The Pitt Rivers Museum has been awarded £70,500 in the latest round of DCMS/Wolfson funding awards, aimed at helping museums increase access to their collections.

This award will fund Engaging the Senses: Activating the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Photograph and Sound Collections through digital audio-visual technology. This project will improve visitors’ engagement and introduce elements of digital exploration and learning in the galleries for a variety of audiences. A digital interactive table top, listening station and interactive screen will display unique photographs and sound collections, improving the visitor experience for visitors with disabilities, local communities and the wider public.

In 2018 the Pitt Rivers Museum welcomed a record 502,000 visitors. These new audio-visual elements will allow the growing number of visitors to not only see the objects that are on display but also search the Museum’s digital collections, hear unique historical field recordings, and view film footage and photographs from around the world.

Welcoming news of the award, Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven, Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum,said: ‘We are very grateful to DCMS/Wolfson for this opportunity to allow our visitors to access the full breadth and depth of the collections, now also giving access to unique sound recordings, photography and film. The project will allow us to show many more fascinating historical and cultural facets of the collection.’

The Pitt Rivers Museum has just recently launched a new website with a wealth of information to enhance the visitor experience but also wants to bring new material into the Victorian age space of the Museum itself. The challenge of Engaging the Senses will be to sensitively show and share the unique material in the photo, film and sound collections without distracting from the objects on display.

Curator of Photograph Collections, Dr Chris Morton said: ‘This very welcome funding will bring collections such as the fabulous travel photographs of Sir Wilfred Thesiger, author of ‘Arabian Sands’ and ‘The Marsh Arabs, into the galleries for all our visitors to explore and enjoy, as well as the incredible collection of sound recordings of polyphonic singing made by Louis Sarno among the Bayaka of Central Africa. There is currently very little opportunity to show these collections to our visitors among the Museum’s dense displays, but the sensitive use of digital interactive technology in the historic museum space will allow us to enhance the visitor experience considerably.’

The DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund supports national and regional museums across England to improve the quality of displays, enhance exhibition spaces and public access, and increase awareness of their collections.

https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

Make exquisite rich brown images using this 19th century print technique.  Led by local photographic artist Catriona Gray who specialises in alternative processes, this short, three-hour workshop, will show you all you need to make your own exquisite and unique Van Dyke Brown prints.

You will learn how to coat your own photographic paper, and expose it to light using the photogram technique of placing objects directly onto the paper. There will also be the opportunity to make a photographic print from a digital negative (if you want to do this, please email your image in plenty of time before the workshop).

We encourage you to bring your own objects, leaves, flowers etc. along to the workshop, to make the images truly personal.

See more here.

Courses take place on 27 January, 21 February and 27 March, book here.

Edinburgh auction house Lyon and Turnbull is offering a group of photogenic drawings dating from May 1839 in its forthcoming auction of books and photography. The group are believed to have been made by William Thomas Salvin of Croxdale Hall, County Durham. They are estimated at £2000-3000. 

The catalogue description is below: 

[COUNTY DURHAM] PHOTOGENIC DRAWINGS, BY WILLIAM THOMAS SALVIN (1767-1842) OR WILLIAM THOMAS SALVIN (B. 1808)  OF CROXDALE HALL, COUNTY DURHAM 

3 of feathers, c. 108 X 174mm., annotated on verso, "Magpie feathers May 1839 W. Salvin" and "W. Salvin, May 15, 1839"; 4 of plants, from 75 x 105mm. to 175 x 105mm., annotated on versos in pencil "April 1839, W. Salvin", "May 1839. W. Salvin" (x 2) "[?] from High [-]oile, Salvin, 1829", one of the armorial bookplate of W.T Salvin Esq., annotated "May 16th 1839, W. Salvin", & 3 totally faded; all somewhat faded, one creased
Note: These must be amongst the earliest "photogenic drawings" produced in Co. Durham. First conceived in England by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1834, photogenic drawing is the first photographic process capable of producing negative images on paper. The inventor did not publicize his experiments until the Daguerreotype was introduced in January 1839. The first photogenic drawings were produced of flat objects (plants, fabrics, drawings or manuscripts, etc.), being placed directly on light sensitive paper, following the principle of a photogram. Talbot had presented his discoveries of photogenic drawing to the Royal Society in January and February 1839, and it is therefore likely that William Thomas Salvin (1767-1842) or his son, also William Thomas Salvin (b. 1808) was present at Talbot's Royal Society lecture and was inspired by it to make some of his own photogenic drawings in May 1839.

