Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), son of the astronomer William Herschel and nephew to Caroline Herschel, was the most influential natural philosopher of the Victorian period.
His long career encompassed astronomy, mathematics, physics, geology, chemistry, as well as art, literature, politics, and the invention of photography. Herschel’s 1831 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy was the first book in English on the philosophy of science and had a formative influence on a generation of scientists, including Charles Darwin. This conference explores all aspects of Herschel’s life & work.

Of particular note is session three: 

Herschel’s Methodology

This exhibition celebrates the work of E Howard Farmer, who today is little-known but was a leading figure in the science of photography and as an educator. The exhibition features the image immortalised on the Led Zepplin IV album cover. Through the exhibition, we will show how Farmer captured the spirit. 

The exhibition shows how Farmer captured the spirit of people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset that were so much of a contrast to his life in London. It is fascinating to see how this theme of rural and urban contrasts was developed by Led Zeppelin and became the focus for this iconic album cover 70 years later.

A framed colour version of this image of an elderly man carrying a large bundle of sticks on his back will be recognised worldwide. It is the centrepiece of the iconic front cover of Led Zeppelin IV which famously features no words.

The origin of the central figure has remained a mystery for over half a century. It can now be revealed as a late Victorian coloured photograph of a Wiltshire thatcher. A grey beard underlining his weathered face, the figure stoops whilst apparently pausing for the photographer, his leathery hands grasp the pole supporting the bundle of hazel on his back.

The original of the photograph made famous by the band was recently discovered in a late Victorian photograph album. The discovery was made by Brian Edwards, a Visiting Research Fellow with the Regional History Centre at the University of the West of England, and is in the Museum collections.

Released on November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin IV has sold more than 37 million copies worldwide. The album’s cover artwork was radically absent of any indication of the musicians or a title. The framed image, often been referred to as a painting, is understood to have been discovered by the band’s lead singer Robert Plant in an antique shop near guitarist Jimmy Page’s house in Pangbourne, Berkshire. Closer inspection reveals this framed image was a coloured photograph, the whereabouts of which is now unknown.

The black and white original Victorian photograph was discovered during ongoing research extending from the Ways of Seeing Wiltshire exhibition (20 May 2021 to 30 August 2021), which was curated by Brian Edwards in partnership with Wiltshire Museum. From paintings to photographs and artefacts to memories, Edwards’ research involved monitoring everyday sources that stimulates public engagement with Wiltshire’s past. While following up on some early photographs of Stonehenge, Edwards came across the Victorian photograph Led Zeppelin made familiar over half a century ago.

Featuring exceptional photographs from Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset, the Victorian photograph album contained over 100 architectural views and street scenes together with a few portraits of rural workers. Most of the photographs are titled and beneath the photograph made famous by Led Zeppelin the photographer has written ‘A Wiltshire Thatcher’. The Victorian photograph album is titled ‘Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury. Whitsuntide 1892. A present to Auntie from Ernest.’

Brian Edwards said: “Led Zeppelin created the soundtrack that has accompanied me since my teenage years, so I really hope the discovery of this Victorian photograph pleases and entertains Robert, Jimmy, and John Paul.”

A part signature matching the writing in the album suggests the photographer is Ernest Howard Farmer (1856-1944), the first head of the School of Photography at the then newly renamed Polytechnic Regent Street. Now part of the University of Westminster, Farmer had worked in the same building as the instructor of photography since 1882, when it was then known as the Polytechnic Young Men’s Christian Institute.

A Wiltshire Thatcher – a Photographic Journey through Victorian Wessex
until 1 September 2024
Wiltshire Museum, Devizes
See: https://www.wiltshiremuseum.org.uk/?exhibition=wiltshire-thatcher-a-photographic-journey-through-victorian-wessex

A talk on the history of photography takes place on 16 July 2024: see: https://www.wiltshiremuseum.org.uk/?event=lecture-exploring-photographys-history-up-to-1939

Dr Sara Dominici, Senior Lecturer in Photographic History and Visual Culture, at the University of Westminster, has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to support her research project on The Photographic Darkroom in the Northern Transatlantic World, 1850s-1910s.

