Atlas Obscura has reported on the conservation of 1800 Gibson of Scilly negatives acquired by the National Maritime Museum at auction some ten years ago. The museum is also planning to digitise the entire collection.
Read the full piece here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gibson-family-shipwreck-images
This one-day, interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together researchers, archivists and curators to explore twentieth-century photo-magazines from across the British Empire and Commonwealth during the so-called ‘golden age of photojournalism’.
As well as the birth of photojournalism, the seismic political, cultural and technological revolutions of the interwar period also gave rise to a novel publication format – the photo-magazine. As Stuart Hall characterised it in his seminal 1972 essay on Picture Post, these were ‘image-over-text’ publications which gave primacy to the photographic image arranged into dynamic layouts and photo-stories by an innovative cadre of picture editors and art directors.
Exemplified by photo-reportage from the Spanish Civil War, this novel format was catalysed during the Second World War via widely circulated visual information campaigns by both commercial organisations and political actors. In the postwar period, the photo-magazine format was deployed by British occupying forces in defeated Germany. Photo-magazines were also a vital element of flourishing public relations initiatives by both newly established agencies of the UN and a host of industrial and manufacturing companies concerned about image management.
Thus, throughout the central decades of the last century, the general readership photo-magazine was developed and used to communicate with large, diverse and/or distant audiences. This format constituted a defining aspect of a public’s visual experience prior to the segmentation of magazine audiences from the 1960s and the dominance of television. This period – arguably, the golden age of photojournalism – coincides with the decline and disestablishment of the British Empire.
We aim to coordinate a selection of papers that look at publications from across the British Empire and Commonwealth in this period. These will address how such photo-magazines sought to instruct and entertain; how they represented social issues; how they othered and racialised indigenous communities; how they documented conflict; how they obscured, as much as revealed, historical developments; how they constructed, connected or divided audiences and publics; and how they explored or framed key tensions in the changing political landscape of the British Commonwealth and its constituent dominions and dependencies.
Hosted by the Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media History at Cardiff University, this initiative is a collaboration between Dr Tom Allbeson (Senior Lecturer in Media History, Cardiff University) and Dr Kevin Foster (Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University).
We invite proposals for individual 20-minute papers from scholars, archivists and curators at all career stages working on relevant topics, as well as proposals for themed panels comprising three related 20-minute papers.
Please submit an abstract (max 500 words) and a short biography (max 200 words) by 1 August 2023 to the convenors, allbesont@cardiff.ac.uk and kevin.foster@monash.edu.
If possible, we will endeavour to provide funding to support travel costs for early career researchers. For international contributors, we could also consider a themed panel delivered via Zoom.
Call for Papers: Photo-magazines across the British Empire & Commonwealth, c.1925-75
One-day workshop, School of Journalism, Media & Culture, Cardiff University
Friday 22 September 2023
Deadline for paper call: 1 August 2023
The publication of Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization has been announced by The MIT Press. Billed by the publishers as 'an intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s', the book traces a history of the modern pictorial economy that foregrounds the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography: picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists.
Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet.
Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, as well as interviews with professionals in the UK picture industry, the book reveals the research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that have been needed to make pictures available to a public, both before and after (or rather, under) digitization.
In short, Picture Research makes visible and explicit the invisible labour that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.
Nina Lager Vestberg is Professor of Visual Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is a member of the editorial board of History of Photography, and her work has been published in journals ranging from Journal of Visual Culture to Museum Management and Curatorship.
Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization
Nina Lager Vestberg
272 pp., 6 x 9 in, 12 color illus., 21 b&w illus, paperback
ISBN 9780262045315
MIT Press, 2022
£38
Details: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045315/picture-research/.
Open access version: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5595/Picture-ResearchThe-Work-of-Intermediation-from
In Search of the Blue Flower celebrates the life and work of photographer Alexander Hamilton. It presents his early formative years, sharing the way his engagement with the cyanotype process has informed his art practice, from his time at Edinburgh College of Art, to his program of exhibitions and residencies, through to his work within the field of public arts. This personal history is combined with essays by academics, scholars and curators who engage with the intellectual roots of his work and practice. A comprehensive selection of Hamilton’s photography, including his unique plant-based cyanotypes, completes this beautiful book.
The book includes essays by Vanessa Sellars, Julie Lawson, Christian Weikop and Jaromir Jedlinski.
In Search of the Blue Flower. Alexander Hamilton and the Art of Cyanotype
Alexander Hamilton
Edinburgh University Press, 2023
£30. order: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-in-search-of-the-blue-flower.html
Hear artist Garry Fabian Miller in conversation with Martin Barnes (Senior Curator of Photography, V&A) and Bronwen Colquhoun (Senior Curator of Photography, Amgueddfa Cymru) about his life, practice and collaborations. This event has been programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Môrwelion/The Sea Horizon which is currently on display at National Museum Cardiff until 10 September 2023.