See more here.

Alexander Lamont Henderson (1838-1907) was a photographer who was distinguished for his services by Queen Victoria of Britain and a member of the Royal Photographic Society. The information related to his life and work is poor as his "royal" images were destroyed after the death of Queen Victoria and his "commercial" work which was donated to the library of the London Guildhall Museum in 1907 was destroyed in 1940's bombing. A set of what he himself called "Holiday snaps" could possibly be the only part of his work that is saved nowadays. It consists of photographs taken between 1884 and 1906 during his trips in Mediterranean countries.

In 1884, Queen Victoria awarded him with a Royal Warrant. This permitted him to depict moments from the everyday life of the royal family and was also responsible for printing portraits of members of the British royal court on porcelain plaques destined to be mounted on jewellery.

After the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Henderson retired. It was then that he made a series of photographic tours in countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, and Australia. Upon his return to London, he turned the negatives produced on his trips into lantern slides and presented a series of these pictures during special projection events called ‘Lantern Lectures’ on the occasion of the annual exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society in London.

What makes his Greece body of work so special is that his camera did not follow the iconographic stereotypes of the time and disregarded the systematic recording of ancient monuments.

In addition to panoramic views of Athens, showing newly built neoclassical mansions, Henderson recorded snapshots of the social and everyday life of the city with images of street vendors being particularly prominent.

The views from the royal palaces of Athens and Tatoi are of particular interest, as they record for the first time their original interior decoration. Furthermore, the photographs from the halls of the National Archaeological Museum and from the first permanent exhibition of the National Historical Museum in the main building of the National Technical University of Athens provide important information on museum displays of the time. Leaving the confines of the city of Athens, Henderson toured Faliro and the port of Piraeus, where he captured unique snapshots of vibrant everyday life. His Greek tour concluded with a short visit to Chania and Patras.

In spite of their limited number, his photographs distinguished themselves by the variety of their subject matter, their defined composition and their outstanding chemical treatment; they clearly demonstrate the work of an excellent professional photographer rather than that of a tourist finding himself equipped with a camera in early 20th century Greece. In total, they constitute a valuable treasure from which unique information about the history and the physiognomy of our country can be drawn.

Henderson died in 1907 and his photographic work was donated to the London Guildhall Museum, which unfortunately was destroyed during the Second World War when the German Air Force bombed London causing major damage. A small portion of Henderson’s work, indicated as ‘Holiday Snaps’, was discovered in the family house and was preserved by the photographer’s son-in-law, William Henderson Gray. This set, probably the only body of Henderson’s work that survived the Blitz, included about 4,000 subjects, produced mostly during the trips he made in the latter years of his life. Among them were the 86 glass lantern slides held today in the Photographic Archives of the Benaki Museum. For the exhibition, the material was processed and part of it was digitally printed.

Guided tours to the exhibition will be carried out by the exhibition curator Aliki Tsirgialou who will attempt to trace Alexander Lamont Henderson’s travels in Greece.

For more information go to @TheBenakiMuseum on Instagram or search #HendersonHolidaySnapsBM

See more here: https://www.benaki.gr/index.php?option=com_events&view=event&id=5752&Itemid=559&lang=en 

#HendersonHolidaySnapsBM

Opening on 30 January, 2019 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey presents masterpieces of early 19th-century photography by one of its unsung pioneers. A trailblazer of the newly invented daguerreotype process, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–1892) travelled throughout the Eastern Mediterranean from 1842 to 1845, producing more than one thousand daguerreotypes - the largest known extant group from this period and the earliest surviving photographs of Greece, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Jerusalem, and among the first depicting Italy.

