The National Trust photography collections include around 550,000 objects located at 250 properties in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Dating from the 1840s through to today, they include prints, albums, cased objects, negatives, slides and photographic equipment. The in-situ nature of the collections sets them apart in the UK, offering rich opportunities to explore the social, cultural, political and economic aspects of photography.

This role, initially offered on a two-year fixed-term basis, is focused on enhancing the Trust's catalogue for the photography collections.

Are you excited by the prospect of new research, creating national connections and improving public access? The photography collections at the Trust are significantly under-researched and under-recognised. This role offers a rare opportunity to someone with a background in photography and a good sense of initiative.

We are offering two 2-year fixed-term contracts. Each will be part-time, working three days (22.5 hours) per week. Salary £27,735 pro rata

See more and apply: https://careers.nationaltrust.org.uk/OA_HTML/a/#/vacancy-detail/88505

You will work as a research assistant on a Paul Mellon funded project conducted by the National Trust and the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.  Your primary role will responsibility for co-ordinating a number of workshops involving academics and museum professionals, which are intended to explore approaches to the extensive photographic collections of the National Trust. In consultation with the Trust’s newly appointed curator of photographs and a Birkbeck Professor who is leading the project, you will help plan and organise a series of day-long workshops. You will correspond with participants and assume responsibility for the practical organisation of these events.

You will be based at the National Trust’s office in Grosvenor Gardens, London and will liaise between project personnel and communicate with curators and academics.

The post offers an excellent opportunity to work with the National Trust, gaining experience in the museum and heritage sector and involvement in an innovative research project in the history of photography.

You will have experience undertaking research in a related field and excellent organisation and communication skills. You will be capable of working both as part of a team and in a self-directed fashion; and be confident using standard IT systems and learning to use custom internal databases.

Desirable: A relevant knowledge of history of photography would be a distinct advantage as would familiarity with the National Trust and the wider heritage sector.

Remuneration 

Grade 6 of the College's London Pay Scale which is £33,836 rising to £38,594, per annum pro rata.

The salary quoted will be pro-rata for this part time post and is on the College's London Pay Scale which includes a consolidated Weighting/Allowance which applies only to staff whose normal contractual place of work is in the Greater London area.

Enquiries 

If you would like to know more about the role please click on apply below or contact Steve Edwards, Professor of History and Theory of Photography, via email: stephen.edwards@bbk.ac.uk.

Read more here: https://cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/research-assistant-history-of-photography-410027.html

In response to the exhibitions presented in the Photography Season at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, this conference will address the politics of photography in terms of its relationship to consumerism, capital and culture. The conference will include presentations from artists, theorists, historians and curators who will look at art and photography in terms of its economics, the art market, class structures, consumerism and commodity culture. The full list of confirmed speakers includes Julian Sander, Hilde Van Gelder, Russell Roberts, Amak Mahmoodian, Carey Young and Jean Wainwright.

24 January, 1000-1700
Cardiff: National Museum
See more here: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/10967/Photography-Conference-Capital-ConsumerismCulture/

Image: Body Techniques (after A Line in Ireland, Richard Long, 1974), 2007
© Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Professor Larry Schaaf will deliver the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group's 2020 Colin Ford Lecture providing a fascinating insight to his work on The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné.

Schaaf has been examining and compiling information on Talbot images worldwide for more than four decades. Beginning in 2014, with the backing of the William T Hillman Foundation, the Bodleian Libraries undertook converting these private databases into a public resource.  So far, images and data on more than 16,000 photographs have been made freely available on the website.  These allow individual researchers to pursue their own questions and draw their own conclusions.

Tickets are free, but seats are limited and booking is essential.

Weston Library Lecture Theatre
Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BG

Doors open 1730, event 1800-2000. 

Find out more here: https://rps.org/schaaf 

Image: © Mike Robinson. Daguerreotype portrait of Larry J. Schaaf.

A new blog by Jamie Carstairs who manages the Historical Photographs of China project draws attention to Charles F Moore, who was born in Manchester, photographed in China and married a local Chinese woman.  He was a member of the London Amateur Photographic Association. Some of his surviving negatives are held in collections in Canada. 

The blog can be read here: http://visualisingchina.net/blog/2019/12/05/charles-frederick-moore-1837-1916-a-photographer-in-china/

There is further biographical information on Moore here: https://www.hpcbristol.net/photographer/moore-charles-frederick 

Image: Fort Chapu, Zhapu, north Zhejiang, c.1870. Photograph by Charles Frederick Moore. HPC ref: Bo01-044.

The exhibition Pages from Photographic History is running at the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre a the Hermitage, St Petersburg. It acquaints visitors with the most important stages in the development of photography and touches on the technical, documentary and artistic sides of its evolution.

The exhibition is devoted to the 180th anniversary of the official invention of photography. More than 70 exhibits, the majority of which are going on display for the first time, tell about the historical development of photographic processes from the 1840s through to the 1910s – the period of the most intensive technical experimentation and creative exploration.

The items included in the exhibition demonstrate the variety of photographic techniques, including both unusual ones – pictures on calico and on porcelain – and others that were fairly popular in their time but are rarely found today in Russian museum collections – the tintype (also known as ferrotype), ambrotype and cyanotype.

Visitors will be able to acquaint themselves with a precursor of photography – the Physionotrace, a means of producing portraits using a special optical device that was exceptionally popular in the late 18th century. It is possible to compare the appearance of likenesses created by that means with the first photographic portraits – daguerreotypes, made on copper plates coated with silver and named after their inventor, Louis Daguerre. It should be noted that the State Hermitage’s collection of daguerreotypes is one of the world’s finest with regard to the state of preservation.

Following the invention of the daguerreotype, the next advance that shaped the further development of photography was the introduction of the negative-positive process of obtaining images. It was proposed by the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot and became known as the talbotype or calotype. Original prints on salted paper – a Portrait of a Woman by an unknown photographer and Cedar of Lebanon by Ernest Benecke – clearly indicate the shortcomings inherent in that early technique.

The variety of genres that arose in the first 30 years of the existence of photography can be appreciated in pictures made by both Russian and foreign practitioners. The genre that was most popular and most in demand was the portrait: the exhibition presents the most common portrait formats, such as the carte de visite or larger cabinet card, and rarer ones, for instance the mignon.

A separate theme within the exhibition is formed by photographs of works of art – photographic reproductions, one of the chief aims in the creation of which was the desire to learn how to convey and preserve the original colours. The display includes one of the earliest colour images of this sort made by the French photographer Léon Vidal. The level of skill and training of museum photographers of that period can be judged from the works of Feodor Nikolayevsky, the first official photographer of the Imperial Hermitage.

After starting off as a means of precisely recording the world, photography gradually evolved its own artistic language and became an independent art form. That aspect is represented by such masters of artistic photography as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Jan Bulgak and Vasily Sokornov.

At the turn of the 20th century, the genre of photographic reportage developed apace. All the fleeting and unusual events of the day became the object of the fixed attention of photojournalists. Sports competitions, natural disasters, the incidents of city life are shown in pictures taken by photographers in both this country and Europe. In Russia the founding father of reportage photography is justly considered to be the St Petersburg photographer Karl Bulla. “I shoot anywhere and everywhere, under any conditions” – the motto of this pioneer became a slogan for all subsequent generations of photojournalists.

The appearance of new light-sensitive materials and the shift to mass production of them in factories, as well as the invention of lightweight portable cameras, made photography accessible to an extensive body of amateurs. Contemporaries described those enthusiasts’ tendency to photograph everything that caught their eye with a great deal of irony, while horrified professionals debated the “epidemic of picture-taking”. The exhibition includes several amateur snaps, probably taken during the unknown photographer’s summer holiday.

By the last decade of the 19th century, photography had completely conquered the world as an inexpensive and readily available means of producing pictures. Methods of reproducing photographs in large numbers without loss of quality by printing press came into widespread use. An example of such high-standard output is provided by a phototype View of Reval.

The most democratic form of photographic image in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the picture postcard, which besides its immediate function also served as a means of advertising, propaganda or education depending on the nature of the image. The examples included in the display demonstrate the variety of subjects found on postcards.

The exhibition also includes several examples of cameras and optical devices that make it possible to trace the improvement of the optical and mechanical components of the photographic process. A Kodak Vest Pocket camera from the collection of technical devices in the Department of the History of Russian Culture allows visitors to judge how convenient and refined cameras had become by the end of the period.

The exhibition curators are Natalia Yuryevna Avetian, senior researcher and keeper of the photography fund in the State Hermitage’s Department of the History of Russian Culture, and Irina Olegovna Terentyeva, researcher and keeper of the photography fund in the same department. An important part of the preparation of the exhibits for display was the making of individual mounts appropriate to the characteristics of each print. This work was carried out by the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Photographic Materials, headed by Tatyana Anatolyevna Sayatina.

Admission is by free entrance tickets, during the opening hours of The Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre (tickets must be purchased at the museum ticket offices).

More information here.

Numerous references to travelling photographers and mobile studios are sprinkled throughout the literature dedicated to photography. Robert Taft refers to photographic studios on board ships that sailed American rivers in his book Photography and the American Scene (Taft, 1938, p. 65-67). He recounts an undated anecdote about a confrontation between an ambulant daguerreotypist and villagers dissatisfied with a portrait: the crowd ended up sending his photographic van and all its content flying. In 1858, the critic Ernest Lacan considers ambulant photographers to be at the bottom of the social ladder (Lacan, 1858, p. 77). In the journal La Lumière, he does not hesitate to designate them as “street entertainers of photography”. Two years later, a statistical survey about photographic industry in Paris indicates that the largest studios regularly sent photographic operators on missions abroad but no figures about ambulant photography are provided (Chambre de commerce, 1864). Finally, in 1984, Ann Parker and Avon Neal reveal through their study that ambulant photographers and mobile studios in Guatemala were still an active profession at the end of the 20th century (Parker & Neal, 1984). What did such mobile studios look like precisely? How many were they, depending on periods and places? To what extent do they invite us to rethink photography practice from a material and social perspective?

By a “mobile” studio, we mean a (reduced or complex) device, which is portable and allows an integrated outdoor practice of photography, outside both the studio and the laboratory, combining all necessary steps to make photographs (from the preparation to the development of the medium, and sometimes to the dissemination and the sale of the final image). The overlooked history of photographic mobility may be considered through this material specificity that distinguishes it from the history of outdoor photographers and modern photo-reporters.

The mobility of photographers outside the studio has been largely overlooked. Reasons for this are numerous (lack of data, lack of recognition notably) and have played in favor of the studio itself. Extensively studied, the photographer’s studio is now an integral part of our collective imaginary. It is the space where the photographer set himself up as a creator (Cartier-Bresson, 2012). However, the history of photographic mobility, just like the history of studio photography, started with the birth of photography and has been continued alongside sedentary practices.

In the 1970s, Susan Sontag, did not hesitate to associate imperialism with the spectacular expansion of photography. A short time later, the series “Early Photography in…” published since 1977 by the journal History of Photography, as well as the “world” histories of the 80s fostered more detailed investigations into the way photography has spread out across the world and has taken root in specific regions. Examples include the studies of Terry Bennett on Japan (2006) and China (2009, 2010, 2013) and those of Erika Nimis and Marian Nur Goni on Africa (Fotota blog, 2013-). Numerous research programs and publications currently address the effect of exile and migration on photographers and their pictures. They define photographers as “contact zones” (Hannoosh, 2016) and photography as “the ultimate diasporic medium” (Dogramaci & Roth, 2019), highlighting the nomadic quality of both the producer and the images.

To inquire the history of mobile studios and ambulant photographers today, means to join these discussions. That is to adopt a transnational logic and to take into consideration flows of people and goods. This issue provides another opportunity to study the local and interior mobility (from town to town, the relationship between cities and countryside) as well as worldwide mobility. Simultaneously, it invites us to investigate the social history of photography and the archetype of the ambulant photographer. Indeed, the category “ambulant photographers” is frequently associated with small trades as well as with urban or rural “popular” practices linked to trades and markets (operators of ferrotypes, tintypes, painted canvases and instant prints for instance). The ambulant photographer as depicted through books, movies, press articles, is often a destitute person: “He appears to us as a poor suffering being, this Kor, ambulant photographer, fairground artist who travelled from town to town” (Claretie, 1912, p.5). However, exactly like the idea of popular photography, the representation and the status of ambulant photographers deserves to be qualified and refined. Even more so, due to the recent studies about worker mobility and transmission of traditional skills in modern times. Each of them invites us to rethink sedentary photographic practices in the light of other ambulant professions (engineer, trader, peddler, qualified craftsman, worker, etc.) and to question the hierarchy between contractual operators and self-employed photographers .

The ambulant photographer is often presented as the plebeian version of the studio photographer, but the pictures he produces participate significantly in another “photographic culture”, both obscure and archaic, modest and genuine, resistant to technological changes as exemplified by the mythologized figure of Eugène Atget. In an enlightening article about ambulant photographers, Ilsen About emphasized the importance of such professions in “the acculturation of contemporary societies to the daily practice of photographic image” and to “the slow and lasting diffusion of visual objects in material culture” (About, 2015). This history of material culture (and thus, of the way contemporary societies relate to images) should reflexively consider photography itself and think about the terms and conditions of photographic practices that flourished outside the studio.

The second issue of the journal Photographica therefore intends to explore both a material and a visual history of the mobile studio as well as to sketch out an ethnography of ambulant operators. Special attention will be paid to devices and uses of studios “beyond the walls”. The reflection is not limited to the genre of portrait but is open to all aspects of mobile studios. Contributors are welcome to question photographic mobility from different perspectives and to address work, material and practice issues more generally.

Moreover, there will be special consideration of ambulant photographers’ living conditions as well as of the historicization and the geographization of the ‘mobile studio’ phenomenon; a phenomenon subjected to many variations, as attested by the participation of casual or professional photographers, explorers, excursionists and scientists.

Bibliographical references

• About, I. (2015). Les photographes ambulants. Techniques & Culture, 2 (64), 240-243.
• Aprile, S. (2016). Déposer un brevet sans déposer les armes ? Exilés et inventeurs français durant le Second Empire. Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle, 2 (53), 79-96.
• Brice, C. et Diaz, D. (dir.). (2016). Mobilités, savoir-faire et innovations. Revue d’histoire du XIX^e siècle, 53 (2), 228.
• Bouillon, M.-E. (2018). Photographes et opérateurs. Le travail des Neurdein frères (1863-1918). Revue Mil Neuf Cent, 1 (36), 95-114.
• Chambre du commerce (1864). Statistiques de l’industrie à Paris résultant de l’enquête faite par la Chambre de commerce pour l’année 1860. Paris, France: Chambre de commerce.
• Claretie, G. (1912, 26 avril). Gazette des tribunaux. Cour d’assise de l’Eure : un drame au théâtre. Le Figaro,
• Dogramaci, B. et Roth, H. (dir.). (2019). Nomadic Camera. Fotografie, Exil, Migration. Fotogeschichte, 39 (151).
• Hannoosh, M. (2016). Practices of Photography: circulation and mobility in the nineteenth-century mediterranean. History of Photography, 40 (1), 3-27.
• Lacan, E. (1858, 15 mai). Les saltimbanques de la photographie. La Lumière, (20).
• Miller, S. (1987). Itinerant Photographer: Corpus Christi 1934. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
• Parker, A. et Neal, A. (1984). Los Ambulantes, The itinerant photographers of Guatemala, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Rosenblum, R. (1984). A world History of Photography. New York, NY: Abbeville Press.
• Rosenblum, R. (1996). Une histoire mondiale de la photographie. Paris, France: Abbeville Press.
• Sagne, J. (1984) L’atelier du photographe (1840-1940), Paris: Presses de la Renaissance.
• Taft, R. (1938). Photography and the American Scene—A Social History 1839–1889, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
• Vitis, Ch. de. (1907, 4 avril). Cœur d’Enfant. 2^e Les miséreux. VI. Photographies ambulants. L’Ouest-Éclair, 2.

Exhibitions and exhibition catalogues

• Cartier-Bresson, A. (2012). Dans l’atelier du photographe, Paris, France: Paris musées.
• Desveaux, D., Cuesta, S. et Reynaud, F. (dir.). (2016). Dans l’atelier. L’artiste photographié, d’Ingres à Jeff Koons, Paris, France: Paris musées.
• Eskildsen, U. (dir.). (2008) Street & Studio: an urban history of photography, Londres, Royaume-Uni: Tate publ..
• A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio, MoMA, 2014.
• In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa, MET, NY, 2015-2016.

Article proposals may cover the following topics:

-sources and archives related to the history of mobile studio or ambulant photographers

-legislation governing the work of ambulant photographers

-materials and materiality of mobile studios: horse-drawn caravan, wagon, tents, backpacks, shacks, portable studio, photographic vans’ design, interior furnishing, setting, etc.

-stakes and usages of mobile studios: portraits; wildlife pictures; trade fair, cabaret and photography; scientific documentation (from ethnological to speleological expeditions)

-sociology and gender of ambulant photography: the dichotomy between studio photographer and ambulant photographer, the role of women in the history of this practice

-hierarchy between contractual operators and self-employed photographers

Proposals will be peer-reviewed.

They may be accepted, accepted with amendments, or refused.

Calendar

Out of the studio. Photographers and mobile studios

Deadline to submit article proposals: 15^th of February 2020

Committee response date: first half of Mars 2020

Publication date of Photographica (n^o 2): November 2020

Submission guidelines

Articles may be written in French or in English.

The should not exceed 30 000 characters, spaces included

Authors should provide an abstract of their article (1000 words) and key-words (from 5 to 10).

Illustrations of 300 dpi with their complete caption and credits may be associated (from 10 to 15).

Each image should be inserted in the text at the desired place.

For any inquiry about reproduction rights for images, please contact redaction@photographica-revue.fr

Please, write your name, email address, occupation and institutional affiliation (university and laboratory) as well as a short bio-bibliography in a document distinct from your proposal.

Articles should be sent to: redaction@photographica-revue.fr

For any inquiries, please contact: contact@photographica-revue.fr

BPH has just learnt of the death of Bill Barnes, the film history and collector who died in July at the age of 99 years. Barnes, along with his twin brother John, who died in 2008, was a collector and historian of early British cinema. For a time their outstanding collection was on display as as the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives. John managed the collection and Bill continued to source objects for it at fairs and auctions around the country.

The museum closed and some of the collection ended up in Turin with the British material going to Hove Museum. John produced the five-volume The Beginnings of Cinema in England 1894-1901, although it was very much a joint effort. 

Bill continued to live in London until his death. 

See more here: http://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/news/bill-barnes-1920-2019/ 

Just over a year since its acquisition, a taster of the vast MacKinnon Collection will be exhibited at the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG). The two institutions joined forces to purchase the collection — made up of more than 14,000 photographs dating from the 1840s to the mid-20th century in Scotland — in May last year, with the help of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Scottish Government and Art Fund.

Now people will be able to view highlights from the collection at concurrent exhibitions  'At the Water's Edge' at the National Library, and 'Scotland's Photograph Album' at the Portrait Gallery.

National Librarian Dr John Scally said: 'Scotland has a unique relationship with photography which dates back to the work of the early pioneers such as Hill and Adamson. The exhibition is a glimpse into MacKinnon's wider collection, which consists of more than 14,000 pictures, but I am excited to share a selection of them as we believe they are truly Scotland's photograph album.I am confident that every Scot will feel a connection with these wonderful photographs and we look forward to sharing them with the public over the coming months.'

National Galleries of Scotland, Director General Sir John Leighton, said: 'Scotland's Photograph Album: The MacKinnon Collection' allows audiences the chance to be transported back to a century of change and growth. It is not only a fascinating look at historical Scottish life that sits just on the edge of living memory, but also an important showcase of the innovative progression of photography in Scotland.'

The MacKinnon Collection was put together by collector Murray MacKinnon, who established a successful chain of film-processing stores in the 1980s, starting from his pharmacy in Dyce, near Aberdeen. The collection covers an expansive range of subjects — including family portraits, working life, street scenes, sporting pursuits, working life, transport, landscapes and cityscapes. Until last year, it was estimated to be one of the last great collections of Scottish photography still in private hands.

Taking inspiration from VisitScotland's Year of Coasts and Waters for 2020, the National Library's 'At the Water's Edge' reflects on this theme, with a strong emphasis on social history and the changing nature of Scotland's coastal communities.

Highlights include:

• Photographs by George Washington Wilson, capturing working life and remote landscapes in Orkney and St Kilda in the 1870s
• Some of the earliest known images of fishing communities in Aberdeen and Edinburgh dating from the 1870s onwards.

'At the Water's Edge' at the National Library of Scotland, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, and 'Scotland's Photograph Album' at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh run from Saturday 16 November until Sunday 16 February 2020. Admission is free.

See: https://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/treasures/mackinnon/ and https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/scotlands-photograph-album-mackinnon-collection

In the early 19th century, the ideas of reform pedagogues such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) gave rise to a didactic turn towards the visual that criticized an exclusive textual mediation of knowledge through books and lectures (Depaepe 1999). The pedagogues and policymakers who strove for a more child-centred approach to teaching were soon joined by media producers and marketers in their aim to transform the classroom into a multimodal space for learning.

By the late 19th century, photographic images had taken up an important role in facilitating this visual turn in educational theory and practice. They were seen as direct representations of reality, ‘evidence of a novel kind’ and, above all, as visual ‘facts’. (Nelson 2000: 427). From the turn of the 20^th century onwards, teachers were increasingly pressured to incorporate high-profile media technologies such as stereoscopes, lantern projectors, epi(dia)scopes and film projectors into their lessons (Cuban 1986). The accuracy of photographic images and the flawless projections enabled by these new technologies inaugurated new regimes of vision and sensoriality that equated light with truth and vision with knowledge (Eisenhower 2006). At the same time, projection-aided lessons provided powerful commentaries on what was shown, conditioning pupils’ practices of looking and giving rise to particular ways they were supposed to understand the world (Good 2019).We propose a symposium engaging with educational uses of light projection from diverse perspectives. We aim to explore this topic in relation to the material and practical aspects of visual teaching and the various regimes of vision that are engendered by the use of visual media like stereographic photographs, lantern projection, the episcope or film projection. Papers could center on a variety of aspects of projection media in educational contexts, ranging from topics like entertaining uses of the magic lantern to the specific modes of scientific vision (Daston & Galison 2007), taught in educational contexts varying from pre-school to secondary or higher education.

Please send your abstract (max. 300 words including possible references) and a short biographical note of the author(s) (max. 150 words) to Nelleke Teughels (nelleke.teughels@kuleuven.be ) no later than 11 December 2019.

Teaching science with light projection: regimes of vision in the classroom, 1880-1940 at the
European Society for the History of Science conference in Bologna, 31 August-3 September 2020.

http://www.eshs.org/

Organizers: Nelleke Teughels and Wouter Egelmeers

References 

Cuban, Larry. Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. New York: Columbia universityTeachers college press, 1986.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books; Distributed by the MIT Press.

Depaepe, Marc. Order in Progress: Everyday Educational Practice in Primary Schools, Belgium, 1880 - 1970. Studia Paedagogica. N. S. 29. Leuven: university press, 2000.

Eisenhauer, Jennifer F. (2006) Next Slide Please: The Magical, Scientific, and Corporate Discourses of Visual Projection Technologies, Studies in Art Education, 47:3, 198-214, DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2006.11650082

Nelson, Robert S. “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Critical Inquiry 26, nr. 3 (2000): 414–434.

The current issue of Source magazine has a number of articles of interest to British photographic history. Sarah Macdonald, Heritage Collections Manager at the Royal Horticultural Society, looks at the RHS's photography collections. It includes over 400 cartes of horticulturalists.

Elsewhere, Richard West provides a useful overview and list of the blue heritage plaques of photography interest. However, his comment that the RPS's involvement in a scheme with Olympus in the 1990s was 'self-promotion' misses the point that the RPS and its membership have been active and integral to photographic history since 1853 and there is an overlapping of interests. The scheme commemorated individuals who would have otherwise been passed by. The RPS hardly needs to 'burnish' its place in history.

There are a number of plaques pending and West's list will be added to over the next couple of years. 

Source magazine is available at various photography galleries and outlets, including the RPS in Bristol.

See: www.source.ie

Hans Rooseboom writes... On behalf of Mattie Boom I would like to bring your attention to our current research opportunities within the Rijksmuseum Fellowship Programme – in particular the new Terra Foundation Fellowship in American Photography.

Currently, we are preparing a major exhibition of American photographs—from the birth of the medium in 1839 to the present—in a wider context. Candidates are invited to submit a research proposal that links to the themes that were chosen for the upcoming exhibition: American landscapes, portraits, the private use of photographs, the application of photography in advertisement, fashion, politics, (decorative) utensils, and a number of social themes – from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement and from poverty to the experience of wars in the Homeland, as well as the relation of photography to modern art (especially after World War II).

We would be very grateful if you could forward the call for applications to potential candidates who, in your opinion, would be excellent candidates for this opportunity. The deadline for applications is 19 January 2020, and all Fellowships will start on 1 September 2020.

You can find all further details, current fellowship projects and eligibility requirements here:

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/fellowships

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/fellowships/terra-foundation-fellowship

A forgotten cache of 13,000 Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) pictures has been rediscovered in an attic and is being "preserved for posterity". The photos were found earlier this year in a large dusty pile in the organisation's headquarters in Poole, Dorset. Work has been started to preserve the pictures, the earliest of which are from the 1920s, and digitise the whole collection.

See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50320140

Terry O’Neill, the photographer who chronicled London’s 1960s culture by capturing the celebrities and public figures who defined the era, has died aged 81.

O’Neill, who was awarded a CBE last month for services to photography and was known for his work with the likes of Frank Sinatra, David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, died at home on Saturday night after a long illness, his agency said. He had prostate cancer.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/nov/17/photographer-of-swinging-60s-terry-oneill-dies-aged-81

Gallery of images: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2019/nov/17/photographer-terry-oneill-a-life-in-pictures

Image: Misan Harriman / Iconic Images / https://iconicimages.net

International photographer, designer and lecturer Janine Freeston discusses colour photography in Britain before the First World War and the beautiful Autochromes of Lionel de Rothschild. Janine is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and currently undertaking a PhD on early colour photography at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Early colour photographyc and the Rothschild autochromes
Sunday 24 November
14:30 - 16:00
£10, including refreshment
Bookings: http://www.visitgunnersbury.org/early-colour-photography-the-rothschild-autochromes

Visit The Forgotten Showman and discover the man who invented British cinema.

National Science+Media Museum
Bradford
Curated by Toni Booth
22 November 2019 - 29 March 2020
See more here.

This exhibition celebrates an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired and shared by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. The photographs were amassed by collector Murray MacKinnon and represent Scottish life and identity from the 1840s through the 1940s – a century of dramatic transformation and innovation.

The chronicle of Scotland’s culture during the mid-19th to early 20th centuries is inseparable from its leading role in the early history of photography itself. Many of the first practitioners and visionaries who impelled the medium forward were based in Scotland or were inspired by Scottish subjects. The exhibition includes photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Annan, Roger Fenton, George Washington Wilson, and others who created stunning images of Scotland’s people and places during the 19th century and established precedents for photographers worldwide.

The photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983) and sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) first crossed paths during the Second World War, when they both created images of civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. Taking these acclaimed ‘shelter pictures’ as a starting point, this major exhibition will trace for the first time the parallel and intersecting careers of these two important artists of the 20^th century.

Organised in partnership with the Yale Center for British Art, the exhibition will bring together over 200 works including major sculptures, iconic photographs, drawings, little-known photo collages, unprinted negatives and rare original colour transparencies. Bill Brandt | Henry Moore will reveal the interdisciplinary range of these two artists, exploring how they both responded creatively to the British landscape and communities during the turbulent times in which they lived.

The exhibition will open with the moment the artists met in 1942 when Brandt photographed Moore in his studio to accompany a 10-page spread in Lilliput magazine juxtaposing the two artists’ shelter pictures. Brandt was a regular contributor as a photojournalist to Lilliput, a magazine known for its innovative photographic features, and this issue was the first time the two artists’ work was shown side-by-side.

Both artists were often drawn to similar subjects - leading up to and during the Second Word War, there was a focus on ordinary people, the home and labour. Brandt’s bleakly evocative photographs of impoverished mining communities and families in the North of England taken in the late 1930s reflect social deprivation. Moore’s later sketches documenting the civilian war effort at his father’s colliery in his home-town of Castleford, although similar in theme, present a more optimistic view.

Sculptures such as the 1944 bronze Family Group show a connection between Moore’s shelter drawings and his depictions of family groups, a subject he often returned to in both sculptures and drawings. In the 1950s Moore made a series of works which used similar groupings of figures, poses and drapery as those seen in the shelter drawings, presenting the familial members as one body, melded together in bronze or in the grey wash of a drawing.

In contrast with the densely populated, often claustrophobic, urban subjects explored during the war, Brandt and Moore both later turned to nature and the light-filled open landscape as a primary source of inspiration. A significant section of the exhibition will look at both artists’ enduring interest in rock formations, geological artefacts, and megalithic sites, such as Stonehenge. Brandt’s photographs of Stonehenge will be presented alongside Moore’s lithographs of the same subject, examining how each artist chose to capture the enigmatic nature of the site.

This section of the exhibition will also explore the importance of found natural objects to the development of both artists’ later works, including a little-known relief sculpture by Brandt, made from pieces of flotsam he collected on the beach. Objects from Moore’s extensive collection of shells, pebbles and bones, which he kept in his studio as source materials will also be on display. These he sometimes collaged together with plasticine into small figurative sculptures, sometimes scaling them up into full-sized standing and reclining figures, such as Reclining Figure (Bone) 1975.

The exhibition will reveal the important relationship for both artists between 2D images and 3D objects. Moore will be presented as a sculptor and draftsman who made a serious commitment to photography both as a creative medium and a means of presenting his work. On display will be little-known photographs of his sculptures, drawn on and collaged together to develop new ideas for future sculpture. Brandt will be revealed as a photographer who looked to sculpture as a subject and as a way of considering nature, landscape, and the human body, as exemplified by a series of rare colour transparencies of sculptural rock formations on the beach.

Bill Brandt | Henry Moore will also examine the complicated relationship between pictures and objects, between ‘primary’ works of art and ‘secondary’ published images used as an important means of disseminating their work to a wide public, and the material nature of the printed photograph.

Simon Wallis, Director of The Hepworth Wakefield said: ‘We are delighted to be working with the Yale Center for British Art on this major exhibition that presents side-by-side for the first time, the work of Bill Brandt and Henry Moore. These two important artists, born only 10 years apart, were both commissioned by the UK government in the 1930s – Brandt as a photojournalist and Moore as a war artist – and subsequently supported by the British Council, developing significant reputations internationally. Both artists had a fascination and poetic sensibility for capturing the spirit of place and it is particularly poignant to be presenting this exhibition in West Yorkshire, where Henry Moore was born and grew up.’

