The Royal Photographic Society’s Historical Group was formed on 22 March 1972 at a time when photography in Britain was undergoing a significant transition. The RPS, itself, was in a process of modernisation as it sought to remain relevant to British photography. The way photography was taught in higher education reflected a move away from the technical to a focus on approach and the content of the picture. New galleries showing photography were established, national museums and galleries began to take photography seriously and the Arts Council appointed its first photography officer.

The period also saw major upheavals for the industry and the profession with recessions, a move to digital, and new ways for commissioners to source content. The way photography was experienced, shared and disseminated changed dramatically later in the period with the advent of new digital technologies.

This conference will examine some of these changes through a series of papers that look at British photography and photographers over the fifty years from 1972-2022.

British Photography since 1972: a conference
Organised by the RPS Historical Group to commemorative its 50th anniversary
1-2 July 2022
Bristol and online
Programme and booking: https://rps.org/1972conf

Flints Auctions is offering a selection of cameras in its next auction. Of particular British interest and a highlight is a James A Sinclair Tropical Una High Power Telephoto 'Everest' Outfit (lot 110). Estimated at £2000-3000 the camera is one of very few examples offered at auction. The camera was exhibited at the recent London Photographica fair. 

The only recent sales are in 2009 at Westlicht) and an incomplete example which was offered at SAS on 26 April 2022 (lot 107). The Flints example features a Dallmeyer lens engraved with the same serial number as that in the SAS auction (lot 110)

UPDATE: the SInclair camera sold for £6,875 including BP.

In 2019 New Zealand's Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū held an exhibition Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography which highlighted the contribution of pioneering photographers at work in nineteenth-century Te Waipounamu, New Zeland's South Island. Spectacular landscapes by skilled amateurs and professionals join powerful images of tangata whenua, settlers and mining scenes. Unseen work by a small number of early women photographers is also included.

The exhibition publication has been out of print for several years but is now available as a free download with texts from curator Ken Hall and Haruhiko Sameshima.

Details and download here: https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/about/library/publications/hidden-light-early-canterbury-and-west-coast-photo

Your chance to acquire paper negatives and daguerreotypes; travel and exploration, fashion and press photographs; and introducing contemporary photographers working with early processes.

Exhibitors include Maggs Bris, Lisa Tao, Richard Meara, Linus Carr, Hugh Ashley Rayner, James Kerr, Bruno Tartarin, Daniella Dangoor, James Hyman, Paul Cordes, Jenny Allsworth, England and Co, Robert Hershkowitz, Yoke Matze, Jane Orde, Anthony Jones, Elspeth Ross and Adnan Sezwer. The fair is sponsored by Chiswick Auctions' Photographica department. 

The Classic Photograph Fair
12 June 2022, 0900-1600
Free entry
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL
https://www.classicphotofair.co.uk/

Work on post-war African photographies over the last several years has attempted definitively to leave behind blunt understandings of the medium and practice as only an instrument of colonial control. Instead, scholars have shown the active role that photography and its institutions played in reimagining political citizenship and possibility in the waning colonial and newly independent African states, even as the continent was subjected to the wider geopolitical machinations of the Cold War. In this afternoon session, we shall consider some of the most recent work on photography in Africa, and reflect on methodological issues and prospects in its study.

Drew Thompson, Darren Newbury and Jennifer Bajorek are featured speakers, followed by a discussion.

Drew Thompson (Bard Graduate Center) – ‘Decolonization in Africa and Photography’

This story begins in Maputo and takes you to Cambridge (Massachusetts) via Johannesburg. I will start in April of 1974, when a coup toppled the Portuguese regime and initiated the end of colonial rule in Mozambique. Settlers left behind the photography business they started. To establish order the independent state nationalized the entire photography industry. Almost 8,000 miles away, Black American workers at the Polaroid Corporation’s U.S. headquarters protested the company’s business in South Africa. How then does the end of colonial rule in Mozambique connect to boycotts over Polaroid’s South African business? To answer this question, I highlight how the Polaroid worker protests conflicted with certain material realities and the protests unfolding in South(-ern) Africa. Decolonization in Southern Africa was anything but unified and straightforward, partially because of photography’s own disruptive nature.