The project explores the development and use of the photographic darkroom in Britain and North America between the 1850s and 1910s. From portable dark-tents to dedicated structures, the darkroom was central to photographers’ lives as simultaneously a site of often unruly physical conditions and social relations, and a modern laboratory of memories and the imagination kindled by processing photographs. By reconstructing how people across the English-speaking world responded to the challenges and opportunities of operating the darkroom in vastly different environments, this study is the first to provide a comprehensive account of how this space affected photographers’ relationship to their practice and identity. In doing so, it elaborates a conceptual framework for historical studies of the darkroom globally. 

The grant will support the archival research into photographic journals, images, and darkroom equipment held in the UK and USA, and the dissemination of its results.  

The work builds on last year's conference on the darkroom convened by Dominci and a special issue of the ESHP's PhotoResearcher

See: http://www.eshph.org/journal/photoresearcher-no-41-2024/

Autograph, is recruiting a Exhibitions Manager to manage delivery of its contemporary exhibition, loans and touring activity, which have a strong focus on photographic practice. Autograph works with a wide range of institutions in the UK and internationally to lend work and tour exhibitions originating in London. We appeal to very diverse visitors who are attracted to the issues addressed by artists we show and appreciate the quality of our offer.

Based at Rivington Place, in Shoreditch, London which houses our two public galleries, small scale screening facilities, a learning studio and our specialist photographic collection, you will:

• Provide logistical support necessary to deliver Autograph’s artistic programme to a high standard, facilitating the curatorial vision agreed with artists for each project.
• Ensure that the highest standards of museum practice are delivered in design, build, procurement, risk management, health & safety (H&S), insurance and care of art works, working closely with curatorial and external stakeholders.
• Coordinate the installation and demounting of temporary exhibitions and collection displays on site with technical contractors and other suppliers.
• Manage, UK and international touring packages, loans and occasional artists’ projects off site.
• Contribute logistical insights to our programme development strategy which takes a team based approach to developing our public offer.
• Contribute to the team’s environmental sustainability work, feeding into and helping to shape the wider organisation’s environmental strategy.

Details here: https://autograph.org.uk/blog/news/exhibitions-manager/?mc_cid=ab2fed7cd8&mc_eid=b331f6dd6d

Applications are welcomed for two positions (PhD candidates) to become part of the research team of the project Associated Media of Austro-Hungarian Zoological Education (AMAZE) – Zoological wallcharts and glass lantern slides at the University of Vienna. The project is led by Assoz.-Prof. Alan S. Ross at the Department of Education and is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (fwf.ac.at).

AMAZE aims to establish visual and material studies as a central concern of the history of education. The usefulness of material sources for reconstructing the historical 'realities' of teaching, ie. the equipment, architecture and methods of teaching, has long been recognised, while their use for approaching epistemological and ideological questions was a marginal concern. Recent studies have shown that natural history education as a field in which objects and images were used to reinforce nationalist and imperialist as well as racist and specist ideologies in education.

However, multi-ethnic and multilingual states such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire have been largely ignored in the context of the propagation of nationalist and imperialist as well as racist and specist ideologies in education. The project aims to place the Habsburg Empire at the centre of visual politics during the nationalisation of education and the sciences in the late nineteenth century. The working hypothesis of the project is that visual and material culture was key to internal colonialism in the sciences of the Habsburg Empire.

The project will pioneer the exploitation of two types of serial media as sources for the history of education. The two collections originated in the former Institute of Zoology at the University of Vienna and are currently held at the Department of Evolutionary Biology. They depict images across the whole range of life-forms and were tied in to natural history teaching at the University of Vienna.

In their size and their documentation, these collections are unique in Europe:

1. a) one-off, handpainted educational wallcharts.
2. b) glass lantern slides.

The study of the Viennese collections advances the study of Habsburg imperial science both in terms of its relationship to other research centers in the empire as well as abroad. The exchange of educational media slides allows for the reconstruction of lop-sided relationships between center and periphery in the context of science and pedagogy.

Enquiries should be directed to the PI, Alan Ross: alan.ross@univie.ac.at

The lantern slide work stream which is likely to be of most interest to BPH readers is below:

The candidate will be in charge of the Work Package concerning the collection of approximately 8000 glas lantern slides produced between 1910 until 1970. Of these slides, approximately 1600 items (20%) were manufactured specifically for the collection.

