In 2021 The Photographers' Gallery, London, celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. A new online resource looks at the history of the Gallery's print sales from 1971.From the Gallery's outset founder, Sue Davies, recognised that selling photography could  help support its programmes at Great Newport Street.

The text is accompanied by audio - interviews with former managers of print sales Helena Srakocic Kovacs (1975-1980), Zelda Cheatle (1981-1989) and Francis Hodgson (1989-1993). 

Read and listen to more here: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/printsaleshistory

Cambridge University's Whipple Museum collections are now fully online. Like other museums, only a small proportion of our collection is on display at any one time and, in the current public health situation, physical access to museums has become very challenging. But now you can search and browse through records and images of close to 7,000 objects, as well as records of its trade literature - all from the comfort of your own home.

In addition, the Researcher Portal allows you to download images, book research visits, request permission to publish images, and suggest ways to correct or improve the published records.

For photographic historians the Whipple collection includes some important photographic equipment. 

See: https://collections.whipplemuseum.cam.ac.uk/ 

A free new online picture archive from Reach plc, the owners of The Mirror and The Express newspapers, has been launched as the nation goes into lockdown. Despite events being cancelled nationwide the new tool allows people to celebrate and share historical moments like fireworks night, Remembrance Sunday. Memory Lane is backed by broadcaster, author and historian Professor Kate Williams.

The launch of Memory Lane follows a YouGov survey carried out for Memory Lane suggesting that the past is in danger of being lost because 80% of Brits haven’t digitised all their photos.

According to the newly commissioned nostalgia survey for Memory Lane almost a third of the population (31%) are looking at old photographs to get themselves through these times. So Memory Lane is asking the public to preserve, discover, celebrate and share images which matter to them as we enter another challenging time during the pandemic.

However, BPH would highlight the T&Cs of the site and warn potential users to be mindful of this if choosing to upload images:

If you post or upload content to the Site, you grant us a perpetual, royalty free, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and licence to use, reproduce, publish, communicate to the public, translate, create derivative works from and distribute such content into any form, medium or technology now known or hereafter developed. In addition, you waive any and all moral rights in such content.

See: https://www.memorylane.co.uk/

A new resource describes the history of photography and photographic studios in South Africa. It is accompanied by a gazetteer of studios for the same period. The text and resource has been compiled by Carol Hardijzer. 

See: http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/operators-mirrors-memory-south-african-photographers-1846-1915?fbclid=IwAR3isIOP6e1voF0SUGI61PPC3Bz5A9O9jtq9YrKH7uFPc-CQv7euhJoo_Zs

The latest edition of The Classic - a free magazine about classic photography is now available. In addition, the publishers have also launched The Classic Platform, an online resource with articles from Denis Pellerin and Richard Meara, and more due to go up shortly. Also available is an auction calendar. 

See:  https://theclassicphotomag.com/the-classic-04/

https://theclassicphotomag.com/the-classic-auction-calendar/

An early album of salt prints by Rev George Bridges is being offered in an online auction by Sotheby's from 3-17 November 2020. Bridges was a contemporary of Talbot and these show some of the first Calotypes of Greece, Turkey and Italy. It is estimated at £20,000-30,000. 

The lot description reads: 

BRIDGES, GEORGE WILSON

Album of photographs titled 'Talbotype album Mediterranean', 1846-48

oblong 4to (208 x 275mm.), 24 SALTED PAPER PRINTS (each 150 x 208mm., or the reverse), each mounted by the corners without adhesive through slits in pale blue laid paper (no visible watermarks), recto only, each with contemporary manuscript captions in pencil and/or ink, one of Athens dated 1848, one of Pompeii dated 1847, contemporary black half morocco gilt, green cloth boards, upper cover with black morocco gilt label, flat spine gilt, patterned endpapers in green, purple and gold, preserved in a modern green cloth folding box, cloth boards cockled and dampstained, binding slightly rubbed

AN IMPORTANT ALBUM OF PIONEERING TOPOGRAPHICAL PHOTOGRAPHS WITH SOME OF THE FIRST CALOTYPES OF GREECE, ITALY AND TURKEY, comprising views of Athens (15), Rome, Naples, Pompeii (3), Sicily (Messina, Mount Etna, and Palermo), and Constantinople.