Darren Newbury (University of Brighton) - ‘Don’t Touch Those Windows’: United States Information Service Exhibits in Africa

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the emergence of newly independent African nations on the world stage precipitated a contest for influence on the continent by the Cold War superpowers. One response of the US government was to mount a campaign of ‘photographic diplomacy’. This presentation considers the forms in which photographs were brought to audiences across Africa through United States Information Service (USIS) field posts. USIS offices provided the network of distribution points for photographs arriving from the US either as specific field requests or in regular packets, and many had windows facing onto the street that were used to curate a changing series of exhibitions and displays. The monthly reports, frequent memos and occasional photographs that record these activities enable a kind of historical ethnography of photographic practice. They provide insights into the work that the photographs were being asked to perform, how the task was understood by those on the ground and the impact of local circumstances.

 Jennifer Bajorek (Hampshire College/VIAD Research Centre, University of Johannesburg) – ‘What we thought we knew’

We remain in a frenzy of activity thinking, rethinking, and reframing the nexus of photography and decolonization, perhaps particularly, but not exclusively, in Africa. How have the hypotheses and presuppositions that may once have sparked our research/art practice on this question been transformed by more recent work? What are the consequences of these transformations for how we understand both photography and decolonization? I am particularly interested in the persistent tensions between documentary or evidentiary and imaginative or poetic functions of the photographic image, or those between the grain of the voice (in oral history or testimony) and the grain of the image. I will touch on my own and others’ research and/or art practice.

Hosted by Birkbeck's History and Theory of Photography Research Centre

Decolonization and Photography in Africa: Drew Thompson, Darren Newbury and Jennifer Bajorek 
Friday, 10 June, 1600 – 1800 (BST) | 1700-1900 (CET)
Online, via Microsoft Teams

registration here.

Bringing together insights from environmental history and photographic history, this lecture focuses on climate and weather as subjects understood in and through photographic images, and the ways in which weather and climate shape the very possibility of photography in the first place. Focussing on specific historical examples, it explores how weather changes are seen, felt and experienced by people, in relation to the ways in which photography “senses” changes in the atmosphere around it, and also with respect to the emotional atmosphere or collective mood captured by photographs of extreme and unusual weather. J

Originally given on 25 May 2022 jointly by Professor Georgina Endfield, Professor of Environmental History, and Professor Michelle Henning, Chair in Photography and Media.

The recording of the lecture is available here: https://stream.liv.ac.uk/rtqm9ecu

A major exhibition of photographs by Paul Trevor documents a dramatic struggle for justice. Following the racist murder of Altab Ali in May 1978, east London’s young Bengali community took to the streets in protest. Four Corners’ new exhibition, Brick Lane 1978: The Turning Point, brings together seventy of Paul Trevor’s images alongside accounts of pioneering activists, to produce a powerful narrative of the time.

The show marks the culmination of a major heritage project led by Four Corners and Swadhinata Trust with a dedicated group of volunteers, and who have interviewed many people involved in these momentous events. The exhibition pays tribute to a generation whose actions changed the course of civil rights in the UK.

Julie Begum, Chair of Swadhinata Trust, said, “It is important to commemorate Altab Ali Day to remember the racist violence the Bengali community faced in the East End of London, and to celebrate the community’s united defence to defeat the evils of racism.”

Paul Trevor said: "They say a photo is worth a thousand words. But sometimes, as in this case, words are essential. This project is an opportunity to add the voices of those who made history to the images of that story.”

Carla Mitchell, Artistic Development Director at Four Corners said: “This history is highly relevant today, with an increase of racist attacks and violence making the headlines. Thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to ensure that this powerful heritage is made publicly accessible for a wide audience of current & future generations.”

