and white image of upturned curraghs reducing the scene to its monochrome core and bring out emotions in McCabe from childhood. Ronis’s work, to McCabe, is ‘pure poetry’.

And that is why a radio works so well with photography.  Look at the photographs, listen to the programme, feel emotions inside you stir and hear the images speak.

Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS

The Spoken Image

BBC Radio 4
To be transmitted Monday, 7 Sept 2015 at 4pm and then available on the BBC iPlayer
Producer:  Olivia Landsberg
The images can be seen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b068tsvg

Hear more photography on BBC Radio 4 here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01w0hly

Image: © Jack Stephenson / BBC. Eamonn McCabe.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) was one of the most important and innovative photographers of the 19th century. Criticised in her lifetime for her unconventional techniques, she is now celebrated as a pioneering portraitist. 2015 marks the bicentenary of Cameron’s birth and the 150th anniversary of her first museum exhibition – the only one in her lifetime – held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1865.

Drawing on the V&A’s significant collection, which includes photographs acquired directly from Cameron and letters she wrote to the museum’s founding director, Curator Marta Weiss tells the story of Cameron’s artistic development. She also presents, for the first time, a group of photographs recently revealed to have belonged to Cameron’s friend and mentor the artist G.F. Watts. This discovery sheds light on previously unacknowledged aspects of Cameron’s experimental approach.

The book also reveals - for the first time - a view of Cameron's glass house in a photograph by Oscar Rejlander, probably in collaboration with Cameron. You can see the picture in a review of the book here: http://fannycornforth.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/review-julia-margaret-cameron-by-marta.html

The exhibition opens in London on 28 November 2015.

Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle the world
Marta Weiss
MACK, in partnership with Victoria & Albert Museum, London
188 pages, 22 cm x 26 cm, paperback
Publication date: November 2015, shipped from August 2015
£25.00

Read more here: http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/1068-Julia-Margaret-Cameron.html

The book accompanies a touring exhibition:
Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (18 Nov 2014 – 1 Feb 2015)
Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (14 March 2015 – 14 June 2015)
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (13 August 2015 – 25 October 2015)
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (28 Nov 2015 – 21 Feb 2016)
Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (15 March 2016 – 15 May 2016)
Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo (2 July 2016 – 19 September 2016)

This exhibition of the work of the British photographer Thomas Child (1841-1898) is curated by Stacey Lambrow and selected from the collection of Stephan Loewentheil. It runs from 10-15 November at China Exchange, Gerrard Street, London. A collector's talk will be held on 10 November at 5pm. Admission to both is free.

Qing Dynasty Peking. Thomas Child's Photography
10-15 November 2015
China Exchange, 32A Gerrard Street, London, W1D 6JA. Admission free.
www.chinaexchange.uk

Our friends at the (new) London Stereoscopic Company have launched Victorian Gems a selection of high quality Victorian stereographs and viewer. It was shown at the National Stereoscopic Association convention last week so we've yet to see the set but based on the LSC's past products we're not going to be disappointed. The set includes: OWL’s nest containing an OWL, three new sets of cards (Scenes in Our Village 1-12, Diableries 1-12, The Poor Man’s Picture Gallery), and an explanatory booklet. 

See more and pre-order here.

Watch the video and description here:

London's National gallery has a series of six interactive lunchtime lectures around the subject of photography designed to investigate how photography has shaped both the Gallery and the history of Western European painting.

Find out more here: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/photography-talks

Edward Reeves took up photography c.1855. Today his great-grandson Tom is still running the business in the High Street in Lewes. The Edward Reeves Studio, situated at 159 High Street is believed to be the oldest continuously operated photographic studio in the world.

Today it houses an archive of over 100,000 photographic glass plates, the work of the first three owners. The archive also includes approximately 150,000 images on film and as digital files, the work of the present owner Tom Reeves. Unusually the family has kept business ledgers and the related paperwork. This archive is both a unique record of the daily life of Lewes and the history of commercial photographic practice.

Stories Seen Thorough A Glass Plate exhibits work by the first three generations, displayed as light boxes in 56 windows on the specific locations where they were originally taken, celebrating the continuing vibrancy of this old market town. This exhibition was first shown last November as part of the Brighton Photo Biennial.

