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
An important album of forty-nine early Scottish portrait photographs dating from the 1850s is being offered by Sotheby's online until 10 December. The album of twenty salted paper and twenty-nine albumen prints, includes many members of the Royal Scottish Academy: Sir George Harvey (1806-1876), Horatio McCulloch (1806-1867), John Syme (1795-1861), Sir Daniel Macnee (1806-1882), Gourlay Steell (1819-1894), Samuel Bough (1822-1878), Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), ?James Drummond (1816-1877), and a photograph of John Graham Gilbert's 1854 portrait of Sir John Watson Gordon (1788-1864); together with portraits of the physician Sir Robert Christison (1797-1882), the geographer and cartographer Alexander Keith Johnson (1804-1871), and minister Rev. Dr Patrick Clason (1789-1867), and other unidentified portraits of men, women and children.
The album is estimated at £5000-7000 and was previously offered by Sotheby's in 1986.
See the full lot description and bid here.
Bellmans dedicated photography auction The Art of the Nude, a collection of 19th and 20th century works, will be hosted on thesaleroom.com as an online timed auction going live on the 29 November, with bidding closing on the 12 December. The digital catalogue of 182 lots, covers the spectrum of the photographic process, from the early albumen print through to the contemporary digital print. The sale also includes a selection of Travel, early Royalty photographs, and three Aspinal of London, red leather bound albums of manuscript captioned First World War press photographs. Auction estimates ranging from £80 to £12,000, offer the photography connoisseur or the novice collector a chance to own an influential image
The auction includes works by Irving Penn, Auguste Belloc, Nadar, Vincenzo Galdi, Wilhelm (Guigliemo) Pluschow, Brassai, Paul Caffell, Nick Ross, Dora Maar, Edward Steichen, Bert Stern, Max Caffell, Lewis Morley, Helmut Newton, Edward Sheriff Curtis, Herb Ritts, Malick Sidibe, Jan Saudek, Leif Erik Nygards, E.J. Bellocq, Norman Parkinson, Sebastiao Salgado, Thilly Weissenborn, Patrick Lichfield, Marcus Adams, John Everard, Frantisek Drtikol, Jean Straker, and Keith Cardwell
Highlights include:
These are just a small number of the photographs being put up for auction.
Denise Kelly, Bellmans photography specialist, comments: ‘Photographs are my passion, I have really enjoyed cataloguing this visually exciting sale. We’re looking forward to seeing the market’s response to this sale which we hope will attract buyers across the globe.’
See the online catalogue here.
Image: Alfred Cheney Johnston, Cutter Sisters, [Zeigfield Girls] ca. 1922
The carte-de-visite illustrated shows a woman, apparently from the Indian subcontinent, in a sari and with metal arm bands. It came from an album of British c-de-v which suggests that it might have been taken in Britain. Does anyone recognise the subject or have any comments about the origin of the sitter? There is nothing on the back of the card.
Seaside: Photographed (25 May - 8 September 2019) is Turner Contemporary’s first photography exhibition, curated by Val Williams and Karen Shepherdson. This major exhibition will examine the relationship between photographers, photography and the British seaside from the 1850s to the present. As well as featuring the work of eminent photographers including Vanley Burke, Susan Hiller, Jane Bown, Anna Fox, Henri Cartier Bresson and Paul Nash, the curators have uncovered rich and sometimes unknown work from across photography’s history, from Raymond Lawson’s remarkable chronicle of family life in Whitstable to Hannah Blackmore’s series of decaying shops in Ramsgate and Henry Idden’s documentation of a traditional Blackpool hotel. Seaside: Photographed looks at the way that the British seaside has become a vivid background to the drama of everyday life, seen through the acute, critical and engaged visions of 70 photographers from the UK, USA and Europe.
The Touring Exhibitions Co-ordinator will co-ordinate touring and loans administration for Turner Contemporary’s ambitious exhibition Seaside: Photographed in 2019.
To apply please follow the link below:
https://www.turnercontemporary.org/news/touring-exhibition-co-ordinator-seaside-photographed
Chiswick auctions upcoming auction of photographs and cameras includes plenty of British-related material with Bill Brandt, George Hurrell, nineteenth-century topographical material and others represented. Included is rare ‘Box of Pinups’ dating from 1965, featuring some of the biggest names of the 60s - Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, The Beatles, Jean Shrimpton, Cecil Beaton, Terence Stamp and
Rudolf Nureyev. This book of half-tone prints was created by David Bailey, a new breed of photographer at the time. The book (lot 419 in the sale), is estimated to fetch £700-£1,000.
See the full catalogue here https://chiswickauctions.co.uk/catalogues/181128/
The database on scientific illustrators (DSI) was launched in 2011 and is a project by the Section for History of Science & Technology [Abteilung für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und Technik, GNT] at the History Dept. at the University of Stuttgart. Its aims are to provide quick and reliable searchable reference information about scientific illustrators and it includes more than 12460 illustrators in natural history, medicine, technology and various sciences, active between c.1450 and c.1950 in more than 100 countries.
The database includes many names of interest to photographic historians: W Abney, Berenice Abbott, Anna Atkins, Antoine Claudet, P H Delamotte, W H F Talbot amongst many others. A quick search reveals over 500 names associated with photography.
The University of St Andrews has an annual visiting scholar programme and the five 2018 recipients have a series of blogs reporting on their work.Of particular interest to BPH is José Luís Neves from Ulster University who was looking at the impact of photographic printing processes upon visual narrative in photobook form between 1840 and 1880. José used the collection of photographically illustrated books at the University of St. Andrews Library to establish a correlation between photographic printing processes and the apparent scarceness of cumulative and relational visual narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century photobook production.
Read his blog here which looked at one of the photographic albums in the Special Collections at the University.
The University of West London is a leading modern university specialising in the education and development of exceptional creative, business and service professionals. This programme would include history of photography.
In addition to its regular programme of fee-paying doctorates, the University of West London is offering PhD scholarships.
PhD scholars will register as full-time PhD and work on their PhD project within the relevant School/College.
PhD scholars will also undertake teaching duties for a maximum of six hours per week. All scholarships will be for a period of three years (subject to satisfactory performance and academic progress).
These PhD scholarships are open to all UK/EU students who qualify and include:
PhD scholars are members of the Graduate School and will register within the relevant school or college. Find out more about the university's eight academic schools.
Luma is pleased to announce the exhibition, Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, a major project exploring the rich history of mechanically-reproduced imagery from the nineteenth century to the present, organized by visual artist and theorist Walead Beshty. The exhibition features over three hundred artworks and objects by approximately one hundred contributors, and includes photography, time-based media, painting and drawing, video, collage, room-size installations. A substantial collection of books and magazines— culled from the artist’s extensive personal archives and various public collections and spanning a visual history of over one hundred and fifty years—weaves throughout the exhibition, reinforcing the themes of the show.
The project is further supported by a parallel rotating program of screenings of film-and video-based artworks.
The exhibition is accompanied by an exclusive audio guide developed by ARTimbarc and Luma, in close collaboration with the curator Walead Beshty. Visit this link for the free audio guide.
Discover the exhibition catalogue
Guided tour of the exhibition
As part of the exhibition, a programme of historic films, documentaries and arthouse videos is presented every day at the Formation building.
The National Portrait Gallery began acquiring photographs shortly after its foundation in 1856, although the first photograph did not officially enter the Collection until 1932. Since then, the Gallery’s Photographs Collection has expanded to include approximately 250,000 examples of the medium. Dating from photography’s earliest days following its discovery in 1839, to the present day, it represents a comprehensive collection of techniques and movements in British photographic portrait history.
This display celebrates recently acquired portraits by contemporary artists whose work joins the recent revival of early photographic processes. Through their use of pinhole cameras, photograms and tintypes, unique pieces are favoured over mass production, highlighting the moment of creation. Shown alongside historical examples, aesthetic, technical and conceptual connections between the art of the past and the present are revealed. Distilling portraiture and photography to their basic qualities of shape and the processing of light, these works both challenge and create a dialogue with conventional approaches to portraiture.
See more here: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2018/photography-a-living-art-then-and-now
Image: Roger Mansfield; Leon Mansfield by Joni Sternbach, 3 September 2014
NPG x199073
From the early innovations of Anna Atkins and Queen Alexandra, through to Dorothy Bohm’s depiction of 1960s London and the self-portraiture of Sarah Lucas in the 2000s, the exhibition will, for the first time, present an in depth historical survey showcasing the achievements of female photographers working in Britain. In collaboration with Fast Forward Women in Photography at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. The exhibition is part of an ongoing international campaign to bring pioneering women photographers to a wider audience and expose the discrimination of working in a male dominated world.
The exhibition is supported by a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant from Art Fund.
Women in Photography: A History of British Trailblazers
30 January-2 June 2019
The Lightbox, Woking
www.thelightbox.org.uk
Image: Urania from the series Zabat, 1989, Maud Sulter © The Estate of Maud Sulter / courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland
The David Collection’s new special exhibition provides a hitherto unknown first-hand impression of 19th-century India, primarily — but not exclusively — seen with the eyes of western photographers. Through original vintage photographs, the viewer is taken back to photography’s birth and earliest childhood and up to around 1900.