Brick Lane 1978: The Turning Point
10 June – 10 September 2022
Free admission. Opening hours 11am-6pm, Tues- Sat, until 8pm Thurs
Four Corners Gallery, 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN

See: Exhibition: https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/brick-lane-1978-the-turning-point-1 and events:  https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/brick-lane-1978-the-turning-point

Image: © Paul Trevor.  Outside Bethnal Green police station, London, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest, demanding the release of two arrested demonstrators.

London's Alpine Club, which was founded in 1857 and maintains an important collection of photography is exhibiting an Historic Mountain Photographs. The selection of rarely-exhibited mountain photographs is on display at the headquarters of the Alpine Club in Shoreditch, London.

The photographs, which date from the 1860s to the 1920s, depict a number of iconic peaks, located mainly in the European Alps, but stretching as far afield as Japan, the Karakoram Range and the Canadian Rockies. Among the selection are compositions by Edward Whymper, WF Donkin, Fanny Bullock Workman and Vittorio Sella.

The exhibition is made up entirely of original photographs, many of which were enlarged by the photographers and all of which were taken while on expedition. Many of the works remain in their original frames, having been presented to the Alpine Club by the photographers shortly after they were taken.

Exhibition curator Bernie Ingrams said: “The works on display are among the finest photographs in the Alpine Club Collection. Thanks to the large format of these images, visitors will be treated to a level of detail and sense of scale that only the best mountain photography can offer.”

The exhibition is set to run until 31st July, with booking available from 10am – 4pm, Monday to Friday by contacting the Alpine Club office on 0207 613 0755 or by email at admin@alpine-club.org.uk. The Alpine Club’s premises are located at 55 Charlotte Road, London, EC2A 3QF.

Historic Mountain Photographs
until 31 July 2022
Alpine Club, 55 Charlotte Road, London, EC2A 3QF
See: http://www.alpine-club.org.uk/events/past-future-exhibitions

Image: W. Donkin, The Dent du Géant and Glacier des Périades from the Aiguille du Tacul, 1882

At the beginning of the 20th century many professional photographers with studios in Croydon town centre supplemented their income from portraits, weddings and school groups by producing postcards of local views and events. One in particular, Charles Harrison Price (1870-1946), developed an especially broad catalogue that besides superbly composed topographical pictures included the vibrancy of air-side views of Croydon Airport – Britain’s major, and only international airport during the interwar years, the compassionate nurturing of injured military personnel during World War I housed in hospitals in local schools and the lives of their carers, popular town parades and celebrations, parks and open spaces, local actors and newsworthy events.

Croydon Natural History & Scientific Society assisted by Bourne Society is exhibiting from its John Gent Postcards Collection a display of Charles Harrison Price photographs that allows a unique insight into life in the borough of Croydon during the first half of the 20th century.

Croydon through the lens of Charles Harrison Price: historic images from Croydon Natural History & Scientific Society.

Croydon through the lens of Charles Harrison Price
Until 10 July 2022
Tuesdays and Thursdays between 4.30 – 7.30pm and on s
elected weekends between 12-5pm
Free
Stanley Arts,  12 South Norwood Hill, London, SE25 6AB
https://stanleyarts.org/events/?tribe_paged=1&tribe_event_display=list&tribe_eventcategory%5B%5D=14

Another Country offers a lively, vital rethinking of British documentary photography over the last seven decades. This collection includes a diverse range of photographers working in an exciting array of photographic and artistic modes, encompassing images from iconic reportage to photo-text pieces, from self-portraits to political photo-collages.

A seminar day looking at some of themes explored in the book takes place on 11 June 2022 at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol. See: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/events/another-country/

Another Country: Documentary Photography Since 1945
Gerry Badger, with contributions by Lydia Caston, Ekow Eshun, Clare Grafik, Hana Kaluznick, J. A. Mortram, Rianna Jade Parker, Simon Roberts, Lou Stoppard, Bindi Vora and Val Williams.
Thames & Hudson In collaboration with the Martin Parr Foundation on 19 May 2022
£50
https://thamesandhudson.com/another-country-british-documentary-photography-since-1945-9780500022177

Rachel Nordstrom has announced that she will be leaving her post as Photographic Collections Manager at the University of St Andrews, at the end of May. She has been at St Andrews for nine years and was appointed to her current role in 2015.