George Wilson Bridges (1788-1863) was the first photographer to use William Henry Fox Talbot's "Talbotype" (calotype) paper photographic process in Greece and Constantinople, and was one of the earliest calotype photographers in Italy. Bridges was an English clergyman who had lived in Jamaica and Canada and on his return to England came to know William Henry Fox Talbot. In December 1845 Bridges was instructed in the art of the calotype photographic process by Nicolaas Henneman (valet and assistant to Talbot), at Talbot's home of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. In March 1846 Bridges embarked on what was to be a seven-year tour of the Mediterranean, joining two other calotype pioneers, Calvert Jones and Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot in Malta. He then set out and travelled to Sicily, Italy, Greece, and the Holy Land, and during his travels he also visited Constantinople. Although Bridges produced around 1,700 calotype negatives during this seven year tour his photographs are rare.

PROVENANCE:

Unknown owner, "Malta, Februari, 1849" (ink inscription on verso of preliminary blank, with the original owner's name inked-out); in the 1850s this album was gifted to a friend in whose family this album was preserved until 2012 when acquired by the present owner

Details are here: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/travel-atlases-maps-natural-history/bridges-album-of-talbotypes-photographs-of-athens

Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books.

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford and Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. The talk is supported by TORCH through the Humanities Cultural Programme.

Details and booking here: https://sites.google.com/view/photooxford2020/whats-on/events

Read more about Anna Atkins here.

Rachel Nordstrom from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Victor Flores, from Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal, Denis Pellerin and Rebecca Sharpe, from the London Stereoscopic Archive, have joined forces to organise this free online Zoom event, a celebration of Stereoscopic 3D. They have invited photo historians, artists, collectors and photo dealers to talk about their passion to explore various aspects of stereoscopy.

The Stereoscopy Blog is hosting a webpage dedicated to this event with details of the programme and registration which is free.

See: https://stereoscopy.blog/celebration-of-stereoscopic-3d/

Sophie Gordon, head of photographs at the Royal Collection Trust (RCT), Windsor, has now confirmed publicly that she is accepting voluntary redundancy. She has been at the Collection for 15 years. The RCT is undertaking a significant restructure following a fall in visitor numbers and revenues as a result of COVID-19. The Trust is also making compulsory redundancies. Gordon's former curatorial colleague Helen Trompeteler who left in the summer and has not been replaced. 

She wrote: "I decided to take the voluntary redundancy offer, as it is time for me to move on. Lots of reasons, some personal, some professional. My post - Head of Photographs - is still on the org chart in the newly restructured Royal Collection, but it is apparently going to be frozen for a couple of years. Although at this point, frankly, anything could happen". She encourages everyone to support the sector by visiting museums and galleries."

Sophie can be followed on Twitter and Instagram at: @shiveringfluff  

Image: Sophie Gordon / social media

In this talk I will discuss my work to draw to together the disparate photographic archive of the West India Regiments. Scattered across the Atlantic in public and private collections, photographs of the men who formed the first 'official' British Army regiment made up of men of African descent represent the men in contradictory ways. The men were both racialised as “others” and accepted as a formal part of the apparatus of the British Empire. At a time when “scientific” proof was being gathered to cement ideas about race, the men were certainly identified as black, and were differentiated from the white personnel of the British Army in a number of ways. However, they were not subjected to the same racialisation as the black civilians that they shared their homelands with. In fact, they were often depicted in ways that undermined the very stereotypes so commonly assigned to their peers. I'll discuss how the Regiments' archives can be used to learn about the characteristics of the British Empire between the mid-19th and early 20th century and some of the difficult histories that their archive intersects with.

Monday, 19 October at 1930
Dr Melissa Bennett - National Trust/Greater London Authority (PhD University of Warwick)
Arranged by IWM War and Conflict Network
Registration is free here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mjgOOm2MTyGChA_dyGx0tw?t=1602515684073

A short post on BPH has drawn attention to the current owners of the Hills and Saunders negative archive selling off negatives individually on eBay. The collection is - or was - owned by Pete Boswell who posted on BPH about his acquisition here in 2103. 

A previous website Harrowphotos.com which offered the opportunity to buy prints was registered in 2014 and is now no longer available. Pete Boswell was a director of Save Photo Ltd which was dissolved in 2016 and in that capacity he reported on saving Churchill negatives from the H&S archive. A number of other associated companies are also now dissolved, suggesting that the original commercialisation of the archive did not live up to expectations.

In an interview with BPH today, Pete Boswell explained that the Hills and Saunders Archive which consists of some 94,000 plates has now been fully digitised and indexed. The current owners have invested a considerable amount money into the archive's rescue and recovery, conservation, indexing, cataloguing and digitisation. It is considered one of the largest collections of of its kind in private ownership.