The exhibition is organised by the Yale Center for British Art in partnership with The Hepworth Wakefield. It is accompanied by a major new book published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press. The exhibition will be shown at The Hepworth Wakefield: 7 February – 31 May 2020; and at the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven: 25 June – 13 September 2020; it will then tour to the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich: 22 November 2020 – 28 February 2021.

Bill Brandt | Henry Moore is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, Hiscox and The Hepworth Wakefield Contemporary Circle.

See: https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/bill-brandt-henry-moore/

Image: Bill Brandt, Nude, East Sussex Coast. Gelatin silver print, 1960 Bill Brandt Archive, London, © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive Ltd. / Photograph by Richard Caspole

Bristol Vintage Photograph Fair is a new event; offering for the first time in the West of England, an opportunity for collectors of early photography to meet the leading specialist vintage photograph dealers from the UK & Europe, and browse through an exceptional display of rare original photographs, documenting the first 150 years of Photography, from 1840 to 1990.

A wide ranging selection of fine prints, from Britain, Europe, Asia, the Americas, and around the world:

Portraiture, Social documentary, Military & Naval campaigns, Architectural studies, Travel, Topography & Landscape, Natural History and wildlife, and much more.

• Daguerreotypes & Ambrotypes,
• Calotypes, (Salt Prints)
• Albumen and Gelatine prints,
• Lantern slides,
• Cartes-de-visite & Cabinet print portraiture,
• Stereographs, Photographic Postcards etc.
• New, Secondhand, and Antiquarian Books on Photographers & the History of Photography.

Photographs offered for sale will be original vintage prints & images (no modern copies, facsimiles or reproductions allowed!)

Prices range from a few pounds, up to examples of some of the rarest and most valuable prints, produced by some of the greatest names in 19th and early 20th century photography.

See: http://www.bristolphotofair.uk/

The Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) and the International Centre for Sports History and Culture (ICSHC), de Montfort University, in collaboration with the National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT) are currently offering a PhD position on the photographic history of the Paralympic community in Britain.

Description of the project:

This project will examine the formation of the Paralympic community through the study of the NHPT photographic collections. This archive follows a community-centred approach. It reflects the daily life of disabled athletes, and not just the elite or mega-events, and aims to bring the photographs back to their regional communities through itinerant exhibitions, currently planned for Norfolk, Bradford, Manchester, Bath and London. By closely analysing the growing NHPT photographic collection, the student will identify how athletes, coaches, medical staff and families have used photography to define themselves as a ‘community’ and how they have used sport to frame and represent their disabilities. Understanding how the Paralympic community has appropriated medical images or the stories that Paralympians tell when seeing the NHPT photographs will challenge public perceptions about individuals with disabilities and will present new critical insights into the formation of sports communities, representations and disability.

The proposed CDA project will 1) determine the key role photographic representations have played in building the Paralympic community; 2) demonstrate the public impact and academic value of incorporating photographic collections into sport heritage projects and activities; 3) will consolidate the reputation of DMU as a leading institution in interdisciplinary arts and humanities research based on knowledge co-production with heritage institutions such as NHPT at regional and national levels.

The outcomes of this project will be the result of the co-creation of knowledge between the student, the academics at DMU and the NPHT. The PhD student will be key to maintain and enhance the NPHT Paralympic heritage by means of 1) contextualising the existing photographic collection, 2) compiling oral histories related to the Paralympic movement in the Midlands and 3) contributing to a Midlands version of the itinerant NPHT exhibition, which will take place in 2024. Unlike other NPHT exhibitions, the Midlands exhibit will be specifically designed for the region and will be the product of the M4C CDA, as the NPHT is not currently planning to tour the exhibition anywhere in the Midlands.

You can find more information about the project here: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/From-Stoke-Mandeville-1944-to-London-2012-DMU.pdf

Funding is available for 4 years (or 8 for part-time study), which includes fees for both UK and EU applicants and maintenance grant for UK applicants (where institutional funds allow, M4C may be able to offer a maintenance grant to EU applicants), plus opportunities for additional funding. You can find more information through the Midlands 4 cities portal: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/our-offer/

To apply, please consult the Midlands 4 Cities portal, where you can find all the information about the application process: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/apply/

Supervisors: Dr Beatriz Pichel (PHRC), Heather L Dichter (ICSHC) and Vicky Hope Walker (NPHT)

Deadline: 14 January 2020

For more information about the project, please contact Dr Beatriz Pichel: beatriz.pichel@dmu.ac.uk