Rachel has accepted a post at Historic Environment Scotland as Operations Manager for their National Collection of Aerial Photography. This is a fascinating collection which spans nearly 100 years and holds not only all declassified aerial reconnaissance from WWII onwards, but land surveys dating back to the 1920s from across Europe, along with commonwealth surveys from around the world. As she notes "with over 30 million photos there will be lots for me to do!"

She joins on 15 June and can be contact from that date at: Rachel.Nordstorm@hes.scot 

During her time at St Andrews Rachel has raised the profile of the photography holdings at St Andrews and was instrumental in realising the St Andrews photography festival and associated conferences https://www.standrewsphotographyfestival.com/

The Scotsman is reporting today that documentary photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert has gifted his archive to St Andrews University, in part with the support and advice of Rachel Nordstrom. Jeremy is a founder member of Document Scotland.

As The Scotsman notes: 

To celebrate and mark Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the National Portrait Gallery presents a new digital display, a competition for families, as well as an exclusively designed range of products to commemorate the Queen’s 70-year reign.

The Gallery’s Collection includes over a thousand portraits of the Queen, and a new digital display will allow online visitors to explore a selection of those works, as well as an animated timeline of her reign. It will also feature an illustration of Dorothy Wilding’s portrait, Queen Elizabeth II (1952), taken just 20 days after she ascended to the throne, using a photomontage of 207 individual portraits. From the earliest of images depicting the Princess Elizabeth’s ‘Merry Smile,’ to the official photographs taken throughout her reign by the likes of Dorothy Wilding, Tim Graham and William Horton, this online display will give visitors the chance to explore some of the most iconic portraits of the Queen, while learning more about the artists who captured them. Horton’s photograph of the Queen, taken in 1945 at the Auxiliary Territorial Service Training Centre in Camberley, sits alongside an earlier photograph, depicting the Queen and Princess Margaret as children, with broadcasting microphones at Windsor Castle on 13 October 1940, carrying out wartime public duties. In addition to photography, the display also includes works by Pietro Annigoni, who painted the Queen in 1969 wearing the red robes of the Order of the British Empire, and Michael Leonard, whose painting was commissioned to mark Her Majesty’s 60th birthday.

Taking further inspiration from the Collection, the Gallery has also launched a new competition, inviting families to explore the Queen’s reign through her portraits. By recreating their favourite photographs, paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures that depict the Queen, families have the chance to exhibit their winning portraits on the Gallery’s website. Judged by the National Portrait Gallery’s Youth Forum and photographer Kymara Akinpelumi, whose work was exhibited in the prestigious Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2021, all winners will also receive a Jubilee-themed bundle of gifts, including a copy of Elizabeth II: Princess, Queen, Icon (£14.95), a special book published to commemorate the Platinum Jubilee. Recreations should be submitted through the Gallery’s competition portal by 5pm on 17 May 2022. The winners will be announced on the Gallery’s social media channels on the Platinum Jubilee weekend in June.

See portraits of the Queen from NPG Collection here.

Image: Queen Elizabeth II by Dorothy Wilding, bromide print, 26 February 1952

Tate has announced the launch of the Tate Photography Series, a new publishing programme providing an introduction to some of the most important and exciting photographers at work today. Four titles will be published each year, all connected through a common theme. The first four books, on Liz Johnson Artur, Sheba Chhachhi, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Sabelo Mlangeni explore community and solidarity in distinct ways. 

 Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen was born in Finland and studied in London, then moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1960s. She has been based in the North East of England ever since, deeply rooted in the local community. Focusing on two of her photographic series, this book captures a working-class neighborhood and reveals the devastating impact that the redevelopment of Newcastle’s East End had on the community, but also the moments of joy experienced in daily life.