The majority - some 96 per cent - of the pictures contained within the archive are related to Harrow School pupils and staff from 1860-1965 and these are being retained by the owners and a selection of them are to be published shortly.

A small selection of around 200 plates that are not core to the main Harrow collection are being disposed of and are being offered to collectors and private owners. It is some of these that are currently on eBay. 

An index of all the Hills and Saunders negatives, by number and name, is available here: http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~victorianphotographs/family/hills/hills.htm 

Images from current eBay listings (reversed from negative to positive)

Photographica is a new French-published magazine which aims to support and show research around the history of photography for university and museum level. It is supported by the Société française de photographie (SFP) and the Ministry of Culture and is published by Éditions de la Sorbonne. It will be published twice a year and include reviews of books, catalogues, journals, conferences and study days. The editors are Éléonore Challine and Paul-Louis Roubert.

Photographica
A publication of the Société française de photographie
71, rue de Richelieu, 75002 Paris
Contact: secretariat-redaction@photographica-revue.fr

Published and distributed by Éditions de la Sorbonne
212 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris

Website: https://sfp.asso.fr/photographica/numeros-issues
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photographica.revue
Instagram: @photographica_revue

Photoria is a new resource documenting female photographers and associated trades, working in Australia between 1850 and 1950. It currently has some 400 names with, most likely, more to be discovered and documented. 

See and explore here: https://photoria.com.au/

Flints Auctions is offering an early experimental camera, believed to be c.1840, with an estimate of £50,000-70,000. The camera is made from mahogany, with a simple back retained by a wedge and with a simple lens in a brass mount. The back carries a series of small pinholes, which were presumably from pins used to fix sensitised paper to it (see below)

Although the camera comes with no provenance it has been inspected by Roger Watson, formerly curator at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock. Although the camera is described by the auctioneers as a 'mousestrap' camera Watson notes 'there is nothing to indicate that this example was made by or used by Talbot'. 

The auction takes place on 19 November 2020 The camera (lot 452) can be seen here and the complete catalogue of Fine Photographica and Instruments of Science can be seen here. 

BPH heard late yesterday afternoon that the British documentary photographer Chris Killip had died at his home in the United States. Killip was born in the Isle of Man, and started his career by assisting Adrian Flowers in London. From 1969 he began concentrating on his own photography. In 1977 he became a founder, exhibition curator, and advisor at the Side Gallery Newcastle, and worked as its first director. His work was championed and purchased by the V&A Museum, London. 

He documented many aspects of 1980s Britain and is best known for In Flagrante (1988). His work has been widely exhibited and collected and his body of work The Station is currently on view at the Martin Parr Foundation. 

From 1991-2017 he was Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, in Massachusetts.

Killip received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award for In Flagrante.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/14/chris-killip-hard-hitting-photographer-of-britains-working-class-dies-aged-74

and: 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/16/chris-killip-recognition-for-a-great-photographer

Images  © Michael Pritchard. Above: Killip at the launch symposium for the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017. Read more here.  Left: The Station at Martin Parr Foundation, on view until 20 December 2020. 

The British and Commonwealth collection, based at Bristol Archives, consists of objects, photographs, films, papers and sound archives reflecting the occupations and interests of mainly white British people living and working in many parts of the former empire during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The new online catalogue, launched today, will make more material available for people worldwide so they can examine difficult, forgotten or hidden histories from their own perspectives. It will be adding 15,000 entries initially, and providing access to over 7,000 digitised images and 200 films.

See: British Empire & Commonwealth Collection 

London's Photographers' Gallery and the Photo London fair are amongst the largest beneficiaries of today's Arts Council England investment of £257 million in 1,385 venues, theatres, museums and cultural organisations, through the first tranche of Culture Recovery Fund: Grants programme.

The announcement was only for Round 1 of grants applications under £1 million. Further announcements will highlight round two of Grants under £1 million, grants over £1 million, and the Capital Kickstart and Repayable Finance programmes. 

The funding is for organisations and there continues to be minimal or no direct support for freelancers and artists, although some support may trickle down from those funded organisations.   

For photography the following principal organisations have benefited:

 Details of all organisations can be found here: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/culture-recovery-fund-data#

Chiswick Auctions is delighted to offer a historically important album of early photographs by Captain Thomas Honywood (1819-1888), notable for taking the earliest known photographs of Sussex. He is also responsible for the invention of the photographic technique known as Nature Printing. This important album of his private  photographs will be offered in the Photographica sale at Chiswick Auctions on Wednesday, 28 October, 2020. It is estimated to fetch £50,000-£70,000.