Featuring approximately 120 of his daguerreotypes, supplemented by examples of his graphic work—watercolors, paintings, and his lithographically illustrated publications—the exhibition will be the first in the United States devoted to Girault, and the first to focus on his Mediterranean journey. Many of the sites depicted have been permanently altered by urban planning, climate change, or conflict.

The exhibition is made possible by the Arête Foundation/Betsy and Ed Cohen.

Additional support is provided by Jennifer S. and Philip F. Maritz and the Alfred Stieglitz Society.

It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Daguerreotypists in the early 1840s faced enormous technical challenges, especially in the desert, so daguerreotypes from these years are exceedingly rare. No other photographer of the period embarked on such a long excursion and successfully made a quantity of plates anywhere near Girault’s production of more than a thousand daguerreotypes. The resulting photographic campaign remains an unparalleled feat in its appearance, scope, scale, and ambition. Using an oversize, custom-made camera, he exposed more than one image on a single plate to create at least six different formats, including unexpected horizontal panoramas and narrow vertical compositions.

The fact that a collection of this size survived at all is extraordinary and attests to the achievement of an unheralded innovator working with unprecedented technology. The survival of this monumental and exemplary collection is also a result of Girault’s meticulous archival process—precocious at the time, even if today it seems commonplace. The artist stored his daguerreotypes in custom-built wood boxes; in addition, he carefully sorted, labeled, and dated the images so that he could retrieve them for future use, occasionally recording when he utilized them, for example, as the basis for a painting or published print. He also had them inventoried several times during his lifetime. In essence, he created the world’s oldest photographic archive.

“The exhibition reveals Girault as the originator of a thoroughly modern conception of photography, by which visual memories can be stored, retrieved, reassembled, and displayed,” stated Stephen C. Pinson, Curator, Department of Photographs. “At the same time, it is perhaps more important than ever to recognize that Girault was himself the product of a complex network of political, social, and historical forces that had far-reaching impact on the West’s relationship with the world he photographed.”

The exhibition presents a unique opportunity to experience these rarely seen works, as Girault never exhibited his daguerreotypes and died without direct heirs in 1892. In 1920, a distant relative, Charles de Simony, purchased Girault’s estate outside Langres, France, and discovered the photographs—labeled and carefully stored in their original wood boxes—in a storeroom of his  dilapidated villa. A handful of intrepid collectors and curators were henceforth aware of the collection, but its dramatic content and scope remained little-known to the world until 2003, when the first of several auctions of material drawn from the original archive was held.

Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey is curated by Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The catalogue is made possible by the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund.

The exhibition is featured on The Met website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via the hashtag #MonumentalJourney.

The University of Leeds and Leeds Film are partnering to offer a funded PhD to produce an analysis of the history of independent cinema exhibition in Leeds. This collaborative doctoral project seeks to break new ground by enabling a student to carry out an analysis on independent film exhibition in Leeds informed by both academic scholarship and practical experience of a series of regional film initiatives under the umbrella of Leeds Film.

Such an analysis will fill a significant gap in cultural memory within the city: despite Leeds’ link with film innovator Louis le Prince and early movie making, and despite currently having the largest number of DIY film exhibitions in the UK, very few discussions of film in Leeds appear in literature, academic or otherwise.

A comprehensive historical overview of independent film exhibition in Leeds constitutes the first aim of the PhD project, with a number of potential research questions providing a specific focus. 

Click here for more information. 

The Royal Collection contains a significant body of work which reveals the historical and contemporary importance of women photographers. Join Catlin Langford, Assistant Curator at the Royal Collection Trust, as she discusses key moments in photographic history, from the development of accessible camera technologies to the advent of colour photography, framed through the work of pioneering women photographers.

Book here: http://www.thelightbox.org.uk/Event/pioneering-women-photographers-in-the-royal-collection

Image: Detail from Mary Steen (1859-1939), Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia, Queen Louise of Denmark, Alexandra, Princes of Wales, Amaliensborg, May 1892, RCIN 2927326

Registration is opwn for the symposium Women, work and commerce in the creative industries, Britain, 1750-1950 which takes place on 7 and 9 February 2019 in London.