Liz Johnson Artur presents images from her series Time Don’t Run Here, made during the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the late spring of 2020 in London. Johnson Artur is a Ghanaian-Russian photographer and artist based in London whose work documents the lives of Black people in Africa and from across the African Diaspora, more recently focusing on the richness and complexity of Black British life. 

Sheba Chhachhi is a photographer, women's rights activist and an installation artist based in New Delhi. The powerful photographs reproduced in her book are selected from three major series, co-curated with her subjects. Interweaving the mythic and the social, her work, as she puts it, ‘is really about opening up a conversation, in the process of creating as well as sharing, to invite people to think about personal, social and public concerns, primarily around feminism and ecology.’

Sabelo Mlangeni is based in South Africa and works collaboratively with the people he photographs to tell the stories of communities on the periphery of society. He has focused on Johannesburg, as well as the rural areas surrounding his hometown of Driefontein. Mlangeni’s work seeks to re-center themes of friendship, love and joy in the face of ever-present risk. Above all, his images tell stories of seeking out your people, choosing a family and building a home, wherever you find yourself.

Each title is priced at £12. Details here: https://shop.tate.org.uk/books/tate-photography-series

Photograph: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Kids with Collected Junk Near Byker Bridge (Byker),1971

Photographs made in the 1870s are to help with the conservation of the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry. In a new partnership London's V&A Museum and the City of Bayeux have agreed to share research and expertise around the Tapestry. This is in lieu of planned loan of the Tapestry to the UK which was abandoned after a condition report discovered the Tapestry in a worse condition that expected. 

As part of a research, conservation and digitisation project, around 180 glass negatives of the tapestry taken by Edward Dossetter, which are in the V&A’s collection are to be digitised and will form part of a digital database showing the Tapestry's state when it was restored at the end of the nineteenth century. Dossetter photographed the tapestry in 1872 under the instruction of photographer Joseph Cundall as part of the first collaboration between the V&A (then the South Kensington Museum) and the City of Bayeux.

Six full-size copies were made from Dossetter’s negatives by the Arundel Society. These were then coloured by hand to create the longest composite photograph made in the 19th century. The partnership will also provide the City of Bayeux access to the two Arundel Society copies of the Bayeux Tapestry in the V&A collection, as well as opportunities for research, curatorial and scientific exchange.

See more: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/05/19/digitising-bayeux-tapestry-victoria-and-albert-museum-work-with-french-city-research-famous-medieval-work

https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/caring-for-our-collections/photographing-bayeux

Photographs: V&A Museum. Below: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O118318/bayeux-tapestry-photograph-cundall-co/bayeux-tapestry-photograph-cundall--co/

One of the highlights of the recent Photo London fair was James Hyman's The Countess of Castiglione. The exhibition has now opened at Hyman's gallery in London.  The exhibition includes over fifty rare portraits of the Countess from the 1850s to the 1890s. Directed and staged by the Countess, herself, and created in collaboration with the studio photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, these “self-portraits” are some of the most extraordinary pictures in the history of photography, precursors to fashion photography and performative self-portraiture.

Today, we live in a world of selfies and social media: an Instagram world of constructed identities, performance, and disguise. But before all this, before super-models and influencers - 150 years ago - one of the most radical figures of the nineteenth century was pioneering new forms of fashion and conceptual photography: autofiction. In hundreds of portraits produced over a period of decades the Countess staged scenarios and performed different roles, to present different characters and personalities and to reflect multiple, fluid, unfixed identities.

Despite decades of activity, photographs by the Countess are incredibly rare as very few prints were made and she chose not to distribute. In fact, major exhibitions of her work only took place at the end of the 20th century at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris in 1999 and then at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 2000. Most of her work is now in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

The exhibition presents some of the most famous images of the Countess as well as an exquisite, recently discovered painted photograph of her which will be exhibited for the very first time.