Brigitte Lardinois, Senior Research Fellow at London College of Communication is researching this archive. She has curated this exhibition with Matt Haycocks of the University of Ulster. They were assisted by Yaz Norris, photographer.

For more information on the research project and exhibition see http://www.reevesarchive.co.uk

Related exhibitions at Edward Reeves Photography Studio & Gallery 159 High Street, Lewes, BN7 1XU

Renowned for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was also one of the most important amateur photographers of the Victorian era and the period's finest photographer of children. This new book by Edward Wakeling, perhaps the world's leading Carroll scholar, presents almost 1000 of his photographs along with a supporting text. BPH readers receiving the weekly update will have received a discount code giving a 20 per cent discount on the book's published price of £87. 

From 1856 to 1880, Carroll took around three thousand pictures, the majority of which were portraits of family, friends, and colleagues. He also sought out and photographed celebrities of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Holman Hunt, Henry Taylor, George MacDonald, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Ellen Terry, John Everett Millais, Charlotte Yonge, and Prince Leopold. Carroll's remaining output includes images of landscapes and architecture, works of art, and skeletons; assisted self-portraits; and other miscellaneous pictures. 

This catalogue raisonné presents images of the nearly one thousand surviving photographs of Lewis Carroll—including many from private collections that have never been published—and provides information on their subjects/sitters, their locations, and the dates when they were taken, as well as extracts from Carroll's private diaries that mention his relevant photographic activity and background information concerning known prints. Edward Wakeling, an internationally recognized Carrollian scholar, has also reconstructed Carroll's lost register of his complete photographic opus. In addition to the catalogue, Wakeling discusses Carroll's activity as a photographer, his contacts with other Victorian art photographers, and his nude studies, and he provides a full listing of the contents of Carroll's various photographic albums. This is the most comprehensive study of Carroll's photography ever produced, and it will be a standard work for anyone studying Victorian photography and for Lewis Carroll's photographs in particular.

See more and order the book here: http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/the-photographs-of-lewis-carroll?dm_i=1GOG,3LNWR,7J6D0K,CXTQZ,1

The Royal Photographic Society's Archaeology and Heritage Group is holding a workshop on making negatives for printing by alternative processes or traditional methods from digital files. It is led by Peter Moseley. 

This introductory workshop  covers the essential steps in creating contact negatives to print your digital images using the cyanotype method (maximum five people). Photographic artist, Peter Moseley uses digital origination to capture his images, which are then realised individually on hand-coated art paper using authentic techniques discovered over 150 years ago. Peter will teach the method to convert digital files to create beautiful cyanotype prints.

The workshop covers: how to create the contact negative from a digital file, mix solutions, coat the paper, exposure, and develop prints. This workshop is suitable for beginners and advanced photographers. The only requirement is that the images you provide have a ‘heritage’ connection, if possible. A second part to this workshop will explore other methods, upon request: platinum, gravure, kallitype or carbon transfer printing.

See more at: http://rps.org/events/2015/september/12/peter-moseleys-digital-negative-one-day-workshop

Rachel Nordstrom has been appointed Photographic Collections Manager at the University of St Andrews Library’s Special Collections Division. She replaces Marc Boulay who returned to Canada earlier this year. She has taken on the leadership of the Photographic Collections team and will soon be recruiting for a new Photographic Cataloguer.

Rachel will continue to have oversight of the preservation needs of the University’s rich and varied collection of photographs in all formats, whilst also taking on strategic oversight of the team and the development of the collection. She aims to provide a community resource for research and discovery, and to contribute actively to the sharing and interpretation of the collection's content for the benefit of the public. She also strives to position photography so as to complement, inform, or be the result of some form of intellectual discourse and to build upon the collection's strengths.

A graduate of the International Museum Studies program at the University of Gothenburg, and the Collections Conservation and Management program at Fleming College, Ontario, Rachel came to St Andrews from the Fox Talbot Museum in 2013. She is currently Secretary of ICON-Scotland, and is a committee member of both the Scottish Society for the History of Photography, and the Institute for Photography in Scotland.

BPH wishes Rachel well in her new role and the continuation of making the rich photography collections at St Andrews better known and appreciated. 

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.