This two-day conference adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship that is deconstructing the male-dominated history of commercial and industrial artistic production. The programme will bring together current interdisciplinary perspectives on women’s experiences of work and the gendered dynamics of commerce in the creative industries in Britain between 1750 and 1950.

Keynote Speakers: Dr Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi (Bath Spa University), Dr Patricia Zakreski (University of Exeter) and Dr Jan Marsh (National Portrait Gallery)

Confirmed Speakers: Rachael Chambers (V&A), Isobel Cockburn (Independent Scholar), Barbara Cohen-Stratyner (Independent Scholar), Caroline Douglas (Royal College of Art), Sarah French (University of Sussex & Hastings Museum), Amy Goodwin (Norwich University of the Arts), Zoe Hendon (Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University), Ruth Hibbard (V&A), Johanna Holmes (RHUL, University of London), Catlin Langford (Royal Collection Trust), Rebecca Luffman (V&A), Michael Pritchard (Royal Photographic Society), Pamela Roberts (Independent Scholar), Benjamin Schneider (Merton College, University of Oxford), Christine Slobogin (Birkbeck, University of London), Deborah Sutherland (V&A), Rose Teanby (Independent Scholar), Katie Lloyd Thomas (Newcastle University), Helen Trompeteler (Royal Collection Trust), Grace Williams (Independent Scholar).

Day 1, Friday 8 February 2019: 10am – 5pm

Seminar Room 5, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL

Day 2, Saturday 9 February 2019: 9.30am – 5pm

Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, Marylebone, London W1B 2HT

Spaces are limited and early booking is recommended: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/women-work-and-commerce-in-the-creative-industries-britain-1750-1950-tickets-53903735524

Image detail: Image credit: Pen and watercolour caricature of art students in the original V&A paintings galleries by Florence Claxton, Great Britain, 1861 © Victora and Albert Museum.

One of the most famous nineteenth-century collaborations between a poet and a photographer has found a home at the University of St Andrews Special Collections.

Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems, 1875, photographically illustrated by Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the most celebrated women in the history of photography, will take pride of place as part of the University’s extensive photographic collection. It is believed to be the only copy in a Scottish collection. 

Tennyson is one of the most well-loved Victorian poets. Born in Lincoln in 1809, he published his first solo collection at 21 and his second collection in 1833. His second collection was met with such criticism that he did not publish again for ten years. His third collection, which included his seminal poem Ulysses, was received with more success.

In 1850 Tennyson published In Memoriam AHH. Dedicated to his late friend Arthur Hallam, it was a favourite of Queen Victoria, who said the book helped to comfort her after Prince Albert’sdeath. With Victoria’s patronage, Tennyson was acclaimed as the greatest poet of his day and was appointed Poet Laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth. Tennyson’s most famous works include Maud, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Crossing the Bar.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is one of the most celebrated women in the history of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, Cameron described her photographic subjects in the categories ‘Portraits’, ‘Madonna groups’, and ‘Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect’. Cameron was criticised for her unconventional techniques, but also celebrated for the beauty of her compositions and her conviction that photography was an art form.

Cameron’s close friendship with Tennyson resulted in the Poet Laureate choosing her services as a photographer to illustrate the proposed ‘people’s’ edition of Idylls of the King in 1874. Both lived in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, Cameron moved there in 1860 having visited Tennyson’s estate on the island. In the event, only three of her photographs were used and those were from woodcut copies. Tennyson encouraged her to fund the publication of two large-format albums with the full-size photographs tipped in and excerpts from his poems lithographed from her handwriting. The first volume appeared in December 1874 with Volume II published in 1875. The University has purchased a copy of Volume II, which contains thirteen albumen prints including a frontispiece portrait of Tennyson and text for the poems all printed in a facsimile of Cameron’s hand. The copy belonged to Dr Rolf S. Schultze (1902–67), Kodak’s research librarian and curator of the Kodak Museum in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also the honorary librarian for the Royal Photographic Society in London.

The acquisition of Idylls of the King greatly strengthens the University’s reputation as an important centre for the study of the history of photography and enhances our collection of photographically-illustrated books. The addition to the Special Collections of Idylls of the Kingaugments the University’s Tennyson collection which includes first editions of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and In Memoriam. The book has already been accessed by academics and there are exciting plans for using the book in research and teaching projects.

Gabriel Sewell, Head of Special Collections, University of St Andrews, said: “Idylls of the King is one of the most famous nineteenth-century collaborations between a poet and a photographer and a rare and invaluable source for the study of Tennyson’s poetry and of Victorian culture.

“St Andrews has one of the most significant collections of early photographic material in the UK. Idylls of the King is the jewel in the crown in our collection, cementing the University’s reputation as one of the foremost important centres for the study of the history of photography.”

The University of St Andrews Library is very grateful to have received the support of the Friends of the National Libraries to purchase a copy of Julia Margaret Cameron, Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems. Volume II (1875).

The Rijksmuseum’s curator of photography, Mattie Boom, has for the last few years been studying hundreds of photographs for her doctoral research into the emergence of amateur photography in the Netherlands. The results of her work will be on show from 15 February 2019 in Everyone a Photographer, an exhibition of more than 130 photographs, photograph albums and cameras that will take us back in time to the end of the 19th century.

The invention of small, easy-to-use cameras enabled amateurs to record important moments themselves for the first time. In Everyone a photographer, Boom shows how amateur photography brought about profound changes in visual culture; and how amateur photographs are the missing link in the history of photography.

Everyone a Photographer will run from 15 February-10 June 2019 at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The accompanying publication Everyone a Photographer. The Rise of Amateur Photography in the Netherlands, 1880-1910 has been made possible by Familie Van Heel Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds/Wertheimer Fonds and Marque Joosten & Eduard Planting Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds.

See more here: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions-expected/everyone-a-photographer

Image: Aan boord, Willem Frederik Piek, c.1892-93.

Welcome to 2019. During the forthcoming year BPH will continue to report on news, exhibitions, publications, jobs and events relevant to British photographic history. It now has over 3000 subscribers and more than 3000 blog posts have been made since 2007, plus, of course, events, forum posts and images. 

To kick off 2019 here are five events that we have to look forward to:

• New gallery space: Fotografiska opening, London, Spring 2019. See more here.
• Exhibition: The Mackinnon Collection, Edinburgh, from 15 November 2019. See more here.  
• Conference: The business of photography, Leicester, 17-19 June 2019. See more here. 
• Exhibition: Women in Photography: A History of British Trailblazers, Woking, from 30 January 2019. See more here.
• Symposium: Women, Work and Commerce: Women in the Creative Industries, London: 9-10 February 2019. See more here.

2019 also sees the bicentenary of the birth of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert which, because of their particular involvement with early British photography, will be of particular interest to photo-historians.

If you know of any other exhibitions, news, publications or conferences taking place and relevant to British photographic history please add them or provide details. 

Dr Michael Pritchard 

John Myers will discuss his new publication Looking at the Overlooked, which documents the claustrophobia of the suburban landscape in the 1970s, published by RRB Photobooks 2019.

Looking at the Overlooked presents Myers’ photographs of substations, shops, houses, televisions and landscapes without incident (boring photographs), which are now being compared with the photographic movement New Topographics.

Followed by questions from the floor and photobook signing.

See more and book here: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/events/john-myers/

Image: Television No. 4, 1973 © John Myers. Courtesy of RRB Photobooks.