The collection makes exceptionally clear the entanglement of older and newer media and the migration of visual topoi between them. On the one hand, it is possible to reconstruct in detail the sources for glass lantern slides. Photographers documented a large number of objects in the institute's collection of human and natural history specimens, producing, for instance, more than 200 photographs of skulls still extant at the Department of Evolutionary Biology. A considerable number of the Institute of Zoology's one-off wall charts were also reproduced as lantern slides. On the other hand, it is possible to reconstruct the international distribution of the glass lantern slides as well as their later role as source material for newer media. The detailed hand-written catalogue of these lantern slides also shows that lantern slides were exchanged with major research institutions abroad such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A considerable number of glass lantern slides have also been utilized in educational films. A large number of these have survived at the University of Vienna and are currently being examined and catalogued as part of a large project funded by the FWF.

What we expect:

The candidate will collaborate with the PI and the rest of the team as well as staff at the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Vienna. The candidate will spend Year One of the project working through the collection of glas lantern slides at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and will collaborate with the staff of the department in documenting, digitizing and cataloguing the part of the collection that has not yet been digitized.

The candidate is expected to write a PhD thesis in the wider field of the research position and to publish preliminary results. The candidate is also required to attend fortnightly meetings with the PI and the other members of the team, to co-organize conferences and research meetings and to maintain the website of the project.

Preference will be given to graduates of history, the history of science, the history of art or educational science with a proven background in the history of the Habsburg Empire as well as some experience of working with visual and/ or material sources.

Very good language skills in German and English are required. Additionally, competence in a second language of the Habsburg Empire or the proven ability and willingness to acquire one during the project is expected.

What we offer:

- an international and lively environment.

- an inner-city research location.

- wide range of training possibilities.

- a fully equipped office space.

- 3-year contracts.

- a salary of 37.577 Euros per year.

How to apply:

Applications (titled SURNAME, Amaze, application 2024, glass slides) can be made in either English or German. They should be sent to the PI Alan Ross: alan.ross@univie.ac.at

The deadline is 15 May 2024.

The following material should be sent in a single PDF document:

1) A two-page letter of motivation. This letter should detail what skills and prior experience qualify you for the position. Outline how you think visual and material sources can help us understand the history of education and science and/ or the Habsburg Empire.

2) A CV, including a list of publications (if applicable).

3) A writing sample (for example an article or a comprehensive chapter of your MA thesis). The writing sample does not need to have been accepted by a publisher.

4) The name, email address and telephone number of at least two referees (do not send recommendation letters).

5) The certificate of your Masters degree.

Online interviews will take place at the end of May/ beginning of June 2024.

The Gevaert Paper Project: unlocking a reference collection of photographic paper, packaging and documentation (2020-2024) is a project of FOMU – Fotomuseum Antwerpen (Photomuseum Antwerp) and was set up after the museum acquired the historical collection Agfa-Gevaert in 2017. The goal of the project is to preserve the rapidly disappearing knowledge about analogue photography and to give the general public access to a wealth of information concerning photographic paper, photo documentation, packaging and sample books from the period 1894-1964.

Because of the size of the historical collection, the Gevaert Paper Project focusses solely on the photographic papers, packaging and documentation. The 67 samples of photographic paper included in the historical collection, supplement the 1110 samples of photographic paper from the FOMU’s own collection. In the end, 1300 photo paper packaging and 70 hanging folders were digitised and registered as part of the project.

Details: https://gevaert.fomu.be/

The Cantor Arts Center is seeking a curatorial fellow to work with its collection of photography, reporting to the Assistant Curator of Photography and New Media. The fellow will be expected to participate in scholarly museum production, including cataloging, research, exhibition planning and implementation, related program development, and collection care. The primary goal of the fellowship is to produce new and innovative research on the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection, a pillar of the collection’s strength in twentieth-century photography of the United States, and propose a focused, single-gallery exhibition. The Cantor seeks a candidate who has the interest and skills to use the CGF Collection as the basis for scholarship that narrates new stories of photography and centers a wider range of perspectives within the twentieth-century American experience and its historical and global contexts. The fellow should be committed to fostering dialogue around historical and contemporary issues of interpretation, representation, and other relevant concerns.

Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography
The Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, California, USA
3 year fixed-term (Sep 2024 – Aug 2027)
The role will remain open until filled. Applications will start being reviewed in two weeks
Full details: https://careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/capital-group-foundation-curatorial-fellow-for-photography-25209

RHS Lindley Collections, one of the finest horticultural libraries in the world, are undertaking a project to document the history of the internationally famous RHS Chelsea Flower Show. This exciting role focuses on cataloguing our historic photography collections relating to Chelsea with a view to making the collection accessible via the public catalogue.

The photography collections sit within the wider RHS Heritage Collections of botanical art, archives, objects and ephemera. They comprise prints, transparencies, and glass negatives, and include coverage of RHS Chelsea since its inception in 1913 to the present day.

We are initially recruiting for an 8-month fixed term post, running until the end of January 2025.

To work for the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is to join a thriving charity, whose mission is to inspire everyone to grow. Everything we do is built on the transformational power of gardening – and the benefits it brings to people, places and our planet.

Job Title:            Project Cataloguer (Photographs)          
Location:            RHS Lindley Library, London                    
Salary:                £18,112pa (£30,187 FTE)
Hours:                 21 hours per week        
Contract:            Fixed term contract until end of January 2025
Details and apply online: https://rhsocli.webitrent.com/rhsocli_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC179GF.open?WVID=9962857kSa

The Oberver newpaper today features part of a recent acquisition by the Bodleian Libraries showing indiginous Alaskans. The photographs were made around 1900 by several photographers, including Missouri-born Beverly Bennett Dobbs and two European emigrants to the US, HG Kaiser and Albert F Johnson, followed a gold rush to Nome, Alaska.

The photographs are part of the Library's Wilson Collection comprising several hundred albums and photographic books  donated by Michael and Jane Wilson and the Wilson Centre of Photography. The deposit, consisting of over 1,000 items from the 19th and early 20th centuries, contains rare salt prints from the dawn of photography made by some of the earliest photographic practitioners. The items include masterpieces of travel photography from across the globe, photographs held in Victorian scrapbooks and family albums, together with early outstanding examples of photographically illustrated books. The photographs in the Wilson Collection are renowned for being of exceptional quality, and outstanding in their range and depth. 

A significant part of the Wilson Collection comprises examples of early photography, including rare salt prints, photographic albums, and scrapbooks. The deposit of these items in the Bodleian’s holdings provide a new opportunity for the study of photographic materials that are either previously unknown, or incredibly rare.

One of the remarkable characteristics of the collection is the presence of a large number of salt prints, for example contained in an album made by early photographer Fallon Horne, portraying his family, friends and home. Salt prints are one of the very earliest photographic processes and are incredibly fragile and rare. The Fallon Horne album will contribute a further 100 salt prints to the Bodleian’s existing holdings. 

The deposit contains several remarkable examples of early travel and exploration photography and British photographic literature

Michael G Wilson OBE says: "Following forty years of collecting works from the history of photography, we are delighted that many of the albums, books and photographs from the Wilson Centre for Photography will now be cared for by the Bodleian Libraries, an institution which provides excellent access to scholars and the wider public. In the coming years, we look forward to further collaborations, exciting discoveries, and fresh perspectives from the Bodleian and its community."

Richard Ovenden OBE, Bodley’s Librarian, who himself is a historian of photography, says: "The masterpieces from the Wilson Collection are an unrivalled resource for studying and appreciating the greatest photographs and photographers from the first century of the new art/science. The Wilson Centre has been wonderfully welcoming to researchers and institutions for many years, and the Bodleian, now entrusted with this astonishing collection, the fruit of Michael’s singular vision, looks forward to continuing that great work, and in inspiring students, encouraging researchers, and in enabling the serious understanding of photography’s great contribution to civilisation through its earliest proponents. We are immensely grateful to Michael and Jane for their vote of confidence in our mission."

See: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2024/apr/20/intimate-portraits-of-indigenous-alaskans-in-pictures
and https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about/media/wilson-collection

Image: B B Dobbs, Inuit man with child. Courtesy Bodleian Libraries, Oxford / Wilson Collection 

Autograph, the London venue with a mission  to champion the work of artists who use photography and film to highlight questions of race, representation, human rights and social justice, has added artwork to Art UK's website. Included is work from Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Syd Shelton and Roti Fani-Kayode. Some 123 artworks have been added. Separately, Bindi Vora has been appointed senior curator. 

