As a Conservator at the National Science & Media Museum in Bradford, you will work closely with the other members of the core Conservation & Collections Care (CCC) teams based at all SMG sites, and alongside project teams, this may also include supervising short term staff, students and volunteers.

You will undertake all aspects of interventive object and/or photographic conservation treatments on a wide range of materials, this includes condition checking and documentation. You will also advise on display conditions, object protection, object installation and decant, object storage and assist in preventive conservation including integrated pest management and environmental monitoring programmes on site.

Utilising your relevant conservation experience and knowledge, you will work both independently and as part of a team to plan and execute programmes of conservation of inventoried objects in the collections required for loans, exhibition and touring on time and to budget. Using your awareness of collections-based hazards you will ensure compliance with best professional practice and statutory requirements.

See the full specification and apply here.

The Journal of Victorian Culture Online the blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture has published a short paper by Rose Teanby titled 'Wish You Were Here: Victorian women pioneers of travel photography'. In it Rose discusses several early British and European women photographers. The paper is free to access and read. 

See: http://jvc.oup.com/2020/12/11/victorian-women-pioneers-of-travel-photography/

Image: Ida Pfeiffer [cropped] by Franz Hanfstaengl, 1856. Print, Austrian National Library   ANL/Vienna Picture Archive NB 504188-B. http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/baa12992972

Geoff Belknap, Head Curator at the National Science+Media Museum, Bradford, has written an extended blog discussing how photography is being collected within the Science Museum Group.

Photography presents particular challenges because of the ubiquity and extent of the medium, although the museum continues to collect both photographs and photographic technology.  As Belknap notes: "we want to tell compelling stories about how photography affects our lives, but we also need to acknowledge that we can’t tell every story about photography". With a spectrum ranging from the processes and equipment through to the photographic image, "there lays a whole range of meaning for photography based on how we use photography, such as for scientific research; for political reasons; to monitor and record; as commercial objects; as tools for circulating and exchanging information; or as aesthetic creative expression. This middle ground can be called photographic practice".

As such, he notes, "our focus will emphasise the areas of photographic process and practice...this means we are particularly interested in the stories of how material images and technology (whether analogue or digital) were made and used... In other words, we are less interested in what is represented in a photograph, and more interested in its production and use."

Read Geoff's full blog post 'Process, Product and Practice: Our approach to collecting photography' here: https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/blog/collecting-photography/

The Photographers’ Gallery has announced highlights of its 2021 programme, including major exhibitions of Sebastião Salgado and Helen Levitt, the 25th anniversary exhibition of the Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize, a rare exhibition of archival photographs from the Guardian Picture Library and a newly commissioned work by Turner Prize co-winner, Helen Cammock.

2021 also marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Photographers’ Gallery and over the course of the year, the Gallery is staging a special series of exhibitions and events reflecting on its legacy and impact and looking towards the future of photography in a rapidly changing world. Full details of these will be announced in the new year and will include a look back at five decades of the Gallery’s history, while reflecting on the wider photographic landscape.

In Summer 2021, the gallery is delighted to launch the Soho Photography Quarter in partnership with Westminster Council. This major public space development in the West End will transform the area outside TPG, creating a pedestrianised open-air gallery with a rolling programme of specially curated exhibitions and commissions.

https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/

10×10 Photobooks is pleased to announce the launch of a new program of annual photobook research grants to encourage and support scholarship on under-explored topics in photobook history. The first year’s theme expands on 10×10’s forthcoming project What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843 to 1999 that will launch in Fall 2021 in association with the New York Public Library and will include a touring reading room, publication, and series of public events.

10×10’s photobook research grant application is now open through March of 2021 and accepts submissions related to research and scholarship that seeks to fill gaps and supply missing information in the history of women and photobooks from 1843 to 1999. The concept of the photobook is interpreted in the widest sense possible: classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines, and scrapbooks. Research topics may include, but are not limited to: significant but lesser-known photobooks by women, women book-makers in underrepresented regions, women uncredited for their contributions, women in book publishing and women photobook designers and publishers, etc.   