Môrwelion/The Sea Horizon will be open for those that would like to view the exhibition before the event. Attendees are invited to enjoy music performed by Composition students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in the gallery from 1-1:45pm. These new works have been composed in response to The Sea Horizon exhibition.
The talk will be followed by a screening of five short films made by the artist in collaboration with Sam Fabian Miller. The films invite you to explore Garry Fabian Miller’s ‘camera-less’ practice that experiments with darkness and light, and weaves in work by the artists, writers and thinkers that have inspired him over the years, including Alice Oswald, Oliver Coates and Kathleen Francis.
In Conversation: The Sea Horizon
National Museum Cardiff
17 June 2023 at 1400
See: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/11914/In-Conversation-The-Sea-Horizon/
Art Monthly Australasia carries a review by Elisa deCourcy of the Bodleian Libraries' exhibitions A New Power and Bright Sparks. The latter remains on view until 18 June 2023.
See: Art Monthly Australasia, Winter 2023, Issue 336. https://www.artmonthly.org.au/current
for details of Bright Sparks see: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/events-exhibitions
A couple of recent articles are worth sharing. In the May Apollo magazine Diane Smyth poses the question 'Do photography collections in the UK need more focus?' and compares the opening of the new V&A Photography Centre with the closure of Newcastle's Side Gallery and takes in the Bodleian Libraries and changes - openings and closures - to other collections in recent years.
The Architects Journal gives a technical summary of the V&A Photography Centre which cost £3 million (base build) and £1.25 million (fit-out).
See: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photography-uk-collections-va-james-hyman-bodleian-npg/
For the first time at Watts Gallery, discover an exhibition dedicated to a 19th century craze that saw the birth of 3D images. Victorian Virtual Reality: Photographs from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy will present highlights from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy to explore the 19th-century photography craze that, for the first time, enabled pictures to appear in 3D.
Featuring over 150 stereoscopic photographs, experience how this lesser-known Victorian innovation continues to captivate today through a range of viewers and digital techniques.
Discover the 19th-century art of stereoscopy, which saw a second wave of popularity in the mid-20th century. It was at that time that the young Sir Brian May – later the lead guitarist for Queen – began his passion for this photographic phenomenon and formed his world-leading collection of stereoscopy.
Through viewers, stereoscopic photographs and interactive elements, explore topics such as celebrity portraits, snapshots of Victorian life, scenes of satire and devilry found in Sir Brian May’s collection. Stereoscopic photographs and other artwork from Watts Gallery Trust’s own collection will feature among the loaned works.
Victorian Virtual Reality will be the first exhibition at Watts Gallery dedicated to stereoscopy. It will open with an introduction to the stereoscopy and early images from Sir Brian May’s collection, including his first ever stereocard – the Weetabix hippos - and examples of the earliest viewing devices and photographs of Victorians at home, sharing and viewing their own collections of images.
Victorian Virtual Reality
4 July 2023 – 25 February 2024
Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, Surrey, GU3 1DQ
See: https://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/victorian-virtual-reality
Tuesday 30 May is National Creativity Day, and Newport's creative arts department in Coleg Gwent will be celebrating this by creating Wales’ largest cyanotype. This Welsh record-breaking cyanotype will be made in Waunfawr Park, Newport, opposite Crosskeys Campus, on Tuesday 30th May at midday and everyone is welcome to be involved.
The cyanotype artwork will 11 meters long and three meters wide – 33m2 in total. It will be made using staff and learners to create silhouettes to represent the wonderful diversity of people in Crosskeys Campus.
Lecturer in Photography and Course Leader of the FDa and BA Photography programme Peter Britton says "This will be a test process for something exciting we have happening later in the year... We have just started the process of applying to the Guinness book of records to make one of the worlds biggest photographs. We will be using the cyanotype process again, to create an image that is ENORMOUS - the worlds biggest cyanotype! As for date and location, to be confirmed, but probably September this year..."
More on BPH when details are released. In the meantime this record-breaking Welsh cyanotype is equally exciting.
https://www.coleggwent.ac.uk/ and https://www.peter-britton.com/
As Great Britain faced a third year of gruelling trench warfare on the continent and dirigible attacks on its shores, the American expatriate Alvin Langdon Coburn joined with fellow London transplant Ezra Pound to produce a series of experimental photographs Pound dubbed ‘vortographs’. This talk from Anne McCauley will explore how these pictures came into existence by focusing on the day of their public presentation at the London Camera Club and why abstraction found a particular resonance at this historical time and place.
Anne McCauley, ‘Alvin Langdon Coburn, the Great War, and the “World’s First Abstract Photographs”: 8 February 1917’
30 May ‘23, 1800 - 1930
Keynes Library, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H OPD
Free and open to all
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/research/centres/history-and-theory-of-photography/
HMS Erebus took part in the Ross expedition of 1839–1843, and was abandoned in 1848 during the third Franklin expedition. The sunken wreck was discovered by the Canadian Victoria Strait expedition in September 2014. In a fascinating series of blog posts Professor Russell Potter reports on several visits to see the process of conservation on recovered artefacts.
One, particularly, is relevant to daguerriean photography. A metal device sparked Potter's interest. He notes: "I was struck at once by the fact that the square seemed similar in proportion to the Franklin daguerreotypes made by the operator from Richard Beard's firm" and thought it might be to do with plate polishing. The hunch was confirmed by Mike Robinson who confirmed it was part of a device patented by John Johnson in 1841 and known to have been used in Richard Beard's studios.
Potter concludes: "So now we have something we didn't have before: clear evidence that indeed such an apparatus was aboard HMS "Erebus," and that, assuming it was used as intended, Daguerreotypes were almost certainly made during the expedition. It's only one small step to add to the hope that someday such plates may be recovered; if they are, they'll be the earliest photographs ever taken in the Arctic!"
Read the full, illustrated, blog here: https://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/
With thanks to Anne Strathie for the link.
Southport's The Atkinson venue and the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), with Ponting's biographer Anne Strathie, is showing a new exhibition Herbert Ponting: Explorer and Photographer at The Atkinson from 10 June to 2 September 2023. Ponting's family lived in Southport from the 1880s.
Alongside the exhibition of photographs and rarely seen artefacts relating to Herbert Ponting are a series of talks and events.
Ponting’s father was appointed Manager of Preston Banking Company in the 1880s and the family set up home in Park Road West, Southport.
Herbert Ponting: Explorer and Photographer
10 June-2 September 2023
Free admission, Monday-Saturday, 1000-1600
The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport, PR8 1DB
Details: https://www.theatkinson.co.uk/exhibition/herbert-ponting/
The second and final phase of the V&A's Photography Centre is now complete and ready for its public unveiling on Thursday, 25 May 2023, At an opening event this evening V&A Director Tristram Hunt and the leading curator Marta Weiss explained the thinking behind the Centre and acknowledged the support of donors and photographers.
Below are a few photographs of the new spaces that compliment and extend the existing galleries.
Birkbeck, University of London, and the British Film Institute are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2023 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.
With privileged access to the BFI’s extensive collections, this project seeks to uncover a story of British filmmaking that foregrounds the shaping influence of migrant skills, techniques, voices and visions in the emergence of a British aesthetic. The aim is to challenge and nuance our understanding of what we mean when we speak of ‘British cinema’.
This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Agnes Woolley (Birkbeck) and James Bell (BFI) and the student will be expected to spend time at both Birkbeck and the BFI, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK. The studentship can be studied either full or part-time.
Project Overview
Dominant narratives about the emergence and development of British film in the twentieth century have largely overlooked the influence of filmmakers from outside Britain. While the 1970s inaugurated an era of reflexive, radical filmmaking by Britain’s diasporic populations, less understood is the transnational sensibility cultivated by migrant filmmakers in the preceding decades and how it continued to underpin the stories Britain told about itself through film, as well as the aesthetic approaches used to tell those stories. While there has been work done into some areas of the subject – for instance into the contributions of German-speaking migrant filmmakers who came to Britain in the 1930s to escape Nazism – there remain large gaps in our understanding of the great impact made to the ongoing development of the British cinema in the post-War years by migrants from Europe, the wider Commonwealth and beyond, as British cinema moved through the 1950s and into the new movements of the 1960s.
The project examines the influence of the ‘outsider’ perspectives of, for example, refugees from post-war Communism in Eastern Europe or British colonial subjects on the story of Britain as presented in its national cinema. With this in mind, this project approaches the BFI’s collections with the intention of drawing out the neglected contributions of migrant filmmakers operating in a variety of roles, such as Director of Photography, Screenwriter or Composer; exploring what influence they have in the overall shaping of the film, and on broader aesthetic and thematic developments in British film. The project might examine the influence of, for example, Polish director Mira Hamermesh, who fled Nazism in 1941; director Robert Vas, who left Hungary following the uprising in 1956; or actor/director Lloyd Reckord, who left Jamaica in 1951. The student will access – and be trained to use – the BFI’s moving image collections (both digitised and physical material), and papers in the archive’s Special Collections holdings. Some of the figures cited above made films funded by the BFI itself, and the student would have unique access to newly-digitised films from that collection, and related paper collections. The work will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the material in the BFI’s own collections, and to its own history.
Research questions include:
Uncovering the Influence of Migrant Filmmakers on the Emergence and Development of British Film 1940-1970
Start date: 1st October 2023
Closing date for applications: Monday 19th June 2023, 5pm.
Deadline for references: Friday 23rd June 2023, 12 noon.
Interview date: w/c 3 July 2023.
Informal enquiries about this collaborative project can be sent to Agnes Woolley a.woolley@bbk.ac.uk
We will be hosting an online briefing for interested applicants in early June. Please register your interest by emailing a.woolley@bbk.ac.uk
Full details here
The Firsts rare book fair which takes place at the Saatchi Gallery, London, from 19-21 May 2023 includes a selection of early photography from Stewart & Skeels. Included within their fair offerings is fascicle no. 1 of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, 1844. It is offered at £60,000.
Also included is a Julia Margaret Cameron print of Sir John Herschel and other photographs.
Alan Marshall’s award-winning photography documents a significant period in the 1960s and mid-1970s when both art and design crossed boundaries to explore and portray the expanding world of technology.
This selected collection of photographs, deeply observed through the lens of an artist, sees beauty in extreme settings and offers an insight into the humanity within powerful industrial processes.
Alan Marshall FRPS FIIP. Industrial Beauty
The School of Philosophy
South Bourne House, 78 Carter Knowle Road, Sheffield, S7 2DX
29 May-9 June 2023
Private view and talk: Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th May at 1430.
Image: Tapping Blast Furnaces - FT Industrial Photographer of the Year 1969
BPH has been advised that Insight, the National Science + Media Museum's Collections and Research Centre, which provides physical access to the museum's collections is to close from 5 June 2023 until summer 2024. The museum will still be supporting research access to the collections remotely via virtual research room appointments and its enquiry service. The final in-person appointments which need to be pre-booked are available from 17-19 May 2023.
The closure is the result of the closure of the museum to facilitate its transofmration through the £6 million Sound and Vision Project.
For more information see: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/researchers/access-to-our-collection
The Courtauld has completed a major five-year project to open up its internationally-renowned collection of photographs to the public for free, working with 14,000 volunteers to digitise over one million images from The Conway Library as part of the biggest public inclusion project in The Courtauld’s history. In addition the Courtauld has published its approach to copyright of the material it has digitised.
Since 2017, almost 2,000 in-person volunteers ranging from ages 18 – 86 have worked closely with The Courtauld to catalogue and photograph every image in The Conway Library collection – the majority of which have never been seen before. Volunteers were recruited from a wide variety of organisations, schools and charities, including The Terrance Higgins Trust, The One Housing Foundation, BeyondAutism, and My Action for Kids. A further 12,000 volunteers participated remotely online.
Located at The Courtauld at Somerset House in London, The Conway Library contains over one million images dating from the inception of photography to the present day: photographs and cuttings of world architecture, sculpture, paintings, and decorative objects, including 160,000 prints by Britain’s leading architectural photographer of the 20th Century Anthony Kersting, documenting his extensive expeditions across the Middle East, rare 19th Century photographs of world architecture, unpublished images revealing bomb damage across Europe following WWII, and T.E. Lawrence’s photographs of Saudi Arabia.
Highlights include:
The digitisation project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, has become the largest and most diverse public inclusion project in The Courtauld’s history, introducing new audiences and uncovering new insights into this remarkable collection. The entire collection is now available as high-resolution images, making the library easier to use as a tool for research and education and enabling a wider audience to access it.
See more here: https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2023/conway-library-photographic-collection-unveiled/
Read the Courtauld's approach to copyright here: https://photocollections.courtauld.ac.uk/copyright
Image: top: William J R Curtis, Dubarry Court, Brighton, East Sussex; lower: Norfolk Crescent, Bath.
The Photographic Collections Network is holding an online event on the preservation of photographic materials looking at photographic processes and their problems. This session aims to help participants gain confidence in identifying different types of photographs (predominantly monochrome processes) and recognising internal and external damaging factors which have a detrimental impact on their condition.
The session is aimed at participants who work with or own collections of photographs. Some participants may have little knowledge of photographs prior to this session but have photographs within their collections. Others may have much deeper experience with photography collections but wish to improve their knowledge and understanding of photographic materials to facilitate long-term preservation.
You will receive a confirmation email when you book, and the event link will be sent to you on the day of the event.
Preservation of Photographic Materials Session: Photographic Processes and their Problems
Tuesday, 16 May 2023, 1-2:45pm BST
Free / donation, online
Register: https://www.photocollections.org.uk/events/preservation-photographic-materials-session-photographic-processes-and-their-problems
As part of the run up to the UK's National Gallery's bicentenary celebrations in 2024 it is running a series of blogs and other activities in its 199th year. As part of that it has published a blog titled 100 years of the Photographic Department: Part One which looks at how the department has operated and evolved over the past one hundred years.
Read it here: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/behind-the-scenes/100-years-of-the-photographic-department-part-one