Autograph currently holds approximately 5,000 prints, 10,000+ negatives, 5,000 slides, as well as several thousand contact sheets and a small amount of archival film and ephemera, and the collection continues to grow. 

Art UK is the online home for every public art collection in the United Kingdom. It brings together art from over 3400 British institutions and shows over 300,000 works by over 50,000 artists. 

See: https://artuk.org/visit/venues/autograph-7926

UCL's School of European Languages, Culture and Society - Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry is hosting two events that will be of interest to BPH readers. 

• 22 May 2024 / Stereoscopic Vision in the Plantationocene from Debashree Mukherjee, Associate Professor at Columbia University
  This talk draws on my ongoing work towards a monograph titled "Tropical Machines: Extractive Media and Plantation Modernity.” I track 19th century experiments with media technologies in tropical islands that, I argue, served as laboratories for modern regimes of labour, resource extraction, as well as vision. I locate this story in the era of emancipation, in the wake of the abolition of plantation slavery in British colonies in 1834 which created a massive demand for labour to replace the labour of those who were formerly enslaved. This story is therefore plotted along the itineraries of indentured and technically voluntary “coolie” labour from South Asia to sugar colonies such as Mauritius and Fiji. In this talk I focus on the short-lived technology of the stereoscope which was extensively used in the 1860s-1910s to image plantations and their workers. I speculate on the popularity of stereographic “plantation views” to ask if it is time to displace the city and the factory as the founding sites for film history. Building on work that posits the plantation as the precursor to the factory and modern regimes of labour management, I set up a parallel between the stereograph and the plantation as tropical machines that generate new techniques of the body and new regimes of vision.
  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-languages-culture/events/2024/may/stereoscopic-vision-plantationocene
• 2 May 2024 / Camera Geologica: Photography and Resource Extraction, from Siobhan Angus, Assistant Professor at Carleton University
  Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, this talk focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how mining is a precondition of photography. Photography begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, I illustrate histories of colonization, labour, and environmental degradation to explore the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Reading materiality alongside representation and visual form reveals a complex picture of photography’s implication within extractive capitalism and, in turn, its potential to resist it.
  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-languages-culture/events/2024/may/camera-geologica-photography-and-resource-extraction

Both events are free to attend and run from 1700-1830 (BST) at: 

The event organiser is: 
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson – SELCS
kirsty.dootson@ucl.ac.uk

We cordially invite you to the lecture from the cycle Collegium historiae artium, which will be given by Anthony Hamber (independent photographic historian, London) on the topic of The 1840s: Transformations in Reprographics.

In January 1839, when the photographic processes of Daguerre and Talbot were announced, there was an existing, mature, and extensive printing and reprographics industry in all industrialised countries. The most significant printing process was that of lithography. Almost immediately there was a wave of experimentation in developing a photomechanical process. Those experimenters were primarily scientists and did not form part of the existing reprographics industries. Photographic historians have tended to repeat the same list of experimenters, primarily from France, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Emerging evidence suggests that during the 1840s – described as a comparative “gap” in scholarly research – photomechanical experimentation was in fact more widespread. This paper examines the speed of the distribution of news of Daguerre’s and Talbot’s processes and discusses a number of the photomechanical experiments that followed. A key consideration examined is why the contemporary printing and reprographics industries did not adopt photography during the 1840s to develop commercial photomechanical processes and accompanying services. A short case study underlines how one individual, with much experience in transfer lithography, played a crucial role in the late 1850s in the development of photozincography at the UK’s national cartographic agency (Ordnance Survey).

The 1840s: Transformations in Reprographics
24 April 2024 at 1630 (CET); 1530 (BST)
Lecture by Dr Anthony Hamber
Hosted by Institute of Art History, Prague
Details and Zoom link: https://www.udu.cas.cz/en/akce/the-1840s-transformations-in-reprographics

Known as one of the pillars of 20th-century fashion photography, Norman Parkinson dazzles the world from the 1930s to the 1980s with his sparkling inventiveness. He gives new impetus to celebrity portraiture, photographing the most prominent artists and celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Jerry Hall, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Jane Birkin. His long association with Vogue and extensive work for Harper’s Bazaar, Queen, Town & Country and other international magazines earn him worldwide recognition.

Celebrated for the liveliness, spontaneity and humour of his photographs, as well as for his use of outdoor locations around the globe, the British photographer helped change the static, posed approach to fashion photography with his impulsive, imaginative style. 