The Grant:

10×10 Photobooks will award 2 grants per year, in the amount of $1,500 each which will be paid in increments during the course of the project.

Grantees are expected to produce a presentation and a paper within a year of the grant being awarded. Paper needs to be in English. Grantees will be assigned a contact/mentor. 10×10 will also assist where able and desired with in-progress review, identifying information, making introductions, etc. The result of the research will be presented and discussed during an event organized by 10×10 Photobooks (a zoom online event and as possible a physical gathering at a relevant festival/fair/conference).

10×10 will be granted the right to publish the resulting paper online and in print in a 10×10 publication. The writer retains copyright and after your work is presented/published by 10×10, you are free to republish it, or to give others permission to republish it. We ask that if you do so, you credit it as follows: [article name] by [author] was supported by 10×10 Photobooks.

See more: https://10x10photobooks.org/10x10-research-grants/

Colin Ford, one of the first curators of photography in Britain and the founding head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, will be talking to Gilly Read about his career on 28 January 2021. 

The event is free but registration is required here: https://rps.org/ColinFord 

The Stanley B. Burns M.D. Historic Medical Photography Collection has been acquired by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University. It  includes images of physicians and medical scientists at work, operation rooms, hospital wards, laboratories, nurses and nursing, notable physicians, surgical specialties, and war medicine. There are also thousands of photos of patients and disease states. The collection is notable for its range of forms, including photo albums, framed photographs, publications, cartes de visite (small photos mounted on cardboard), cabinet cards, postcards, and personal collections assembled by noted physicians. Virtually every format is represented, including boxes of lantern slides and 253 unique daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes from the earliest years of photography.

“The Burns Collection is one of the most compelling and comprehensive visual records of medical history ever assembled,” said Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and head of the Medical Historical Library, the medical library’s special collections repository. “From early depictions of surgery to profoundly personal family images and photo albums, it shows how deeply medicine is interwoven in human lives.”

See more here: https://news.yale.edu/2020/12/02/newly-acquired-trove-historic-photos-captures-evolution-medicine

This display of original photogravures and vintage platinum prints has been organised in conjunction with renowned 19th century photography specialist Robert Hershkowitz.

At a time when so many of us are weighing up the value of urban living in favour of more rural existences, these images resonate with a longing for the English countryside and its traditional ways of life. We are exhibiting original photogravures from Emerson’s most famous series Marsh Leaves (1895), in addition to a selection of platinum prints from his first album Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886).

We would be delighted to welcome you to the gallery to view the work in person, and you can also visit the works in the exhibition, online, via the button below.

P. H. Emerson is now open at Michael Hoppen Gallery and will run until 31 January, 2021.

See:  https://website-michaelhoppenviewingroom.artlogic.net/viewing-room/16-p.h.-emerson/?_cmspreview=1

This exhibition has been a victim of two COVID lockdowns and was originally due to open in June, and then in November. With London in COVID Tier 2 it will now open on 8 December 2020 and run until 9 May 2021...  Unearthed traces the rich history of the medium through depictions of nature, with over 100 works by 41 leading international artists. Unearthed: Photography's Roots will reveal the fascinating technical processes and narratives behind these images, showcasing innovations in photography by key figures including William Henry Fox Talbot and Imogen Cunningham as well as several overlooked photographers including rare works by Japanese artist, Kazumasa Ogawa and the English gardener, Charles Jones. Jones’ striking modernist photographs of plants remained unknown for 20 years after his death, until they were discovered in a trunk at Bermondsey Market in 1981.

Curator Alexander Moore, Creative Producer at Dulwich Picture Gallery said: "Nature is a constant, and there’s a reason that artists through the centuries have always returned to it…the social landscape changes, media influences change, even geography changes. But nature is this enduring force. We can’t help but be inspired because it’s unwavering." 

The exhibition opens with some of the first known Victorian images by Talbot, with his experiments with paper negatives, and will also feature many works by one of the first female photographers Anna Atkins. Focusing on botany and science throughout, themes range from typology and form to experiments with colour and modernism. The show culminates with more recent advancements in photography, from the glamour and eroticism of artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Nobuyoshi Araki, to experimentations with still life compositions by Richard Learoyd.

The Gallery's mausoleum will host a contemporary installation from renowned video artist Ori Gersht, On Reflection reimagines a still life painting by Jan Brueghel the elder, and has never before been on show in the UK.

Unearthed: Photography's Roots
8 December 2020 - 9 May 2021
See more about the exhibition, opening times and booking here: https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2020/june/unearthed/

Wedgwood 250 will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Tom Wedgwood on 14 May 1771. It is arranged jointly by the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC), The youngest son of the prominent potter Josiah Wedgwood, Tom was very well known in the intellectual and scientific circles of his day and today is chiefly remembered for developing what was later identified as a very early form of chemical photography, including the use of the camera obscura. Speakers at this meeting will discuss his life, work, friendships and legacy. 

A programme will be issued early in 2021. It is intended that this will be a one day meeting held at RPS House, Bristol on 15 May 2021. Should it appear by mid-April that Covid restrictions will not have eased sufficiently to permit a face-to-face meeting, then it will be held virtually over two half days on 14 and 15 May. In any case provision will be made for live streaming over the internet. 

Further details will be available from Dr Michael Pritchard (michael@rps.org) or Professor Frank James (frank.james@ucl.ac.uk).  

A paid studentship funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, supported by the South West & Wales Doctoral Partnership and co-supervised by the universities of Cardiff and Bristol is available. Titled Traces of Empire in the Built Environment: Exploring the Collective Memory of Colonialism through the Photographic Collections of the Historic England Archive, applications close on 25 January 2021. 

The project will use historic photographs to tease out the multiple ways in which the English built environment has been formed and reformed through its links to empire. This will include an examination of a wide range of areas, including the construction of monuments and statuary, the creation of buildings and spaces, and the work of the tens of thousands of people who travelled from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia and found work as architects and builders in England’s cities. The photography collections of the Historic England Archive provide a unique and currently underexplored resource for exploring these themes. The Archive’s collection of 9 million images is one of the largest photography collections in the country, and provides a crucial window into the shaping of the built environment

Further details about the studentship can be found here: https://www.sww-ahdtp.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CDA-1-Photographic-Traces.Further-Details.pdf

Details of the application process are provided here: https://www.sww-ahdtp.ac.uk/prospective-students/apply/collaborative-doctoral-award-projects-2021/

The deadline for applications is Monday 25th January 2021.

The Wolfson Foundation's New Collecting Awards give curators 100 per cent funding to research and buy works that grow their museums’ collections in new directions or deepen existing ones – such as commissioning new photographic portraits of people underrepresented in Scotland’s national collection and the acquisition of works by indigenous artists. Each winning curator receives a budget for acquisitions alongside funding for research, travel, and training, plus the support of a mentor and Art Fund staff and trustees. The programme invests in curatorial talent and allows museums to bring works of art and objects into public view.

Two of the 2020 winners will support new photography projects:

Louise Pearson, Curator (Photography), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Louise Pearson will use Scotland’s census data to identify groups which are underrepresented in the national photography collection and address these gaps by acquiring and commissioning photographs that reflect the true breadth of Scotland’s population. These groups are likely to include single parent families, people of a mixed ethnic background, individuals from the Pakistani and Polish communities and residents of the Scottish islands.

Catherine Troiano, Curator, National Photography Collections, National Trust, Lacock
Catherine Troiano will develop a collection of photography since the 1970s, that represents diverse experiences of British heritage and speaks to local, regional and national histories. The project seeks to expand the Trust’s existing national collections of photography, which are richest in material from the 1840s to the mid-twentieth century. Collecting will focus on emerging and established photographers working in Britain, whose work engages with varied perspectives of identity, land and history.

Paul Ramsbottom, Wolfson Foundation chief executive said, “We are delighted to continue our long partnership with Art Fund. The finances of museums and galleries are under pressure, and so it is more important than ever to invest in curators. The items to be collected will be important acquisitions for the already remarkable collections at these five wonderful institutions.”

Jenny Waldman, Art Fund director said: “Supporting curators and their development is core to Art Fund’s charitable programme. Many museums’ collections are currently behind closed doors, but curators are still caring for, researching, and expanding them for the benefit of audiences. During a year in which we all are reflecting more deeply on critical issues including equality and diversity, we are delighted to support projects broadening representation when building collections.”

The New Collecting Awards programme is run by Art Fund and supported by a consortium of funders, including the Wolfson Foundation. For more information, please visit: https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/programmes/new-collecting-awards.

The charity is also fundraising to support museums through the urgent crowdfunding appeal Together for Museums aiming to raise £1m to help museums adapt to Covid-19 and evolve in the future.

The latest issue of British Art Studies no. 18 has gone online and includes two papers of particular interest to BPH readers, from Sarah Parsons and Steve Edwards. 

Sarah Parsons, 'Women in Fur: Empire, Power, and Play in a Victorian Photography Album'. The craze for carte-de-visite portraits in the early 1860s established photography as an intensely social practice. As cartes were bought, gifted, traded, archived, and displayed, they captured and created social networks. This article asks what we can learn about the social language and networks of early photography by turning instead to amateur photography, specifically women’s amateur efforts.

Steve Edwards, 'Making a Case: Daguerreotypes'. This essay considers physical daguerreotype cases from the 1840s and 1850s alongside scholarly debate on case studies, or “thinking in cases”, and some recent physicalist claims about objects in cultural theory, particularly those associated with “new materialism”. 

British Art Studies is an opens source publication and the full papers can be read and downloaded from https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-18

The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons has digitised much of its collections and made them available to the public. Included are photographs and other material relevant to photographic history, including a series of letters from Francis Galton.

See: https://rcvsvethistory.org/

Image: Frederick Smith, Photographs of Smith's Laboratory at the Army Veterinary School, Aldershot

E. A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas, a collaboration between the National Trust for Scotland and the City Art Centre, is the first major retrospective of Hornel's art for over 35 years. Featuring photographs and paintings from Broughton House in Kirkcudbright, this exhibition shows how photography was crucial to the development of Hornel's artistic technique. It examines his use of young, female models in Japan, Sri Lanka and Scotland, and demonstrates that he only became the painter he did thanks to the photographs he took and collected.

This extensive collection is housed at Broughton House in Kirkcudbright (Hornel's home 1901–33), which is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland. It includes c.1,700 photographs used by Hornel to create his paintings. He collected these from friends and contacts, purchased them commercially and took or posed them himself, both at home in Scotland and while travelling in Japan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

These photographs were crucial to the development of Hornel's artistic technique. E. A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas shows that from 1890, the influence of photography can be seen in almost every facet of the artist’s painting. It provided him with access to people, places and networks. It helped him build a visual library from which he could refresh his memory and take inspiration. Hornel not only chose his subject matter based on his photographs, but copied figures, poses and imagery directly from photograph to painting.

The exploration of Hornel's photographic collection in From Camera to Canvas also reveals a more challenging hinterland to his paintings. While his photographs of Scottish girls (accompanied by their mothers and chaperoned by his sister, Elizabeth) are discomfiting to a modern eye, some of those he took of girls and young women in Sri Lanka and Japan appear intimate or intrusive.

E. A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas
7 November 2020 - 14 March 2021, free entry, pre-booking essential 
See: https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/e-hornel-camera-canvas

Photokina, the world's largest and most important fair for the photographic trade and consumers is to end after seventy years. In an email to the trade the organisers state: 'it is an extremely difficult step for us to have to suspend implementation of photokina at the location in Cologne for the time being, in light of the continuing steep decline in the markets for imaging products and the increasingly heterogeneous needs of the different market segments.

After decades of shared history, this deep cut is a painful one indeed. Nonetheless, we must face the situation and the trend in the industry and take a clear, honest decision against continuing this event – a decision to which, unfortunately, we have no alternative'

Photokina was first held in 1950 in Cologne and acted as a biennial showcase for manufacturers, along with a supporting exhibition and cultural programme.  At its height major manufacturers such as Leica and Kodak would occupy a whole hall changes to the industry from the early 2000s saw a contraction in its size. 

The full statement can be read here: https://www.photokina.com/

A short history of Photokina can be found here: https://kwerfeldein.de/2012/09/05/die-geschichte-der-photokina/

 

Five unique Kinora reels - a form of early moving picture - have been digitised by the National Library of Scotland and made available online. The work started in 2009 and the reels show the fishing fleet and industry in the Scottish town of Wick in north-east Scotland from the early 1900s. Although the Kinora is best known for the published reels and viewers that were sold in Britain c1900-1915, it also offered a Kinora camera and service to make up amateur reels from c1908.  The Kinora history extends back to 1896 when it was patented by the Lumière brothers and it went through several iterations before it came to Britain. 

The NLS notes: In 1989 a Kinora Viewer together with a collection of reels was given to The Wick Society for display in the Wick Heritage Museum. The reels contained local scenes and events dating between 1897 - 1910 [sic]. It was originally believed that these reels formed part of The Johnston Collection, also preserved by the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive, however we now think that they could be the work of a contemporary local photographer John G. Humphrey.

The digitised reels can be seen here: https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/4627?search_term=wick&search_join_type=AND&search_fuzzy=yes

Read more about the history of the Kinora in Barry Anthony's The Kinora motion pictures for the home 1896-1914 (The Projection Box, 1996). 

A print from an album likely to have been compiled by Roger Fenton is being offered by Chiswick Auctions online on 3 December. The anonymous portrait, by Fenton, comes from the notorious 'grey paper album'. The important album was disbound and each image was offered, and dispersed, individually, at auction between 1977 and 1984.

No record of the album and its sequencing was made at the time and it remains an example of commerce determining to break up an album to maximise value for the consignor.  Pages from the album are now scattered across the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and prints periodically appear at auction. 

The Chiswick auction also contains other early photographs, stereocards and cameras. 

The Fenton lot description can be seen here.

The sale whole auction here. 

Bristol's Arnolfini arts space is presenting two photography exhibitions as part of its Health and Well-being series, both come from the Hyman Collection. A picture of health presents a group of women photographers and Jo Spence: from fairy tales to phototherapy presents work held in the Collection. 

The first, brings together a group of contemporary women photographers featuring autobiographical perspectives and social commentaries on the wider society, that aims to de-stigmatise subjects around mental health and create an environment in which people can have open conversations about their wellbeing. A Picture of Health includes work by Heather Agyepong, Sonia Boyce, Eliza Hatch, Susan Hiller, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Anna Fox, Rosy Martin, Polly Penrose, Jo Spence, and Paloma Tendero.

Jo Spence is drawn from one of the most comprehensive collections of Jo Spence’s works in the world, From Fairy Tales to Phototherapy focuses on the intersection between arts, health and wellbeing, celebrating her work as a photo therapist in which she used photography as a medium to address personal trauma, reflecting on key moments in her past.

Both exhibitions run from 4 December 2020-28th / 21st February 2021 respective. Both are free but will require pre-booking so social distancing can be respected. 

See: https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/a-picture-of-health/ and https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/jo-spence/

Images:  Wish You Were Here 1. Le Cake Walk: Rob This England Heather Agyepong; Only When I Got to Fifty Did I Realise I was Cinderella, (03). Jo Spence in collaboration with Rosy Martin

Two daguerreotypes of Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, by the London photographer J. J. E. Mayall, are being offered at auction on 17 December 2020. Both are dated c.1853-55 and are estimated £50,000-70,000 and £10,000-20,000 respectively.

Dickens was regularly photographed by Mayall and he wrote about his experiences in his publication Household Words in 1853 (vol. vii, no. 156, 19 March 1853).

See: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/26015/lot/40/?category=list

https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/26015/lot/41/?category=list