As part of the National Museum Cardiff's Photography Season 2019-20 three new exhibitions have opened presenting work by four of the most influential artists/photographers in the history of the medium: August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Martin Parr. The exhibitions predominantly comprise loaned photographs, a number of which have never been exhibited before, and all of which will be displayed for the first time in Wales. They continue to 1 March 2020.

• ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander presents over eighty photographs by August Sander (1876-1964), one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. The photographs are drawn from Sander’s monumental project People of the Twentieth Century, which classifies individuals and groups of people according to profession and social class. The exhibition is drawn from a major collection of over 170 modern prints, produced from the original plates by August Sander’s grandson, Gerd Sander and placed on long loan to ARTIST ROOMS.

• Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Visions brings together 225 photographs by two of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. For over 50 years the Becher’s collaborated on a project to document industrial structures across Europe and the USA. Their photographic inventory included winding towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, gasometers, grain elevators, water towers and lime kilns. In 1965 the Becher’s made their first visit to Wales and returned in 1966 after receiving a British Council Fellowship. Based at a campsite in Glynneath, they explored the south Wales valleys and made an extensive series of photographs that now stand as monuments to a lost world of labour that were once central to the social fabric of industrial communities.

• Martin Parr in Wales. Martin Parr is one of the most influential and prolific photographers working today. He has always been drawn to Wales, having lived just over the border in nearby Bristol for thirty years. Throughout that time, he has undertaken several editorial and cultural commissions, covering subjects from working men’s clubs to coal mining. This exhibition brings together, for the first time, works that explore different aspects of Welsh life and culture, from male voice choirs and national sports to food, festivals and the seaside.

See more here: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/10826/Photography-Season/

Image: Bernd and Hilla Becher: Blaenserchan Colliery, Pontypool, South Wales, GB, 1966
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne, 2019

A major exhibition of prints by the renowned photomontage artist John Heartfield opens at Four Corners Gallery this Autumn. 33 of Heartfield’s scathingly satirical artworks against war and fascism will be on display, bringing his inspiring imagery to a new generation.

This set of anti-Nazi photomontage posters was recently rediscovered in its original crumbling box in the Special Collections & Archives at Liverpool John Moores University. The exhibition will also display material produced by Heartfield during his time as a refugee in England between 1938 and 1950, alongside work by contemporary artists inspired by his legacy.

A pioneer of German agitprop and an early member of the Berlin Dada group, Heartfield is known as the inventor of political photomontage. Armed with scissors, paste and acerbic wit, he used art as a political weapon. Risking his life under Hitler’s Third Reich, Heartfield subverted Nazi imagery to reveal the hypocrisy, greed and political threats of 1930s Germany.

80 years after the outbreak of World War Two, Heartfield’s work foregrounds the need for artistic agitation in challenging times. His striking photomontages offer inspiration in our own era of rising far-right politics, racism and the blurring of fact and fake news.

HEARTFIELD: ONE MAN’S WAR is a highlight of Insiders/Outsiders Festival, which celebrates the contribution of refugees from Nazi Europe to British culture. The exhibition is curated by Four Corners and Professor John Hyatt, Director of The Institute of Art and Technology, Liverpool John Moores University. Monica Bohm-Duchen, Creative Director, Insiders/Outsiders Festival said: ‘I am absolutely delighted that the Insiders/Outsiders Festival includes this important exhibition. While Heartfield is a significant international figure of continuing relevance, few people realise that he came to the UK as a refugee, intent on continuing his fight against fascism on these shores.’

John Hyatt, Liverpool John Moores University said: ‘Unforgettable juxtapositions, visual collisions, biting wit, and the subverted languages of advertising, propaganda and iconography create fissures in the construction of modernity through which Heartfield shines the light of truth to shrivel and shame the occult darkness of populism, fascism and lies. These posters are as vital today as they were when Heartfield’s glue was still wet.’

Sabine Unamun, Director, Visual Arts, London, Arts Council England said: ‘We have awarded funding to Four Corners for their Heartfield/One Man’s War exhibition, to showcase the recently rediscovered prints in London for the first time, and share Heartfield’s deep belief that art should effect social change’.

HEARTFIELD : ONE MAN’S WAR
1 November 2019 – 1 February 2020,
Tues-Sat: 11.00 - 18.00, Thurs 11.00 - 20.00
Admission free.
Four Corners Gallery
121 Roman Road, London E2 0QN. Nearest tube: Bethnal Green, Central Line
A programme of talks, tours and workshops accompanies the exhibition. 
www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk

Images
John Heartfield, The Hand Has 5 Fingers / With 5 You Seize the Enemy! / Vote List 5 /
Communist Party!, 1928
John Heartfield, The Old Slogan in the “new” Reich: Blood and Iron, 1934
© The Heartfield Community of Heirs/DACS 2019

The programme for this conference at the V&A Museum has been announced. How do photographs construct meanings in museums? Why are some photographs collected as ‘significant’ and others, of historical value, not Bringing together new work on institutional ‘photographic cultures’, this conference explores the dynamics and significance of such questions across analogue and digital media, and the formative role of photographic practices in articulating the values and assumptions of museums and galleries.

PROGRAMME (provisional)

Day 1: Friday 6^th December

10.00 Registration

Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture theatre

10.15. Brief welcome: Elizabeth Edwards

Public Lecture  Geoff Belknap (National Science and Media Museum). (Chair: Martin Barnes)

Redefining Photographic Collections: Institutional and Photographic Practices

***

11.45 Conference Welcome: Tristram Hunt (Director, V&A) and Elizabeth Edwards

12.00. Session 1. NON-COLLECTIONS – MUSEUM DISLAYS.  (Chair: Marta Weiss)

Christina Riggs (University of Durham), The Archive on Display: Photographs in the 1972 ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’ Exhibition.

Angus Patterson (V&A) Two Dimensions Among Three: The Role of Photographs in the V&A's Refurbished Cast Courts.

13.00. Lunch break (not provided)

13.45. Session 2.   NON-COLLECTIONS – information Banks  (Chair: tbc)

Ella Ravilious (V&A/ De Montfort University). Studies from Life

Lucy Bayley (Tate Britain) Tricky Boundaries: collection, archive or gallery records?

14.45. Session 3.  COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND ITS DEPOSITS   (Chair: Joan Schwartz)

Kate Hay (V&A) Revitalising research: the fall and rise of the furniture image collection.  

Petra Trnkova (Art Institute, Prague) Familial Relationships of Photographic Doubles

Erika Lederman, (V&A/De Montfort University) Isabel Agnes Cowper, Official Museum Photographer:  Her Practice, Her Work, and Afterlives

16.15 Coffee Break

16.45   Session 4.  MATERIAL INSISTENCES Chair: tbc

Pip Laureston (Tate London / Maastricht University) Finding Photography: Networks of material, skill and technology in contemporary art photography

Simon Fleury, (V&A Conservation/Birmingham City University). Condition report: mapping the museum-object encounter.

17.45 Keynote.  David Odo (Harvard Art Museums):  The Shape of the Collection:  The case of ‘Art’ Photographs of Japan in an ‘Ethnographic’ Archive.   (Chair: Elizabeth Edwards)

18.45  End of day 1

Day 2 : Saturday 7^th December

10.00 Registration  and coffee

10.15 Keynote   Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz) (Chair: Elizabeth Edwards)

 “The red dot. Archival transformations and the value of photographic objects.

11.15 Session 1.  DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS (Chair: Simon Fleury)

Kathy Clough  (University of Newcastle)  Digital lenses on analogue collections - the Maurice Broomfield Archive at the V&A 

Adam Koszary (former Programme Manager and Digital Lead at The MERL University of Reading).  Absolute units and virality: using photographic collections in the internet age

Catherine Troiano (National Trust/ De Montfort University).  Computations and Complications: Value systems of institutional photography

12.45. Lunch break (not provided)

13.30 Session 2. THE POLITICS OF EMERGING COLLECTIONS. 1   Chair: tbc

Chris Morton (University of Oxford). Objects, assets, surrogates: non-collections in cross-cultural curation at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Sigrid Lien (University of Bergen). The Institutional Afterlives of Photographs of Sámi Peoples

14.30 Session 3 THE POLITICS OF EMERGING COLLECTIONS. 2  (Chair: James Ryan)

Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford). Don’t Look Now: The Nanjing Massacre and its Photographic Afterlives 

Naluwembe Binaise (University College London) – Framing the past in Nigeria: the visibility of the photographic archive.

15.50 Coffee Break

16.00   Session 4 ROUND TABLE.  EXPANDED CURATORSHIP: INSTITUTIONAL IMPLICATIONS AND PHOTOGRAPHIC FUTURES. 

Elizabeth Edwards (Chair); Martin Barnes, Geoff Belknap; Costanza Caraffa; David Odo; Joan Schwartz.

16.45. Closing Remarks

17.00. End

The conference is organised by the V&A Research Institute (VARI) and generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in conjunction with research strands led by VARI  Mellon Visiting Professor Elizabeth Edwards.

Final version of the programme will be uploaded nearer the time of the conference itself.

The Institutional Lives of Photographs.
V&A; December 6-7 2019.
Registration: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/Vvq9oLvj/the-institutional-lives-of-photographs-dec-2019

The V&A has unveiled a major new photography commission by internationally-acclaimed artist Valérie Belin. Known for her monumental photographs exploring artifice, identify and representation, Belin has found inspiration in the V&A’s photographs collection for her new series Reflection. Ten of Belin’s resulting 173 x 130cm pigment prints are on display in the V&A Photography Centre.

Belin was drawn to the street photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Walker Evans (1903-75) and Lee Friedlander (b. 1934), alongside commercial pictures of shopfront window displays by New York’s Worsinger Window Service and works by graphic designer, Robert Brownjohn (1920-70). Through this new series, Belin examines the visual vernacular of the street while emphasising illusionary effects created by layered reflections. Reflection continues her ongoing enquiries into the tension between the real and the imaginary, interrogating stereotypes, while furthering her interest in the visual language of commerce and typography.

As Belin delved further into the V&A’s collection of over 800,000 photographs, it was Brownjohn’s images of 1960s London, taken in the wake of post war-austerity, that resonated most. Brownjohn used his images as source material for his design process, and for Reflection, Belin took a similar approach. Revisiting the thousands of photographs she’d made of streets and shopfronts in American cities over the last three decades, Belin used her signature superimposition process to build up layers of imagery. Drawing on additional visual references from graphic novels, magazines and film noir, the resulting dream-like photographs comprise rich, textural layers, fragmented narratives and dynamic juxtapositions conjuring themes of reflection, depth, representation, artifice and identity – drivers behind Belin’s conceptual approach.

Valérie Belin said: “The V&A is a treasure trove filled with amazing art, graphic design, fashion and photography. I go there when I’m between series to stimulate my gaze and see where I go next. The motif of the window recurs throughout my work; as a place of representation, fantasy and glamour it speaks to the line between artifice and reality. To me, the V&A is a big window display, so the shop window motif felt fitting for this commission. We live in a world where superimposition is part of our basic human condition. We are constantly dealing with different types of information, fielding multiple things at once. These photographs are like a broken mirror - perhaps they reflect that it’s easy to lose ourselves in the atmosphere generated by mass consumption. When encountering my works, I want viewers to question what it is they are looking at, and maybe challenge their way of seeing the world too.”

Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs, V&A, said: “Valérie Belin has a unique vision. Through her experiments in digital post-production she injects her photographs with a sense of fantasy and eerie surrealism that challenges viewers to question their perspectives on the world. By applying her creative vision to the V&A’s photographs collection, Belin interrogates ideas of seeing and being seen, past and present, light and dark, and transparency and opacity. Her contemporary perspective reimagines pictures from the past, bringing new relevance and meaning to our collections. We’re thrilled to acquire a selection of these pictures from Belin’s evocative new series for our permanent collection, increasing our holdings of such an inventive and influential photographer." 

Valérie Belin / Reflection opens in the V&A Photography Centre on Saturday 19 October 2019 alongside pictures by Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Robert Brownjohn and the Worsinger Window Service that inspired Belin. The display is accompanied by an illustrated publication with texts by Belin and former V&A Curator of Photographs, Catherine Troiano. Valérie Belin / Reflection is the second in the series of V&A Photography Centre commissions, and follows Thomas Ruff’s Tripe/Ruff series created to celebrate the opening of the V&A Photography Centre in October 2018.

As part of the V&A’s commitment to supporting and spotlighting the work of contemporary practitioners, the museum has acquired a selection of pictures from Belin’s Reflection series through the generous support of the V&A Photographs Acquisition Group. The artist has also donated works from her Still Life (2014) series, which depicts consumer goods in ornate compositions echoing classical vanitas and memento mori paintings, for which she won the illustrious Prix Pictet in 2015.

Valérie Belin / Reflection
V&A Photography Centre, The Sir Elton John and David Furnish Gallery
19 October 2019 – 31 August 2020
vam.ac.uk | @V_and_A | #vamPhotography

Image: Valérie Belin, Lights on Lexington 2019
Pigment print.  Purchase funded by the V&A Photographs Acquisition Group
© Valérie Belin

A highly significant collection of work by pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge is to be brought back to his home town thanks to a partnership between the Royal Borough of Kingston and Kingston University.

The unique material is part of the Victorian photographer’s own personal collection, which he bequeathed to Kingston Museum on his death. It includes 67 of Muybridge’s famous zoopraxiscope discs, which enabled him to create projected moving images, more than 2,000 glass lantern slides which he presented in his extensive international lectures, and 150 collotype prints, a type of printing that preserves fine detail. It forms part of Kingston Museum’s Muybridge Collection, one of the largest worldwide. A selection of the trailblazing photographer’s work is displayed at the museum, but much of the collection is currently stored out of borough. 

Following three years of work, the Council has signed a memorandum of understanding with the University which will see these pieces of Muybridge’s work returned to Kingston, to a specially designed home in the University’s flagship new Town House building. The document was signed by Council Leader Liz Green and Kingston University Vice-Chancellor Professor Steven Spier at the University’s civic showcase event at the town’s Guildhall on Monday night.

Councillor Green said Eadweard Muybridge’s contribution to motion pictures was immeasurable. “It’s wonderful to see one of Kingston’s most famous historical figures celebrated in his home town in this way – he sits at the heart of the borough’s cultural identity and I’m delighted to be able to sign the Memorandum of Understanding on behalf of the council,” she said.

Professor Spier said working with the Council to bring more of Kingston Museum’s Muybridge Collection back to the borough marked the latest milestone in a decade-long collaboration and was a tangible demonstration of the strong relationship between the University and town. “The collection is a jewel in the crown of the borough’s rich cultural heritage. Kingston University is delighted to play its part in helping embed Muybridge in the DNA of Kingston by reuniting the collection he bequeathed to the town, making it more accessible to researchers and residents alike. This collaboration with the Council epitomises exactly what we want our new Town House building to represent – a shared space where both the university and town are enriched,” he said.

The pieces will move to their new home in the University’s Town House next summer. They will sit on the second floor of the new building, in a tailor made archive area with specialist facilities and controlled conditions to preserve the fragile and important artefacts. Hosting the archive at the University would not only give it more visibility, but would also assist the museum’s curators to continue their work to make it more accessible, Professor Spier said. 

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston in 1830, the internationally renowned technological and artistic innovator is best known for his ground breaking work on animal locomotion, in which he used multiple cameras to capture movement in stop-motion photographs. His work is credited as paving the way for cinema and CGI animation. On his death in 1904 he entrusted his personal collection of equipment and prints to Kingston Museum – leaving to the borough a body of work unlike any other in the world.

Chiswick Auctions next sale of Photographica includes a large selection of historic and collectable photographs and cameras. Of particular note is a group of lantern slides of East London Types by 'KY' from c.1900. 

The full auction can be seen online here: https://auctions.chiswickauctions.co.uk/auctions/7260/srchis10630?categoryCode=CCE&page=2&pageSize=60

As part of Photography Scotland’s Season of Photography which runs until the end of November Roddy Simpson, on the eve of the 2019 Robert Louis Stevenson Day, will be talking about the work of American-born twentieth century photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who helped illustrate a 1954 edition of Stevenson’s book Edinburgh Picturesque Notes with a series of photographs. Taken in 1905, Coburn regarded these photographs as some of his 'very best' work though he always regretted that he never got to meet Stevenson himself, who had died in 1894.

“I consider Edinburgh one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and Robert Louis Stevenson appreciated it as few have done. For over fifty years I have followed lovingly in his footsteps, endeavouring to see it as I thought he saw it, and I hope that he would have approved of what I have done in illustrating his Edinburgh Picturesque Notes.”

Coburn also said: "I never met Stevenson in the flesh. It is one of my great regrets that I came just a little too late to make his portrait, but I have all his books and have read them many times, so that I seem to know him better than some of my other friends. Through his Edinburgh and in his Edinburgh I seem to know him best of all".

This talk will explore Coburn’s admiration for Stevenson through the photographs he produced for the edition of Edinburgh Picturesque Notes and will look at the images and discuss the affinity they have with Stevenson’s prose.

Alvin Langdon Coburn in the Footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson
Roddy Simpson
Patrick Geddes Centre, Edinburgh
Admission: £10 
12 Nov 2019, 19:00 – 21:00

See: http://photo-networks.scot/listing/alvin-langdon-coburn-the-footsteps-robert-louis-stevenson/

Image: © Alvin Langdon Coburn: 'A passage between tall lands', also known as 'Weir's Close, Edinburgh', 1905.
Image courtesy Library of Congress

Bookings are now open for the academic conference -  Light | Sensitive | Media  - which takes place on 1-2 November at the University of West London, St Mary's Road, Ealing, London. 

The fields of photography theory and history have in recent years moved away from the assumption of a break between the analogue and digital image to a more nuanced understanding of both past and contemporary photographic practices, images, and technologies.

Increasingly photography is discussed in relation to other media, to industry and markets and to climate and the environment. At the same time questions of aesthetics and interpretation are recast and understood in terms of sensual, haptic, embodied and everyday encounters with material images.

This conference will examine photography as simultaneously material and immaterial, addressing not only the tangible properties of photographic objects, but also the ecosystems in which they circulate.

We live in and through the photographic, in its physical presence in the world, and in our thought. The conference thus also invites considerations of the ways in which a mode of philosophical thinking can be conceived as photographic or vice versa.

The conference is convened by Professor Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool) and Dr Junko Theresa Mikuriya (University of West London).

Places are limited but affordable (£20 for 2 days) and details including a full list of speakers are at the following link: https://www.uwl.ac.uk/light-sensitive-material

London's History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck has announced its autumn seminar programme. All events are free and open to all. 

Wednesday, 20 November 2019, 6-7:30pm. Room 106, 46 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD.

Andrés Mario Zervigón (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)

Fully Visible and Transparent: Zeiss Anastigmat

In 1890, the famous Jena Glass Works of Carl Zeiss released the Anastigmat photographic lens. The innovative device advanced a chapter in optical technology that seemed to have progressed automatically in a predetermined manner since the medium’s origins. The new lens offered a consistent field of focus across the photographic plate and corrected for a number of additional aberrations at lower and higher f-stops. But why exactly had Zeiss developed its expensive mechanism and what drove photographers to buy it? This paper suggests that the consistent focus and varied depth of field that the Anastigmat provided were not in and of themselves the desired goals of the improvements, but that they were instead visible signals of a pictorial model that makers and consumers had been seeking since the public introduction of photography in 1839. The goal was a transparent realism that remained stubbornly external to the medium, an illusionistic standard that had largely been mediated by painting since the renaissance and was now apparently possible in photography as well.

Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His scholarship concentrates on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art, generally focusing on moments in history when these media prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual. Zervigón is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Photography and Germany (Reaktion Books, 2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (Routledge 2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Zimmerli Musuem/Hirmer Verlag, 2017). His current book project is Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung - The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). At Rutgers Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory and practice.

Monday 9 December 2019, 6-7:30pm. Room 106, 46 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Charlene Heath (Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada)

To Circulate and Disperse: Jo Spence, Terry Dennett and a Still Moving Archive.

Image: Justine Varga, Overlay, 2016-18.

Join us for an afternoon of discussion and a film screening to mark the opening of the exhibition Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Visions.

A distinguished panel of experts, chaired by Dr Russell Roberts (co-curator of Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Visions) and including Max Becher (photographer and son of Bernd and Hilla Becher), Gabriele Conrath-Scholl (Director of Die Photographische Sammlung /SK Stiftung Kultur der Sparkasse KölnBonn) and Marianne Kapfer (director of The Photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher) will discuss the Bechers' work in more detail, and how their time in Wales influenced their practice.

Followed be a special screening of The Photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher (2012) by Marianne Kapfer.

National Museum Cardiff
25 October, 1300-1600
£5-7

https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/10896/Panel-Discussion-and-Film-Screening-of-The-Photographers-Bernd-and-Hilla-Becher/

Image:  Bernd and Hilla Becher: Blaenserchan Colliery, Pontypool, South Wales, GB, 1966

© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne, 2019

From the late 1880s there was a marked increase in the number of British women becoming professional photographers. Drawing on archival documents and photographs in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

This talk examines the dynamics of women photographers’ studios to better understand how they became competitors in a male-dominated industry.

George Mind: 'The fair abode of femininity'
University of Westminster, Harrow Campus
Wednesday, 9 October 2019 from 1330-1400
See: https://westminster.ac.uk/events/westminster-photography-forum-george-mind-the-fair-abode-of-femininity

Image: Lallie Charles, Bea Martin, Rita Martin, circa 1899, copyright National Portrait Gallery

Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography is a conference within a conference, hosted by the National Stereoscopic Association at the 46th annual 3D-Con in Tacoma, Washington. 

In the last thirty years, scholarship on stereography has moved from the margins to a more central position in the history of photography and visual culture. A new wave of scholars has emerged with studies that range from stereo’s inception to contemporary virtual and augmented reality. These scholars are creating a language for stereo photography even as it is expanding into nascent vision. Potential topics for paper presentations include: historical and archival discoveries; studies on collecting, p/matronage, and the culture of stereo; the marketing and incorporation of 3D; domesticities and instruments; immersive media, interactivity and performance; 3D cinema and video; the politics of historiographical suppression or distortion; hyper-simulation to surveillance; representations of stereo in popular media; reading stereo perception, as well as others. Papers on topics from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century are invited. Stereoscopic projection is available at the conference.

Deadline for abstracts: March 2, 2020. Send an abstract of 500 words and a biography of 250 words including institutional affiliation. Independent scholars are welcome. Email to: Melody Davis, davism6@sage.edu

Notification of acceptance by May 1, 2020. Digital images will be expected by June 30, 2020.

Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography

14 August 14, 2020 at The National Stereoscopic Association’s 3D-Con

The Hotel Murano, Tacoma, Washington, 11-17 August, 2020

The stereoscopic craze that swept over France and Britain from the mid-1850s to the 1862 Exhibition led to the production of millions of binocular photographs that are an invaluable help for anyone who wishes to study and understand the Victorian era. Among those images, so precious for the historian of the period, are hundreds of portraits of famous and totally anonymous Victorians. Projected on a large screen and visible in 3-D through special glasses, they bring to life in a very vivid way those ghosts of the past and let us step, for a while, straight into the very heart of photographs that were all taken when Queen Victoria was ruling over Britain. Even the “carte-o-mania” which succeeded this stereoscopic frenzy yields, at times, some surprising full length and full 3-D portraits in a way that will be explained by photo historian Denis Pellerin with chosen examples from Brian May’s and the NPG’s collections.

Book a place here: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/friday-lates/lecture-11102019

National Portrait Gallery
11 October 2019, 19:00
Ondaatje Wing Theatre
Tickets: £10 (£8 concessions and Gallery Supporters)

Photography has been entangled with education processes for nearly two centuries. For much of that time, photography has been used to communicate information, cement knowledge, and train individuals, groups, and machines alike in visual literacy and the meaning of cultural customs. In the late twentieth century, photography became absorbed into academia as a subject of study. In more recent years, photographic historians and scholars have also begun to consider photography, photographs, and photographic practices as a means to tap into diverse historical processes at large. This paradigm shift has also resulted in various instances in which photography studies has been incorporated into the academic curriculum as a prism through which historical, social, cultural, and political phenomena can be studied.

In its 8th Annual Conference, the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) invites applicants to consider the role of photography in education as well as particular histories of intersections between the two. Themes may include (but are not limited to):

• Photography in schooling programmes
• Photography and visual literacy
• The development of photographic education
• Photographs in the classroom
• Photography as an auxiliary to art, archaeological and historical education
• Education and the photographic industry
• Photographic technologies in education systems
• Photographs as participants in familial/domestic education processes
• Photography in social and political propaganda
• Photography-based teaching/learning/training
• Uses of photographic technologies in artificial intelligence
• Digital humanities and photographic history
• The influence of photographic vision on memory, remembering and the imagination
• Educational uses of photographs on New Media platforms.
• Photography and “how-to” guides.
• The material culture of photography education.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to phrc@dmu.ac.uk by 7 January 2020. Include your name, affiliation and contact details in the same document but please do not send a cv.

Camera Education: Photographic Histories of Visual Literacy, Schooling, and the Imagination
Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
15-16 June 2020
De Montfort University, Leicester UK

Confirmed keynote speakers to date:
Professor Jane Lydon, Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History (the University of Western Australia)
Professor Andrés Zervigón, Professor of the History of Photography (Rutgers University, USA)

Follow on Twitter @PHRC_DeMontfort

Conference hashtag #PHRC20

For any queries please email: phrc@dmu.ac.uk

The Icon Photographic Materials Group is delighted to announce the third photo conservation round table, taking place on Friday 29th November at the Science Museum in London. The event will consist of five-minute presentations and discussion, and aims to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing among conservators, as well as other professionals interested in the care and preservation of photographic materials.

We invite speakers from public institutions, private practice and education to talk about their work, and the issues and challenges involved in caring for historic and modern photographic materials. Subjects could include (but are not limited to) treatment practices, preventive conservation, scientific research, education, outreach and funding. Our aim is to build a comfortable space for discussion and to broaden our network by learning about others’ work.

If you’d like to give a five-minute presentation, please send a titled proposal (c.100 words) with your name and affiliation to phmg@icon.org.uk by 3rd November. Presentations should include around five PowerPoint slides, which should be illustrative rather than textual. Please get in touch as soon as possible for further details or to discuss your idea. We look forward to hearing from you!

The event will take place between 13:00 and 17:00. Different ticket prices will apply to presenters, Icon members and non-Icon members. Tea, coffee, and biscuits will be provided. The round table event will be followed by the Icon PhMG annual general meeting, which is free to attend.

A final version of the programme will be available by mid-November, but you can check our Eventbrite page for updates before then.  Please follow this eventbrite link for more information and to book your tickets.

For the first time since 1860 Diableries will exhibited in London, just in time for Halloween. The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new edition of Brian May, Denis Pellerin and Paula Fleming's Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell which now includes all of the original stereocards, the missing cards having been found.

For one day only Soho's Century Club will be transformed in to a gothic Victorian crypt of temptation and seduction. Whilst surrounded by fantastic imagery depicting demonic scenes with carousing skeletons, devils and satyrs you will have the opportunity to see the Diableries stories come to life in 3D. Dr May will display a selection of his original stereocards alongside some of his  most treasured stereoscopes and Victorian stereoscopic cameras. 

There will be a 3D screening of the spelling animated 3D short film One Night in Hell.  The original iconic skull guitar from Queen's It's a Hard Life video - that makes an appearance in the film with a skeleton rocking the underworld - will also be on display for the first time. 

Find out more at: www.diableries.co.uk

Diableries. The exhibit
Monday, 28 October 2019 from 1100-1600
at The Century Club, 61-63 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1
Entry is free. 

Sotheby’s has announced that it will be offering a copy of John Thomson’s Views on the North River (Hong Kong, 1870) in its auction of Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History on 12 November 2019.

This is the rarest of all of Thomson’s photobooks on China, of which fewer than 10 copies are known and only 3 copies are located in institutional libraries. The last copy sold at auction was 38 years ago at Sotheby’s Belgravia on 17 June 1981, lot 194 which realised £1,500. The estimate for this copy is £20,000-30,000 GBP.

This publication was the result of Thomson's sailing voyage in the summer of 1870 up the North Pearl River from Canton (Guangzhou), and was reviewed in the Hongkong Daily Press on 31st October 1870: 'Mr Thomson has just published a volume of admirable photographs of scenes on the North River, entered about 40 miles above Canton through the Fatshan creek. The views, which are beautifully executed, are accompanied by a short description of the places which they respectively represent ... Better praise cannot be given to them than stating that they are fully up to the standard of the previous views which have gained Mr Thomson the high reputation he enjoys.' (quoted in Bennett).
'Views on the North River would have been expensive to produce and the print run was probably small ... Later in 1870 Thomson was in Foochow (Fuzhou) to embark on a trip along the River Min where he produced some of his most powerful landscape work' (Bennett, T. History of Photography in China: Western Photographers 1861-1879 (Quaritch, 2010), p. 227

The Sotheby’s sale also includes an album of 37 albumen prints of Hong Kong by Thomson (c. 1868) and many other albums of 19th and early 20th century topographical photographs of the world. Enquiries: richard.fattorini@sothebys.com

sothebys.com/travel

Images from Thomson’s ‘Views on the North River’, Courtesy: Sotheby's. 

For anyone practising the Malde-Ware platinum/palladium printing-out method of photography, there is a call for submission of work for possible inclusion in Pradip Malde's forthcoming book on this process.  The book will be published in the Focal Press series, edited by Christina Z. Anderson.

Open call: Photographs by the platinum/palladium print-out method using ammonium salts.
Submission deadline is December 15, 2019.

Focal Press, an imprint of Routledge, has spearheaded a series entitled Contemporary Practices in Alternative Process Photography. Each book in the series is devoted to a single process, or a process and its related techniques. Now, Focal Press/Routledge and Pradip Malde, with Mike Ware, are teaming up to publish a book about the platinum/palladium print-out method using ammonium salts.

Submission of works requires the completion of this form, and uploading between 3 and 10 image files as indicated below. Note the image file format: TIFF file, no compression, in sRGB colorspace, 8 bits per channel, sized as close to but no larger than 300ppi, 10˝ longest side, maximum file size 40 MB each. Each file must be named: <yourlastname_filename>.tiff or, if submitting for a group: <groupname_filename>tiff e.g. malde_20190902.tiff or kozoeditions_20190902.tif.

In addition to the print images, please try to include a photograph/scan of a standardized color target, captured under the same conditions as the prints–this will allow for color-accurate reproduction. There are suggestions about how to copy and scan here:

https://pradipmalde.com/scanning-and-copying-platinum-palladium-prints/

Please try to include at least one vertical image and one horizontal in the submission, as this will increase the options for fitting images into multiple page formats and layouts.

Submission does not guarantee that your image(s) will be published. Although there is no monetary compensation, the benefits include wide exposure of your work, a publication line on your résumé, and the placing of your work in a contemporary account about the platinum/palladium print-out method using ammonium salts.

If your work is accepted, you will be asked to respond to a supplemental 500 to 2000-word questionnaire about your working process, and to complete a release form.

See more here. 

The National Trust has announced two new vacancies at The Hardmans’ House. The full time fixed-term Archivist and Digitisation Conservator roles will be based at Liverpool Central Library and Archives on a two year project that will focus on the cataloguing, digitising and rehousing of the Edward Chambré Hardman Photographic Collection.

Archivist - https://careers.nationaltrust.org.uk/OA_HTML/a/?_ga=2.64376492.2002886058.1568103503-1105403324.1568103503#/vacancy-detail/84276

Digitisation Conservator - https://careers.nationaltrust.org.uk/OA_HTML/a/?_ga=2.64376492.2002886058.1568103503-1105403324.1568103503#/vacancy-detail/84248