The exhibition includes vintage prints as well as prints specially made in 1900 for her great admirer, the symbolist poet Robert Montesquiou, who spent thirteen years of his life writing her biography, which was published as La Divine Comtesse in 1913.

The Countess of Castiglione. The Creation of a Legend
James Hyman Gallery
50 Maddox Street, London, W1S 1AY
9 June – 29 July 2022
See: https://www.jameshymangallery.com/exhibitions/182-the-countess-of-castiglione.-the-creation-of-a/overview/

Photography from daguerreotypes, through collodion and on to contemporary work is being offered at auction By Chiswick Auctions on 24 May. The sale includes one previously unrecorded portrait, part of a set of four by Julia Margaret Cameron (est £12,000-15,000), Beard studio daguerreotypes and work from Paul Strand, Rodchenko and others. 

The catalogue is available here: https://www.chiswickauctions.co.uk/auction/search/?au=808

Image: J M Cameron, captioned 'Winner of the prizes at the Royal Artillery Games, Freshwater'. 

The purpose of the Curatorial Fellowship is to further develop expertise in the history of photography by researching the collections of the V&A, while gaining vital curatorial experience working in a museum.  The Curatorial Fellow will divide their time between key curatorial duties (including cataloguing, collections care, display, exhibition and publication preparation and researching potential acquisitions) and pursuing an independent research project based on the V&A’s photography collection, which will culminate in a tangible output such as a conference, publication and/or web project. 

The research project will be based on the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Collection, which was transferred to the V&A in 2017, and may relate to portraiture, colour photography or photographic processes, all areas of interest to the American photographer Bern Schwartz and The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation. The topic and scope of the project will be agreed at the start of the Curatorial Fellowship, depending on the Fellow’s expertise and the priorities of the Photography Section. 

Curatorial Fellow in Photography, supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation
£27,000 Per Annum, fixed term for two years, This is an externally funded Curatorial Fellowship sitting in the Photography Section of the Art, Architecture, Photography and Design (AAPD) department. 
To apply, please submit your application online by Monday 13 June 2022 at 23:59. Details here.

Join leading experts, curators, and photographers in the virtual re-launch of Trans Asia Photography, the world’s first and only open access journal devoted to research on Asian photography. Established more than a decade ago, the journal has moved its base to Toronto and relaunches this year with a new publishers, Duke UP, and new editors, Thy Phu, Deepali Dewan, and Yi Gu. This event previews the upcoming themed issue on "Photography," examining the third title keyword, and explores what is at stake in thinking "Asia" and "Photography" together.

This relaunch also features board members, Rahaab Allana, Nadine Attewell, Geoffrey Batchen, Sabeena Gadihoke, Tao Leigh Goffe, Kajri Jain, Will Kwan, Tong Lam, Christopher Pinney, Atsuko Sakaki, Stephen Sheehi, Laura Wexler, and Wu Hung.

TAP Relaunch & Celebration 
Online Event, 26 May 2022
10-11:30am EDT | 1500-1630 BST
CLICK HERE to register for this free event.

A forthcoming symposium focuses on an often-neglected aspect of photography history - photographs of and by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and more broadly, women and early photography around the world.

The project is inspired by our exploration of photographs taken by the Aberdeen-based photography studio of George Washington Wilson (1823-1893), who was named the Photographer Royal for Scotland in 1860. His collection is housed at the University of Aberdeen library, and consists of over 37,000 glass plate negatives, produced by the firm that he, and then his sons, headed from the 1850s to 1908. It includes landscapes, cityscapes, and portrait photographs from across Britain and its former colonies and beyond. The GWW Collection includes diverse representations of women, in terms of their location, class, occupation, and ethnicity. An online exhibition of a selection of these photographs can be seen via this link: Envisioning Women's Places: Photographs from the George Washington Wilson Collection · University Collections (abdn.ac.uk)

Professor Elizabeth Edwards, author of Photographs and the Practice of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) will be keynote speaker at this event.

The symposium has been coordinated by Dr Áine Larkin, Lecturer in French, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Heidi Brevik-Zender, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside.