Two lots of particular photography interest are being offered over the next few weeks. Stephen Thompson's Photographs of British Museum Antiquities (1872) be at Lyon and Turnbull on 25 February and estimated at £700-1000. In an online auction ending on 19 February property from the late Professor Malcolm Yapp (1931-2025) is being offered which includes John Forbes Watson & John William Kaye's The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations...of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, in eight volumes (1868-75) estimated at £4000-6000.
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A remarkable body of work by the late photographer Joyce Edwards is being unveiled for the first time in a new exhibition that reveals one of East London’s most extraordinary grassroots housing movements. Edwards, a Hampstead landlady turned passionate documentarian, ventured into the East End nearly 50 years ago to photograph the young squatters who were transforming derelict streets into vibrant, if precarious, homes.
Edwards passed away in 2023, just months before her hundredth birthday, leaving behind a substantial legacy of fine photographs—many lovingly printed in her own darkroom. Much of this work was nearly lost to time, but a recent discovery and archiving effort has brought her images back into the light.
In the 1970s, Edwards began photographing squats across London, a journey which took her from affluent locations such as The Bishops Avenue, now known as Billionaires’ Row—to the heart of Bethnal Green. There she encountered ‘the Triangle’, a cluster of streets near the Grand Union canal and Victoria Park. The houses on the Triangle had been earmarked for demolition to make way for the monstrous London Ringways motorway scheme that included the Eastway, a road straight through Victoria Park to the A12. Mercifully the plan was scrapped, but only after hundreds of residents had been decanted and rehoused. The empty houses were soon seized upon by young people and locals seeking an inexpensive and alternative way of life in the capital. Over 2 years, Edwards took their portraits, creating an intimate and richly detailed record of a unique community.
The squatters' story is one of resilience and self-determination. The community of the Triangle did more than restore the homes; over the following years they established a Housing Co-op. Supported by SOLON Housing Association, the architect Julian Harrap and Cooperative Development Services (CDS), they convinced the Greater London Council and the Housing Corporation to eventually sell them the freeholds to all 79 properties. Today, the community continues to thrive as the Grand Union Housing Co-op. As Pete Bishop assures us, “The Co-op survives because of the involvement of the members and that we are fully mutual and, crucially, because our 1981 constitution includes a No Right to Buy clause.”
The exhibition brings together Edwards’ compelling portraits of the musicians, builders, painters, actors and radicals that occupied the Grand Union squats, alongside snapshots taken by the squatters themselves: vibrant Kodachrome slides, Polaroids, and drugstore prints that capture the spontaneity and creativity of life inside the Triangle. Together, these images form an unprecedented visual record of an East London community that refused to disappear.
Joyce Edwards: A Story of Squatters
13 February - 21 March 2026
Four Corners, 121 Roman Road, London, E2 0QN
Wednesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm. Free and open to all
See: https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/joyce-edwards-a-story-of-squatters
10×10 Photobooks is pleased to announce a new grant cycle and call for applications as part of its annual photobook research grants program to encourage and support scholarship on under-explored topics in photobook history. For this cycle, 10×10 is looking for submissions related to 10×10 Photobooks’ forthcoming publication on the history of photobooks from Africa and its diaspora. We invite proposals for photobook research on Black identity, Africa and the African diaspora. The concept of the photobook for your study can be interpreted in the broadest sense possible: classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines, digital media, scrapbooks, posters, or other ephemera. The evaluation of proposals will consider the importance of the proposed topic, how significant and/or unknown is the subject, and the strength of the proposed approach.
10×10 Photobooks will award three grants for this 5th cycle for 2026-2027 cycle in the amount of $2,500 each, which will be paid in two increments during the course of the project. Grantees are expected to present the result of their research in a 15 to 20-minute Zoom presentation along with an approximate 1500 word printed essay, including illustrations and photographs. Final research needs to be in English and will be due within a year of the grant being awarded.
10×10 will assist where able and desired with in-progress review, identifying information, making introductions, etc.