An exciting opportunity has arisen to explore the popularity of immersive and interactive images in visual culture 1820-1920.  This Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) will be based on the extensive and unique resources of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and would make a substantial contribution to both its public mission and to our understanding of the nature and development of ‘immersive’ media.  Many new visual formats and optical devices in the period were characterised by their ‘immersive’ qualities: these could be experienced within the home or as part of a lecture, performance or fairground attraction. Circular and moving panoramas awed with enormous canvases; the diorama created illusionistic tableaux; stereographs beguiled with a 3D world, while the many varieties of peepshow promised a marvellously garish experience of patriotic battles and far-off places. If that was not enough, printed ephemera and toys, such as protean prints, mutoscopes and Kinora Viewers required an embodied spectator. ‘Immersion’ is often seen as a defining characteristic of contemporary digital media, but this CDA will elaborate a much longer genealogy.  Within the broad parameters of the research project, the student will have the freedom to define and shape the projects, and to decide which formats and media to focus on.

Key Research Questions:  What were the visual formats and devices offering an ‘immersive’ experience in the period 1820-1920? In what ways did they ‘immerse’ their viewers? How was ‘immersion’ characterised through a series of discourse and motifs prior to the invention of film? In what ways do contemporary devices and technologies remediate and build on a longer tradition? How does the BDC collection present an alternative history of immersive media through its games, novelty prints, devices, toys and everyday ephemera? How might such material be best exhibited by the BDC and other museums?
 
Research Collection: This CDA will augment and expand the work of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, located at the University of Exeter, which is home to one of the largest collections of material relating to the moving image in Britain. It is both an accredited public museum and a research facility and holds a collection of over 80,000 items. The collection includes artefacts dating from the seventeenth century to the present day, covering all aspects of cinema, pre-cinema and the history of the moving image. The collection is diverse but is united by an emphasis on the audience’s experience of the moving image. A key strength is its holdings of items relating to nineteenth-century moving, projected and 3D images, both in terms of devices, toys, pictorial media such as lantern slides, and printed ephemera. The collection, for example, contains 30 small peep shows and 70 peep show prints and vues d’optiques, as well as more than 1500 assorted stereoscope cards.

The BDC also has an excellent track record of enabling PhD scholarship and delivering Employability skills. This CDA would provide numerous value-added opportunities for the student to gain professional skills, training and experience; they would gain heritage and museum skills; contribute to a redisplay of the permanent galleries; curate a temporary exhibition based on the studentship; be trained in cataloguing and working with archival sources, including objects and printed ephemera.  There would also be opportunities to contribute to the Public Engagement programme of the museum.

Supervisory Team
Professor John Plunkett (Exeter), Professor Julia Thomas (Cardiff) and Dr Phil Wickham (BDC).  Plunkett is an expert on 19th c visual media and performance.  Thomas is an expert on Victorian illustration, material culture, and digital humanities.  Dr Phil Wickham, Lead Curator, will act in the role of supervisor for the BDC.

See more here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=3417

‘Business’ can have many meanings. In the most straightforward sense, it refers to the photographic marketplace, its industry and the commercial relations established among different agents. Some of these actors, such as studios and companies of the like of Kodak and Ilford, are specifically photographic and have featured prominently in histories of photography. But the photographic business also depends on other social, cultural and economic agents like chemical supply companies, image brokers, content providers, commissioning editors, advertising campaign managers and digitization officers, among others.

Especially since the beginning of the 21st century, historians have begun to pay attention to the broader implications of what one might call ‘the business of photography’. In this sense, it is not only about commerce and trade, but also about visual and material economies, where photography and the many worlds and people it affects directly or indirectly negotiate, define or transform social, cultural, political, scientific, and other ideological environments as well as values.

In this 7th annual conference of the PHRC, we invite 20-minute papers stretching the notion of ‘the business of photography’. While not neglecting the transformative role of photographic companies and that of photographers as businessmen and women, we encourage submissions that stretch our understanding of ‘business’ to the circulation of and the impact exerted by photographic images, objects and raw materials. We invite papers that think outside of the box, and address themes like:

• Photographic recycling
• The life of photographic raw materials
• Gender and photographic businesses
• The marketization of individual and collective identities
• Photographic image banks
• Photography in political and financial economies
• Photography in the heritage industry
• Photographs, photographers and algorithms

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to phrc@dmu.ac.uk no later than Friday, the 25th of January 2019.