The album includes an array of arresting portraits of the inhabitants of Horsham, as well as buildings and the surrounding Surrey & Sussex landscapes, in the form of 170 calotypes and albumen prints, dating from 1851 onwards. They are the earliest images from this area of England known to exist, taken ten years after William Henry Fox Talbot invented the Calotype process of photography.  

Talking about the contents of this exceptional album, Austin Farahar, Head of Photographica at Chiswick Auctions explains: 'The album has a narrative similar to any great artist’s sketchbook, full of experimentation, development and adjustments. It is fascinating to observe how the Polymath Thomas Honywood was utilising and learning the new photographic artform. Many of the works contained within are simply breath-taking. The album’s contents, containing personal portraiture studies of the people and the places that he knew and loved dearly, communicate with such arresting intimacy a record of the world that Honywood inhabited. Before these photographs were discovered, every record or account of this part of England had been translated via the eyes and hands of an artist, perhaps with the assistance of the camera-lucida, but still from the subjective view of a draftsman.

What we have here is a beautiful and extraordinary intersection of art and science. Very few people were proficient in this process and fewer excelled with such artistic flair in the way that Honywood did.'

Jeremy Knight from the Horsham Museum, notes: 'Thomas Honywood is that typical figure of British heritage, known and promoted locally for his innovative and creative ability, with Horsham Museum holding a unique collection of his nature prints and photographs, since he first exhibited them over 150 years ago. Now through the power of the art and photographic market, awakening global interest he will become appreciated for the genius that he was, a nationally important figure in the story of British photography.'

As well as his photographic skills, Honywood was also a skilled scientist and archaeologist, famously discovering the ‘Horsham Hoard’ of medieval pottery during one of his many excavations in his beloved West Sussex - the photographs of which are included in the album.  He was very involved in his local community, which also no doubt enabled him to capture events and people first-hand. He was Captain of the Horsham Volunteer Fire Brigade for many years and assisted neighbouring towns and villages in starting their own Fire Services, which earned him an oil portrait of himself, which now hangs in Horsham Museum.

Honywood’s passion and skill in photography led to much experimentation with a range of photo-chemical processes, which resulted in him devising a new technique called ‘Nature Printing’, which enabled the transfer of positive images onto a range of surfaces. He was able to patent this technique and exhibited it at the London International Inventions Exhibition of 1885, which was received with both awe and commendation.

See: https://www.chiswickauctions.co.uk/auction/details/28%20Oct%202020%20B%20-photographica/?au=588

Alan Denney and Tamara Stoll discuss their new book The Rio Tape/Slide Archive, published by Isola Press, in conversation with Anne McNeill, Director of Impressions Gallery. Programmed as part of Impressions Gallery’s Online Photobook Fair 2020. 

The Tape/Slide Newsreel Group was an adult education project that met in the basement of the Rio Cinema in Dalston, East London. It taught young, mostly unemployed, locals photography and sound-recording skills and sent them out to report on Hackney life. The resulting ’newsreels’ were then shown on the big screen before the main feature.

The recently rediscovered slides – more than 12,000 – are a snapshot of Hackney in the 1980s: protests, social issues, work and play, and vibrant street life, parties and festivals. They show the borough’s diverse, working-class communities as they endured the day-to-day hardships of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Alan Denney is a Hackney resident since 1974. He is a photographer and local historian, and he scanned the entire Rio slide collection.

Tamara Stoll is an artist and community activist. Her self-published book Ridley Road Market (2019) highlighted the history and people of this Hackney institution that is under threat from developers.

Anne McNeill, now Director at Impressions Gallery, started her career in the early 1980s running similar projects at the radical gallery Camerawork in Tower Hamlets and Nightingale Estate, Hackney.

Rio Tape/Slide Archive
17 October 2020
11.30am - 12.10pm
Free, booking essential here: https://www.impressions-gallery.com/event/rio-tape-slide-archive/

More information can be found on the Rio Cinema Archive Instagram page http://instagram.com/riocinemaarchive.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were passionate collectors of photography from the announcement of the medium. Following their purchase of the Osborne estate in 1845, this locality became an important setting for the early photographic experiences of the royal family. The presence of the royal family at Osborne House contributed to the Isle of Wight becoming a popular destination in the mid-nineteenth century.

Read more about its role, importance and wider impact in this  online resource by Helen Trompeteler, a former curator at the Royal Collection Trust. https://albert.rct.uk/placing-osborne-in-the-history-of-early-photography