See full details here: https://10x10photobooks.org/research-grants-cycle5-call/
PHRC is pleased to announce the second season of its Research Seminars in Photographic Cultures and Heritage, a free, online series of talks and discussions exploring photography’s intersections with politics, technology, and cultural production.
The series investigates the rich and evolving field of photographic cultures and heritage, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to examine photography as a cultural artifact, historical record, and dynamic form of communication.
With a focus on critical methodologies, material practices, and global perspectives, the series addresses themes such as archival ethics, indigenous and everyday photography, technological shifts, memory and identity, and the politics of visual representation, dissemination and perception.
Through interdisciplinary talks and discussions, the seminars aim to expand and foster innovative insights into how photography and photographic practices are both shaping and shaped by cultural heritage – across time and space.
The programme for Semester Two 2025/26 includes three talks:
19 February 2026, 5.30pm – Associate Professor Donna West Brett (University of Sydney, Australia), “A Strange Tissue of Space and Time’: Modernist Photobooks & Propaganda”
26 March 2026, 5.30pm – Professor Sarah Parsons (York University, Toronto, Canada), “Feeling Exposed: Early Photography and Privacy in the United States”
7 May 2026, 5.30pm – PhD Candiate Javed Sultan (De Montfort University / Photographic History Research Centre), Constructing Dissent: Photojournalism and the Democratic Transition in Postcolonial India (1970s)”
Attendance and Registration
The seminars will be held online via Microsoft Teams and are free of charge.
Those wishing to attend one or more of the talks on the current season are kindly asked to register through the link below, with a joining link sent to registered participants one hour before the scheduled start.
https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/photographic-history-research-centre-phrc
Michael Hoppen Gallery has announced that the Bodleian Library has acquired what it described as 'one of the most important albums of 20th century photography to come to light in recent years' - a previously unknown Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton album which Michael Hoppen Gallery exhibited last year. Compiled by Roland Haupt, an assistant to both photographers, it contain some of the first prints of Miller's best known photographs and other prints that were previously unknown. The Gallery noted: 'the Library will use their exceptional conservation department to preserve this historically important album and make it available to students and academics alike to study. We could not have hoped for a better home for Lee Millers work.'
The Gallery described the album:
The album begins with this brief and heartfelt introduction by its originator – Roland Haupt, who sets the scene perfectly:
…This is the story of my favourite photographer Lee Miller – Vogue war correspondent who followed the American army from the beaches of Normandy, 5 days after D-Day, up to the final entry into Berlin and after that she continued her journey visiting countries that had been occupied, having many exciting experiences – here are a few of the beautiful pictures she sent back…
The album, which is ostensibly a daybook or scrap book kept by their assistant, Roland Haupt, provides an empirical time capsule of this fast moving, dangerous and seminal period at the end of the WWII. Many of the seismic moments that Lee Miller witnessed and photographed so professionally, are here - from the surrender of the German army to American forces, the harrowing evidence she captured in Dachau and Buchenwald, and an unpublished version of Lee in Hitlers bathtub, taken by David E. Scherman, who she in turn photographed in the bath too. There are strangely banal and unknown photographs of Hitlers bedroom with his unmade bed (Lee had spent the night in it) and his rather ordinary living room and desk. These ‘innocent’ images however produce a chilling and unsettling realisation when one realises whose home we are looking at. Miller observed that:
… ‘Hitler had never really been alive for me until to-day. He'd been an evil-machine-monster all these years, until I bathed ate and slept in his house. He became less fabulous and therefore more terrible’…
The following section of this unique album is populated with beautifully perfect photographs by Cecil Beaton, many taken in North Africa, where Beaton was stationed towards the end of the war. His pictures show a more restrained and composed method of documenting what he saw. There is none of the horror of Europe - which so compelled Lee - to be found in Beaton’s photographs. In 1942, Beaton had travelled to North Africa. where he produced some of his most dramatic abstract studies focusing on the detritus of war in the dry endless desert landscape, which he described as surreal. Beaton did also record the hardships and physical extremes experienced by the troops, just as he registered the sometimes sublime beauty of the desert.