The exhibition features 79 of Norman Parkinson’s best-known images, as well as recent discoveries from his remarkable photographic portfolio and a selection of 56 covers of major magazines shot between the 1950s and 1970s. Several magnificent pieces from the McCord Stewart Museum’s Dress, Fashion and Textiles collection are also on display: 10 high-end dresses and ensembles made between the 1930s and the 1970s by French designers Christian Dior, Jacques Griffe, Jean Patou, Louis Féraud and Guy Laroche, Italian André Laug and British designers Digby Morton and Hardy Amies, plus four creations by Quebec milliners Fanny Graddon and Yvette Brillon.

The exhibition, shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Centro Cultural de Cascais in Portugal, is curated by Terence Pepper OBE and co-curated by Iconic Images.

Norman Parkinson: Always in Style
19 April-2 September 2024
McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal
https://www.musee-mccord-stewart.ca/en/exhibitions/norman-parkinson-always-style/

Image: Young Velvets, Young Prices, Hat Fashions, American Vogue, October 1949 © Iconic Images / The Norman Parkinson Archive 2024

To mark the 120th anniversary of Kingston-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s death, this new exhibition presents a magnificent panorama of San Francisco that Muybridge photographed in 1878.The panorama is over five metres, and is one of the highlights of Kingston Museum’s world-class Muybridge collection.

The exhibition also features three modern panoramas of the city by American photographer Mark Klett, British artists Tom Pope and James Doyle, and American historian Nick Wright. It also displays different scenes of Kingston from the nineteenth century to the present day.

San Francisco in Kingston: Muybridge and Panoramas
10 May-2 November 2024
Thursday-Saturday, 1000-1700. Admission free 
Kingston Museum
https://www.kingstonheritage.org.uk/

Alex Schneideman writes... My friend Paddy Summerfield, who has died, was broadly considered Oxford’s greatest photographer since Henry Fox Talbot. Summerfield, a child imbued from infancy in Oxford’s history and art was raised in the same house in Summertown from the age of two until he died.

Having studied at Guildford School of Art (not without controversy) Summerfield became known as a photographer in the 1980s but it was not until the publication by Dewi Lewis in 2014 of his seminal work, Mother and Father that he came to the forefront of British documentary photography.

The photobook depicts Summerfield's parents in the garden of their north Oxford home as they tended to the lawn and plants and to each other. As the book progresses we watch as his father increasingly cares for his mother, her eventual disappearance and then the loss of his father too. In most of the photographs the parents’ faces are turned away from the
photographer-son. Summerfields images were typified by a certain spirituality and he maintained that his work had always been about “abandonment and loss” as his parents had turned their attention inward following the tragic early death of his older sister when Summerfield was two years old. However he insisted that ‘Mother and Father’ stood as a durational “love letter” to them both.

Summerfield’s first major publication was important because it established his groundbreaking use of a unique and emotional photographic ‘perspective’. His work would become representative of what became known as the ‘psychological perspective’ - in which Summerfield’s compositions place the viewer in the emotional apex of the scene, blurring the boundaries between the subject, the photographer and the viewer.

Several more books were to follow including The Oxford Pictures (2016), Empty Days (2018), The Holiday Pictures (2019) and Home Movie (2021). Each subsequent title added to Summerfield’s reputation as one of the most important contemporary British documentary photographers.

Summerfield’s photography was typically black and white but in his final years he worked mainly in colour using an old ‘flip phone’ to photograph the garden and the people who
surrounded him. Some of these were published in his final book, The Beginnings of Eternity (2023).

In 2019 Summerfield married his partner, Patricia Baker-Cassidy, who by this time had become his de-facto producer. Baker-Cassidy brought order to the chaos of Paddy’s now notorious bins of thousands of negatives that he had accumulated over decades. A visitor to the Summerfield home would often find Paddy ensconced in writing, reading or discussion with friends and photographers while Baker-Cassidy worked diligently with a film scanner, as together they put together numerous maquettes for planned new publications.

The well respected Oxford Photography Group was often hosted by Summerfield and Baker-Cassidy at his home. He supported the group and worked closely with individual photographers, many of whom went on to be published, exhibited and collected.

Almost ten years after the publication of Mother and Father a new body of work was made by a group of photographers (including Alex Schneideman, Vanessa Winship, Sian Davey, Matthew Finn, Alys Tomlinson, Nik Roche and Jem Southam) who wanted to preserve the garden where Mother and Father had taken form and and to pay homage to Summerfield’s work. The resulting images were published as ‘Pictures from the Garden’ (as ever by Dewi Lewis) and an exhibition was staged in Oxford supported by The Photographers Gallery.

Summerfield’s work was supported by curators, academics and other photographers such as Richard Ovenden, Nicholas Serota and Martin Parr, Bill Jay and Peter Turner, then editor of Creative Camera. Summerfield’s own exhibition list is long and varied. He exhibited in solo group shows alongside such photographers as André Kertesz, Martin Parr, John Goto and Gerry Badger (who has written extensively about Summerfield’s work as well as providing texts for his publications). His work is held in national, international, private and institutional collections. It should be noted that Dewi Lewis’s sustained support of Paddy’s work brought it to the widest possible audience.

This year the Bodleian Library completed their acquisition of Summerfield’s extensive archive where plans are underway for a major exhibition in Autumn 2025.

It was a great honour for me to give Paddy what would sadly turn out to be his last solo show, The Holiday Pictures, at Flow Photographic Gallery in 2019. Sue Davis, the founder of The Photographers Gallery, then in failing health herself and accompanied by Zelda Cheatle made the trek from her home in Surrey to North West London to see the show - it was to be the last photography exhibition she would visit before her death some months later.

Paddy was the most photographic person I have ever known. It was as impossible to distinguish the man from the medium as it is sometimes to discern the sea from the sky on a blue day when both seem to merge into one.

Paddy leaves a daughter, Lucy and his wife Patricia.

Paddy Summerfield
18th February 1947 - 11th April 2024

Obituary by Alex Schneideman
London, April 2024

Image: (top) Alex Scheiderman, Paddy and Patricia; (lower two) Paddy Summerfield, from his Mother and Father series. 

An exhibition of photographs by renowned British photographer John Bulmer has broken all recent visitor records at Hartlepool Art Gallery – and now those important images have found a permanent home there. Over 12,000 people have so far seen the exhibition – ‘John Bulmer - Northern Light’ - which runs until Saturday, 4 May, and captures the fortitude of Hartlepool people during the hardship of the 1960s.

Thanks to a substantial award from the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the support of John Bulmer himself, Hartlepool Borough Council has been able to purchase the images for Hartlepool Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Angela Thomas, Hartlepool Art Gallery Curator, said: “The response from visitors to the exhibition has been phenomenal. People have left lots of comments on our comment cards, sharing their memories of the scenes in the photographs and identifying people they recognise. I’ve never known a response like it. 

“So we’re thrilled that, thanks to the generous support of Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and John Bulmer himself, these photographs will become part of our permanent collection. “By acquiring these images, we will ensure they are preserved for future generations to look back at that moment in time before much of the local landscape changed beyond recognition.”

Leanne Manfredi, National Programmes Lead at the Victoria and Albert Museum, said: “The Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund supports the purchase of a wide range of material for the permanent collections of non-nationally funded organisations in England and Wales. We are delighted that this collection of photographs by John Bulmer has been acquired by Hartlepool Art Gallery and featured in the current exhibition John Bulmer: Northern Light. They will benefit audiences for years to come.”

John Bulmer said: “I’m so glad the photographs will have a permanent home in the town where they were taken. I’m honoured that Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund have supported the purchase and would like to thank all involved.”

Born in 1938, John Bulmer is best-known for his pioneering colour photojournalism in the Sixties, when he worked for, among others, the Sunday Times magazine. In the winter of 1962-63 he visited Hartlepool for Image magazine, taking more than 40 photographs. At the time of his visit, during a bitterly cold winter, Hartlepool was suffering from mass unemployment. Gray’s shipyard had just closed with the loss of 1,400 jobs and the future looked bleak.

His images record the town before it changed, but also the daily life of men and women who were out of work and gathering sea coal from the beach, waiting in the dole queue or visiting the labour exchange. Despite the hardships people were facing, John Bulmer’s photographs convey a sense of resilience, humour and even optimism.

Northern Light / John Bulmer
Hartlepool Art Gallery
until 4 May 2024
Tuesdays to Saturdays 10am – 5pm
Free entry
https://www.culturehartlepool.com/art-gallery/

Images: (top) John Bulmer pictured at the Northern Light exhibition. (lower) Hartlepool Art Gallery Curator Angela Thomas and John Bulmer at the exhibition. Photography: Dave Charnley Photography.

The PHRC conference 2024 is now open for registration. There have always been unacknowledged or under-acknowledged forces that operate around photography. Some of them are human, like family members, camera assistants, darkroom personnel, curators, editors and the like. Others are non-human, like algorithms, chemicals, equipment of various sorts and transportation. The explosion of AI has pushed the field of photography studies to once again consider the practices surrounding photographs, but has at the same time neglected existing assistants like the skills force, the editors, image technicians, programmers, curators, and historians that enable and narrate photographic making. In the face of so many assistants, the primacy of the photographer as a central person through whom we understand photography recedes.

In this PHRC 2024 conference, speakers will consider the role and agency of human and non-human assistants in the making, collecting and dissemination of photographs. The papers to be delivered will employ diverse methodological perspectives that not only enlarge the notion of the photographic assistant, but also consider the role of those assistants (or that assistance) in the formation of photographic practices, images, archives and histories.

The Photographer's Assistant
Photographic History Research Centre
17-18 June 2024
Hybrid event, Online and at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Open for registration and programme here: https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-conference-2024/

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter has announced that it has received a £104,456 grant each year for the next five years from Research England’s Higher Education Museum and Galleries Collection Fund.  The awards recognises and supports the unique and significant contribution that the museum makes to the wider research community and enables this to grow.

The funding will be used for more staff to allow more cataloguing of the museum’s ever-growing collection. It will also enable greater digitisation of the collection so people can enjoy it remotely and give the opportunity to expand the museum’s successful stipend scheme for researchers.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum is the leading moving image museum in the UK and is home to one of the most significant such collections in the world. It was formed from the collection of the renowned director Bill Douglas and his friend Peter Jewell and many donations have been added since. Experts from around the world come to examine the 90,000-strong collection at the University of Exeter’s Streatham campus. It is also a public museum, free and open to all.

Museum Curator Dr Phil Wickham said: “Our mission is to follow in Bill Douglas’s footsteps and preserve these wonderful objects for the future and give the public and those researching the history of moving image access to them. Our collection – and interest from experts – has grown significantly in the past decade. People entrust their own collections to us because they know we will take very good care of them, and because they will be available for others to study and see.

“We are thrilled to have been given this funding from Research England. It will allow us to continue building this unique resource and further extend our reach to scholars, students and the public. It will allow us to take on further staff and support to enable further digitisation and cataloguing to open up the collections further, and initiatives to support visits from external researchers.”

More than 1,000 items are on display in the museum galleries. The collection is accessible to all and covers three centuries of moving image history, including over 23,000 film books; 1,500 stereoscope cards; 650 magic lantern slides and 23 magic lanterns. There are more than thousands of items relating to stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, shadow puppets from around the world, an original 1896 Lumière Cinématographe, books signed by Thomas Edison and annotated by his inventor W.K.L Dickson, as well as many items used by ordinary film fans that makes the museum a people’s history of the moving image. In addition to objects the collection includes a significant library and archive. 

 See: https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/

Photographs: © Michael Pritchard, October 2022

Call closing shortly... The National Stereoscopic Association is pleased to announce its fifth annual 'Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography' at the 50th annual 3D-Con held at the Drury Plaza Broadview Hotel, Wichita, Kansas, on July 26, 2024. Presentations of 15 minutes are welcome on any aspect of stereo-media from the inception of stereoscopic photography to immersive stereo media. We project stereoscopically on the 3D-Con's big screen, and our growing community of international scholars represent diverse research from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. All stereoscopic photography subjects from the historical to the contemporary are invited.

Please fill out the contact information form on the web page below. Then upload on a separate file your abstract of 600 words maximum, followed by a biography of no more than 300 words, and five images (optional). Deadline: May 14, 2024

Notification of acceptance by May 24, 2024. Digital images will be expected by June 25, 2024.

Call for Papers
Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography V
July 26, 2024
at the National Stereoscopic Association’s
50th Annual 3D-Con

https://3d-con.com/history.php