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

Today we take pictures of anything we fancy on our phone. But in the early 1860s, the idea of portraying daily life using the long exposures and the temperamental wet-plate process of photography was not even imagined. To include people in a photographs, the subjects had to stay still for several minutes – something only achievable in a studio, or perhaps on the verandah of a home. Images of street life were pretty well impossible.

John Thomson arrived in Singapore to work with his brother William, a marine instrument maker with a photo service on the side. They made money from studio portraiture, but also made views to take back home. Working in Penang and Province Wellesley in 1862–63, Thomson realised that he could include the locals in situ with minimal staging. One of his most delightful images shows durian sellers (probably paid to stay still), an image that still evokes any outdoor market scene.

Thomson's photographs from The Straits were left behind when the Thomson Brothers studio closed and their glass plates has disappeared. Thomson's role as a pioneer in the new medium of documentary photography and photojournalism must be gleaned from the surviving small numbers of large prints and tiny cartes de visite studio and outdoor photographs, several of which are held in the Peranakan museum.

About the speaker
Gael Newton, former Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Australia, is an Australian curator and photohistorian specialising in 19th- and 20th-century Southeast Asia photographers. Newton contributed an essay to the forthcoming Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography catalogue, about Scottish professional photographer John Thomson (1837–1921), one of the first photographers working in Asia (1862–72).

See more here: https://www.peranakanmuseum.org.sg/whats-on/lectures/12dec2018_newton

The talk is part of a programme accompanying an exhibition Amek Gambar which presents over a century of photographs, tracing the emergence, adoption and evolution of photography in Southeast Asia.

The W W Winters Heritage Trust is hosting a talk titled Derby, the Royal Photographic Society and the history of photography on 12 December 2018. All welcome.

Contact W W Winters on 01332 345224 or office@wwwinter.co.uk to book a place.

Wednesday 12 December 2018, 6.30pm for a 7pm start.
Room OL1, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 1GB

This exhibition provides an overview of the rise of photography in Salisbury during the first decade or so of the medium’s existence up to the end of the First World War. While amateur photography began in and around the city during the 1840s, it was following the 1851 Great Exhibition that commercial photography took off in Salisbury.  The exhibition will examine the photographers of the 1850s and 1860s and the subject matter and photographic formats they exploited. The extensive collection of the Salisbury Museum and other local collections will provide examples of a wide range of images of Salisbury and the surrounding area.

The Origins of Photography in Salisbury 1839-1919
Saturday, 19 January-Saturday, 4 May, 2019

See: https://salisburymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/origins-photography-salisbury-1839-1919

Image: William Russell, High Street, 1853

The inaugural Colin Ford CBE lecture takes place at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on 14 December. Robert Gurbo will discuss the Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész (1894-1985).

Gurbo is the Curator of the André Kertész Estate in New York and has promised a fascinating first hand perspective on this celebrated photographer's life and work.

This lecture is supported by the André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation.

Tickets are £5 and can be booked here.

The Morton Charitable Trust has been funding fieldwork on the National Trust for Scotland’s photographic collections since 2014. In 2018–19, this work is raising the profile of these collections through research, articles, talks and dedicated projects, as well as digitising the Margaret Fay Shaw photographic archive of mid-20th-century Hebridean life.

The Scottish Society for the History of Photography website carries an article from Morton Photography Project Curator Ben Reiss who reviews some of the photographic collections that have been explored during the project.

Read Ben's article here. 

From 2019 to early 2020 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinbrugh, shows off highlights from an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired jointly by the NGS and the National Library of Scotland. Amassed by collector Murray MacKinnon, The MacKinnon Collection documents Scottish life and identity from the 1840s through to the 1940s and 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. The MacKinnon Collection is distinguished by the work of photographers who captured unprecedented images that brilliantly transport us back to a century of changing rural communities, growing cities and enduring historic sites, but also illuminate the faces and places that continue to affect our lives today.

THE MACKINNON COLLECTION
15 November 2019 – 16 February 2020
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#NGSMacKinnon

For more on the collection see: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/mackinnon-collection