Scattered through the album, are other pictures taken by Beaton in London and of Beaton himself – possibly by Haupt, and as any day book would have, a haphazard cornucopia of mixed portraits, theatre sets and newspaper cuttings of the day showing his images used in the press.
Later in the album, where we find numerous images by the three photographers. There is an extraordinary print of a semi-naked Lee Miller with a plaster cast of her exposed torso, possibly made by her husband Roland Penrose, upended over her head. Penrose had photographed the cast being made on her body and was in keeping with their exposure and fascination with the surrealists movement in Paris before the war.
Amongst the album’s other crowded pages are photographs by Miller of firing squads, scenes of despair and grief around the camps. Jumping out of one of the pages is a desperate image of a pair of young SS guards, captured, beaten and tied-up in the back of a van staring directly into her lens. Miller's writing about the beaten guards was brief and offhand, suggesting that she found it difficult to put her feelings into words:
….’What is the nature of justice - and what the role of vengeance - in the aftermath of atrocity? And how is it possible to go on living in the world, with the full knowledge of humanity's capacity for evil?’….
Amongst some of the highly charged photographs, are other more traditional and gentler images which share a strange kind of classical beauty contrasting against the stark late winter war ravaged landscapes. A plethora of fashion pictures by Miller showing models resting during a fashion shoot - juxtaposed with war photographs - are easily mistaken for ‘bodies’ that she photographed after suicides or as casualties of war.
It is through this ability of her fluent and intuitive visual language, that Miller was able to make pictures of the horrors of war, of fashion, views and landscapes and of personalities with such professionalism, and moreover, with such a razor-sharp point of view. It is understandable how her integrity and image-making ability came to mean so much to all those who worked with her. She clearly knew how important her witnessing of the history that unfolded in front of her was, and that she had to make these difficult pictures to inform the world of an uncomfortable truth.
Populating some of the other more general album pages, are portraits of many distinguished and influential luminaries of the day, whose lives were intertwined during the war years through art, politics, literature, music and theatre. Picasso, Marlene Dietrich, Fed Astair, Noel Coward, Mervyn Peake, Bob Hope, Clifford Coffin, Margaret Bourke-White and many others are there.
This day book was started in 1943, and was printed and assembled by Roland Haupt. Lee Miller was an excellent photographic printer herself, and she learned some of her technique from Man Ray who she lived with in Paris with whom she grew fascinated by what was achievable with photography. She printed all her own work and some of Man Ray’s in her Paris days, and to begin with in her New York studio, where she then trained her brother Erik Miller to be her assistant and to take over the darkroom work under her supervision.
In Egypt, she used commercial processing, but it is probable that she took a firm role in supervising the making of the enlargements she had made, some of which were published and exhibited at the time.
During the London Vogue studio days in 1940 she at first found herself back in the darkroom, but she managed to train and encourage her assistant Roland Haupt to the point where he did all the routine work.
Haupt was tasked as the photographic assistant to Cecil Beaton too during the war years. He processed and printed many of their most important and celebrated works, made for Vogue and Bazaar. Haupt was often entrusted with their precious rolls of film. Lee would send the shot film to Haupt in the UK via an army courier which he would then process, contact and print in his small darkroom, and then, forward them onto Vogue.
Read more and see Michael Hoppen discuss the album with Philippe Garner here: https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/viewing-room/51-an-album-a-daybook-with-works-by-lee-an-exceptional-album-of-vintage-silver-gelatin-prints/
The announcement provides a useful reminder that the Tate's Lee Miller retrospective exhibition remains open until 15 February and the National Portrait Gallery's Cecil Beaton exhibition closed earlier this month but a book is available.
By/For: Photography & Democracy is a collaborative partnership between three photographic historians, Dr. Tom Allbeson, Dr. Colleen O’Reilly, and Helen Trompeteler. Our second season of events begins on Friday 6 February. Please join us online with Anne Cross and Matthew Fox-Amato for their lecture, ‘To Show or Not to Show: Ethics, Censorship, and the Case of the Scourged Back’.
With a year of thought-provoking conversations on photography and democracy, upcoming lectures include Vindhya Buthpitiya, Leigh Raiford, Jeehey Kim, Zahid R. Chaudhary, and Tiffany Fairey.
Also, a reminder that at the end of our inaugural 2024/2025 season, we convened a reflective roundtable conversation with Shawn Michelle Smith, Brenna Wynn Greer, Thy Phu, Darren Newbury, Ileana L. Selejan, and Patricia Hayes. Together, they examined the stakes of photography in our contemporary moment and explored its complex entanglements with power structures and systemic injustice. Read the transcript of the conversation.
To Show or Not to Show: Ethics, Censorship, and the Case of the Scourged Back with Anne Cross & Matt Fox-Amato
6 February
Studio Ilankai: A Tamil Photographic History of Sri Lankan Citizenship with Vindhya Buthpitiya
6 March
When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World with Leigh Raiford
10 April
War, Movement, and the Camera: Black Lives in Korean and Japanese Photography with Jeehey Kim
2 October
By/For & Zahid R. Chaudhary
6 November
Imaging Peace: What might a photography of peace consist of? with Tiffany Fairey
4 December
All free to register and held via Zoom
See: https://www.byforcollective.com/programs
Late spring will see two new heritage plaques being unveiled. One will be for Julia Margaret Cameron, and the second will be a new plaque for Christina Broom. The dates and locations - both in London - and how people might attend will be announced here later.
On this day in 1926 John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television from premises in London's Frith Street. The building which is now the renowned Bar Italia is already marked with a blue heritage plaque. One hundred years to the day it has been joined with a World Original Site plaque. A ceremony today marked the unveiling by Iain Logie Baird, formerly television curator at the National Media Museum, and John's grandson.
The BBC with a particular interest in the event was there to film the unveiling which falso included Charlotte Connelly from the National Science and Media Museum which houses a Baird Televisor and Baird's experimental apparatus including test dummy 'Stookie Bill'.
See: https://worldoriginsite.org/television-john-logie-baird/
and https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/tv-100/#televisiongoespublic
The seminar is organised by Museum of Cinema - Tomàs Mallol Collection (Girona); Department of History and Art History of the University of Girona (UdG); Research Group on the Origins of Cinema (GROC); and the Research Project of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities entitled: 'The impact of electricity on turn-of-the-century cinema and photography: from transformations of vision to the animism of objects (1885-1919)'
The call for papers for the 15th Seminar is open. The deadline for submissions is 31 March, 2026.
15th International Seminar on the Origins and History of Cinema
Electricity and its impact on modern visual and auditory culture
cfp: deadline: 31 March 2026
see: https://museudelcinema.girona.cat/eng/institut_seminari_2026.php
seminar: 5 & November 2026
The photographer Gus Wylie has died aged 90 years. Wylie was a long term chronicler of Scottish island life, and his home county of Norfolk, and much more besides. He was perhaps best known for his book The Hebrideans. The Photographs 1974-2004 (2005).
Wylie taught at The Royal College of Art, London, the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, and directed the MA in Fashion Photography at the University of the Arts, London. He published five books, four of which are on the Western Isles of Scotland and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2005.
He graduated three times at Postgraduate level in, respectively, Fine Art, Photography and Cultural History, all of which were gained at the Royal College of Art, London, and the last of which was a PhD.
In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history of chemical photography through the lens of its deep connections to empire and industry. Dr Miranda Melcher discusses the book with Michelle Henning.
Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives of British photographic manufacturer Ilford Limited, Professor Henning exposes the ways photography shaped how we see and understand the atmosphere while leaving its toxic residues in the air, soil, and water.
Structured as thirty-six short chapters and with over seventy illustrations, this innovative book begins in interwar London, follows the supply of Ilford products to photographers on the West African coast, and considers photography as a military technology linked to the development of chemical warfare. Combining close readings of photographs with discussions of low-light, tropical, and aerial photography, Professor Henning examines the extraction and development of photographic materials, their role in the current environmental crisis, and how they have shaped experiences of time and the environment.
See: https://newbooksnetwork.com/a-dirty-history-of-photography
Professor Donna West Brett is the 2026 Oliver Smithies visiting lecturer, at Balliol College, Oxford. She will be delivering two lectures during her residence. The first looks at Zeppelins.
‘Disaster, Sensation and the Zeppelin Sublime’.
Zeppelins played a significant role in shaping the British home front experience during the First World War, which Trudi Tate characterised as ‘a fantasmatic, infantile, and pleasurable relationship to the war and its objects.’ In September and October 1916, three German airships were shot down over Essex, events that drew tens of thousands of spectators, including journalists, who collected souvenirs or photographed the wreckage. Despite widespread disillusionment with the war, the presence of zeppelins elicited a paradoxical mix of intoxication, exhilaration, and horror (Freedman, 2004), a response reflected in the broader public imagination. Photographs and illustrations of burning airships and bombed houses, reproduced in the illustrated press, formed part of the burgeoning visual culture surrounding these spectacular events. This lecture examines the public emotional response, the extensive visual culture, including media narratives, and the mass consumption of wreckage souvenirs and postcards that emerged from these spectacles, thereby constituting what became known as the ‘Zeppelin Sublime.'
12 February 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/february/12/oliver-smithies-lecture
‘Stasi Surveillance: Photography’s Material and Residual Traces’.
This lecture examines the entanglement of photography with the past and its potential future within a post-archival context. Specifically, it examines photographs taken by the East German Stasi from the 1960s to 1989, highlighting the extensive material and photographic residue that serve as tangible traces of surveillance activities. Through key case studies, the lecture considers photography’s multiple registers as a tool for covert surveillance and as an evidential record, which nonetheless become haunting traces of unseen surveillance forces and a testament to photography’s unsettling potential.
5 March 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford.
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/march/05/oliver-smithies-lecture
All are welcome. Please RSVP to the college: office@balliol.ox.ac.uk if you would like to attend.
Following the death of Martin Parr on 6 December 2025 the Martin Parr Foundation has posted a short statement to reassure its members and the wider photography world about its future. It is reproduced here:
We've been asked a lot over the past weeks - What's next for the Foundation? - so we wanted to assure everyone that out mission remains the same.
Martin put in place a sustainable plan for the Foundation's future and we will continue with our programme of events and exhibitions, as well as continue to grow our collection of photography and to nurture new talent.
We will continue to hold BOP_Bristol, our annual photobook festival, and we'll still be involved in Bristol Photo Festival.
We deeply miss Martin's presence, but we are strengthened by the outpouring of support from across the globe in response to Martin's death. If you would like to help us continue Martin's work supporting the photography commnity, please consider joining us as a Member, Supporter or Patron.
The Martin Parr Foundation and membership can be seen here: https://martinparrfoundation.org/
The Foundation's first exhibition of 2026 will be Martin's The Last Resort first shown in 1986 at the Serpentine Gallery, London. It opens at the Foundation on 20 February 2026. Details on BPH - with some of the 1986 reports and reviews - in the next week or so.
Photo: Martin Parr at the opening of A year in the life of Chew Stoke at the Foundation in January 2023. © Michael Pritchard
Chiswick Auctions is to offer a group of 29 lots from the estate of Cherry Kearton (1871-1940). Kearton was one half of the Kearton brothers who are widely acknowledged as the pioneers of natural history photography and cinematography made in the field and underpinned by fieldcraft and scientific rigour. Both were Fellows of the Royal Photographic Society. Richard (1862-1928) and Cherry Kearton published their natural history photography widely in book form, through articles and lantern shows, and their films were widely exhibited. One lot is from British ornithologist C.H. Bentham, Richard Kearton's son-in-law and his co-author on Pocket Book of Birds (1925).
The Cherry Kearton material includes Kearton's prototype rifle camera from c.1919, a tropical hand camera and his 3a Autographic Kodak Special model B camera, a selection of photographs (including correspondence and photographs with Theodore Roosevelt from 1909), press cuttings, documents relating to Kearton's publications, books, camera patents and manuscript material. One lot includes a selection 35mm nitrate ciné film.
Michael Pritchard writes...Of the two Kearton brothers Cherry was widely acknowledged to be the more significant and 'demonstrated the outstanding value of the camera in the study of wild life', although the collaboration was a significant one until Richard's early death. As the photographic press noted the Kearton's books 'marked an entuirely new approach to the study of animal and bird life'. Although birds were the Kearton's initial subject, they expanded their work to include wider fauna and flora.
Summing up their contribution in 1940 the British Journal of Photography noted 'more than any other naturalists they developed photography and the photograph as the mode and the end of personal observation...and laid the foundation for a technique entirely different from any that had gone before'.
Cherry Kearton's work started in his native Yorkshire and spread more widely across Britain and then into Africa. Photography in daylight was supplemented by flashlight, and cinematography was added to still photography. Their work studying nature 'largely put an end to the wholesale slaughter of birds and beasts in the so-called interests of science' and their approach was followed by many other photographers.
Auction: The Art of Nature
Chiswick Auctions
10 February 2026 at 1100
Lots 66-94
See lot details here
Images: (top): a selection from 80 held in Kearton's library, including signed books (est. £600-800); (top, right): Prototype rifle camera c.1919 (est £2000-3000); (centre): flashlight photograph of a maneless African Lion and Cherry Kearton holding a lion cub c1909 (est £100-150); (lower): Kearton's personal press cutting's archive (est 200-300). All courtesy Chiswick Auctions.
BPH reported on a new book by John Bevis The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography in 2016 and the acquisition of a Kearton cinematographic camera by the then National Media Musuem in 2013. A second camera reputed to be owned by the Keartons was shown on the Antiques Roadshow in 2016.
The Times Literary Supplement in an essay by Maria C Scott reports on the discovery of portraits by the Parisian studio of Nadar of Jeanne Duval, the long-term mistress of Charles Baudelaire and the 'Black Venus'. Scott examined the portraits and discovered further likely portraits in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Scott suggests that the portraits rewrite the representation of Duvall based on Baudelaire's biased accounts, and concludes 'What these photographs confirm above all is Duval’s strength of character, and that is surely what Manet was trying to capture in his portrait of her.'
See: Maria C Scott, ' Portraits of the ‘Black Venus'. Newly discovered photographs of Baudelaire’s muse', TLS, 23 January 2026, no. 6397 or: https://www.the-tls.com/lives/biography/newly-discovered-photographs-baudelaire-muse-essay-maria-c-scott (paywall)
Image: Two previously unknown photographs of Jeanne Duval from the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
Following the recent death of Colin Ford CBE Amgueddfa Cymru–Museum Wales has announced the establishment of the Colin Ford Endowment Fund. Before his death Colin gifted his personal collection of photography books, which reflects a lifetime’s worth of collecting, to the museum. The endowment fund will support the on-going purchase of photography books to continue to grow the Colin Ford Photography Library and reflect current photographic scholarship, curation and practice.
Colin Ford CBE HonFRPS was the Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru from 1993 to 1998. He was a curator, historian, museum director and broadcaster, whose professional life was largely dedicated to photography. His personal papers have been donated to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
See more and contribute in Colin's memory here: https://my.museum.wales/donate/q/in-memory-colin-ford
In celebration of International Women’s Day, 8 March 2026, and building on the success of our 2025 conference-a-thon, we invited scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts to submit abstracts for participation in a free, online, global, 24-hour symposium dedicated to celebrating the contributions of women to the medium of photography from photography’s announcement in 1839 to now. This unique free event featuring 72 speakers aims to highlight the diverse and impactful work of women and female-identifying photographers, as well as those working with photography, across all countries, continents, cultures, and time zones, without a penny spent on travel or registration. The recordings will be viewable for a month afterwards but only to those who have registered.
Women of Photography conference-a-thon
International Womens' Day
8 March 2026
See the full programme and register for free here: https://womenofphoto.com/
A couple of BBC Radio 4 programmes have explored the lives and careers of two prominent photographers. This Cultural Life featured American photographer Annie Leibovitz who spoke to John Wilson about her career and cultural influences. Desert Island Discs interviewed Sally Mann who spoke candidly about her family and approach to her photography. Both programmes are available to listen to on BBC Sounds.
Listen to: Annie Leibovitz. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002pqnk and Sally Mann: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002m1mv
From 1879 onwards, the gelatin silver bromide process gradually became the dominant photographic method, and companies dedicated to the manufacture of photographic plates and papers began to emerge in the main countries of Europe and America.
Spain, with no tradition in the manufacture of photographic materials, became an ideal market for the distribution and sale of these foreign brands. However, as the consumption of plates and papers grew, voices began to emerge denouncing the large amount of foreign currency that was leaving the country for this reason, and at the same time, demanding the creation of a domestic photographic industry. This book explains the attempts to establish such an industry, its successes, and its failures.
The book has a well-researched text and is extensively illustrated. It provides a model for long overdue national studies of sensitised materials manufacture.
El Gelatino-Bromuro en España [1879-1939]. La fabricación de placas y papeles fotográficos
Salvador Tió Sauleda
Price 30 € plus shipping costs
Laie Bookstore, Vía Laietana 85, 08010 Barcelona
tel. +34 933 181 739 / orders to: comandes@laie.cat
Dartmouth Museum has recently received a major donation: the entire photographic archive of Vernon MacAndrew (1880–1940), a Dartmouth-connected businessman, yachtsman and philanthropist who pursued photography as a sustained private practice over several decades.The donation has opened a new chapter in the town’s cultural history - and in the life of a man already familiar to many in Dartmouth.
Vernon MacAndrew (1880–1940) is remembered locally as a businessman, yachtsman, and philanthropist, associated with Dartmouth’s maritime and social life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Alongside this public profile, MacAndrew pursued photography as a sustained private practice. He showed work privately to friends, family, and local groups, and he exhibited flower studies at the Royal Photographic Society. In 1936 he was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society.
The archive was donated to the Museum by Dartmouth resident Alec Smith, who intervened when the archive was placed on the market at auction. Alec was impressed by the scale and completeness of the archive: “I’m delighted to have been able to transfer the complete archive to the Museum, so it can be kept together — and so its significance for Dartmouth and for the wider history of photography can be uncovered in the coming years.”
The archive had been in private hands since MacAndrew’s death and has only recently resurfaced at auction. It has not yet been fully catalogued or studied in a museum or academic context. As a result, the figures below are estimates, though they give a clear picture of what has been deposited and the overall character of the collection, which represents the overwhelming majority of his life’s work with his camera.
On current assessment, the archive totals approximately 5,000 glass originals, comprising around 4,500 glass positives and 500 glass negatives. Within this, at least 1,750 items are colour, forming a major component rather than an occasional experiment. On current information, that places it among the largest documented of pre-WW2 colour collections currently in the public domain. The collection spans approximately 1900 to 1939 and includes monochrome work, hand-tinting, and multiple colour processes, with evidence across the archive of Autochrome and other colour systems including Agfa and Finlay (glass and cut film)—a broad technical range within a single private body of work. There is also evidence of Paget material, but this has not been quantified at this stage.
For photographic historians, this breadth matters because colour appears as a sustained practice rather than a small side-line. A particular highlight is a long sequence (115 slides) of early Autochromes associated with MacAndrew’s time in Valencia (1906–1914), above, left, forming a multi-year run rather than isolated examples. The archive also includes later still life studies, indicating continued technical work with lighting, colour, and composition beyond travel and maritime subjects. In total around 300 Autochrome slides are identified and need to be catalogued.
The archive subjects include Dartmouth and Kingswear—harbour and river scenes, working boats, waterfront life, and yachting—to extensive travel and expedition photography made overseas. The overseas material includes sequences associated with travel in Europe and the Mediterranean as well as work made further afield, including in North Africa and the Red Sea region, Sudan, the West Indies/Caribbean, and the Philippines. This breadth places the archive within wider maritime and travel networks of the period, rather than limiting it to local topography.
A further strand, unusual in its scale within a personal archive, is MacAndrew’s systematic documentation of natural history, including an extensive photographic record of his shell collection alongside studies in botany, insects, and microscopy. After his death, his nationally significant shell collection was donated to the Natural History Museum, and the shell photographs in the archive form a separate visual record of that scientific interest. These sequences suggest a photographic practice used for recording, comparison, and close observation as well as for travel and social documentation.
MacAndrew’s position within yacht racing also provided access that is rarely available to photographers working from outside the sport. As owner and helm of the 12-metre Trivia, he achieved notable success at Cowes Week in 1938, winning 21 prizes including the King’s Cup. This brought him into the international big-boat racing world—yachts, tenders, and the shore-side and social routines around major regattas—and the archive shows that he documented this environment in colour[Image of West Solent One Design racing].
The archive also contains hand-tinted monochrome photographs associated with expedition contexts, showing that colour work here includes both native colour processes and post-production hand colouring. In later maritime work, there is evidence of MacAndrew using Finlay glass plates, and later moving into Finlay cut film, indicating changes in materials and practice within a single working life.
Dartmouth Museum has stressed that this donation marks the beginning of a long-term project rather than a finished story. The immediate priorities are collections-led: stabilisation of fragile glass materials, condition assessment, careful handling protocols, and creation of a structured inventory. Only once these foundations are in place will it be possible to make evidence-based statements about the archive’s wider significance within British photographic history and the history of early colour practice.
“This is an important addition to the town’s historical record,” a museum spokesperson said. “It offers a rich visual account of Dartmouth’s maritime world, but it also raises wider questions about early colour photography and private photographic practice in the first half of the twentieth century.”
The donation also strengthens an existing local photographic resource. Dartmouth Museum already holds a substantial group of black-and-white glass lantern slides by five local photographers, documenting Dartmouth between 1890 and 1945, totalling approximately 2,400 slides. The addition of the MacAndrew glass material increases the scale and range of Dartmouth’s public photographic holdings and supports future work comparing local documentation across formats, decades, and photographic approaches. A project page on the Museum website will host updates as work progresses.
Taken as a whole, the MacAndrew donation brings into public care a large, technically varied archive made over several decades, and represents his complete oeuvre, so far as we are currently aware. The presence of multiple early colour processes, the sustained Valencia Autochrome sequence, the hand-tinted expedition photographs, the use of Finlay materials in later maritime work, and the extensive scientific documentation of shells and related subjects combine scale with a high level of photographic intent. Once conserved and catalogued, the archive has the potential to stand both as a major visual record of Dartmouth and its maritime life and as a significant body of primary material for the study of early colour practice and private photographic production in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
With thanks to Jonathan Turner, Dartmouth Museum. If any BPH reader has further information about Vernon MacAndrew and his photography, please get in touch with Jonathan at Dartmouth Museum: vicechair@dartmouthmuseum.org.
See: https://www.dartmouthmuseum.org/
Images: (top to bottom): Dartmouth harbour entrance from Bayards Cove, 1930s; Vernon MacAndrew, around 1939; Traditional houses beside a rice field in the Huerta de València, c1912. Autochrome; Hyacinths in flower, Autochrome; MacAndrew’s expedition motor yacht, Harpado, undergoing repairs in Jeddah c1923; Philippines, over-water stilt village (possibly Moro), hand-tinted photograph, 1929;Shells from the Cyclophorus genus of land snails, found in the Philippines, 1929; West Solent One Design yachts racing in Torbay, early 1930. All courtesy of Dartmouth Museum.