Photography had made a breakthrough in British-dominated India in the early 1850s. With its magnificent architecture, exotic landscapes, and many different peoples and cultures, India offered fantastic motifs: splendid Islamic palaces, mosques, and sepulchral monuments. Princes, maharajas, ministers, and warriors in all their glory. But also an abundance of life among the common people, with everyone from stonemasons to snake charmers as well as elephants bathing in the Ganges.
Motifs of a completely different type that can be seen in the exhibition are those of the shattered palaces and dead warriors that spoke admonishingly of the rebellion against British rule in 1857-1858. The rebellion broke out after Muslim and Hindu soldiers had been forced by the British to use cartridges supposedly greased with fat from pigs and cows. These are some of history’s earliest war photographs, which in Europe served as the basis for newspaper illustrations.
The photographs were often taken under difficult working conditions. The heavy photo equipment had to be transported to distant regions along impassible roads, and its chemicals dried out in the tropical heat. The exposure time could be very long, and processing the negatives and the positives was often arduous.
Experiments were made with the new media by both visiting and local photo pioneers. The exhibition bears witness to the exchanges and competition between amateurs and the professional photographers whose studios popped up in innumerable places in India in the years up to 1900. The photographs also show how the new medium developed in the tension field between documentation and creative art form.
The over 80 works in the exhibition comprise photographs and photo albums, all of which were lent by the same private collection. The exhibition catalogue was written by the British photo historian John Falconer, who for many years was responsible for the photograph collections in the British Library’s Indian and Oriental departments. The author is one of the world’s leading specialists in this field and his catalogue provides a detailed and lively account of the photographers’ India in the 19th century and their photographic techniques.
The catalogue is available in both Danish and English editions and can be purchased in the museum shop for DKK 200. Read the press release from Strandberg Publishing for the publication here.
Images: Top: Robert and Harriet Tytler. Negative. View at the Taj Mahal, Agra, 1858; Below: Donald Horne Macfarlane. Elephants bathing, 1862.
The legendary Marilyn Monroe is captured in full splendor by society- and appointed court photographer of the British Royal Family Baron (Stirling Henry Nahum) - whose career started in photographing ballets at Sadlers Wells Theatre in London and whose real breakthrough came in 1947 photographing the wedding of Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth.
The photograph bares the stamp of Baron stating his legendary studio address Park Lane in London - where for example Anthony Armstrong-Jones was assistant before having a very prominent career of his own. The entire collection of Barons photographs was donated to the National Portrait Gallery after his early death at 50 years old.
The auction lot on eBay can be seen here: https://tinyurl.com/yc2gculu
Arclight is a data mining and visualization tool for film and media history that allow users to analyze millions of pages of digitally scanned magazines and newspapers for trends related to a chosen subject.
Also, available is The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities free download. Across seventeen chapters, contributing authors discuss the ways in which they are using or building digital technologies, assessing strengths and weaknesses, and responding to successes and failures. Topics explored include search, maps, big data, text mining, video analytics, databases, networks, and new forms of publication. All authors attempt to be reflexive about how the media of the twenty-first century shape our engagement with the past.
By aggregating these perspectives, and including an index and a glossary of key terms, this collection seeks to be a “guidebook” that surveys what media historians are doing with digital tools and charts a course for how the field of media history might move forward in an ongoing dialogue with the digital humanities.
The New York Times carries a review of the New York Public Library's exhibition about Anna Atkins and her seminal work of cyanotypes British Algae. The exhibition is open until 17 February 2019.
The National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, has appointed Dr Geoff Belknap as its Head Curator, effective from 1 November. Belknapp joined the museum in June 2017 as Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology and the new role gives him wider curatorial responsibilities across photography, television, film and sound within the museum. A similar role was previously held by Michael Terwey.
The History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck has announced two seminars. Admission is free and open to all.
Wednesday 21 November 2018, 6-7:30pm
Room TBC
Anna Dahlgren, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University
i-D and Artforum: the printed magazine and the merging of art and fashion.
The worlds of art and fashion merged in the 1980s on the pages of illustrated magazines. Since the early 1990s, fashion photographs have migrated effortlessly between the art field and the commercial field, between being considered personal works or assignments limited by the ideas and wants of designers, brands and fashion publications. An important material basis for this development was the emergence of new fora in the 1980s. This presentation traces the beginnings of these transgressions through a close examination of the two magazines i-D and Artforum, which from different positions and with different strategies served as an active interface between art and fashion photography in the 1980s.
Tuesday 26 March,
Jennifer Tucker, History Department and Science in Society Program, Wesleyan University
Load, Point and Shoot: Cameras, Gun cartridges, and the ‘Black Boxes’ of History
This paper explores what it might mean for historians to take seriously the shared history of firearms and cameras, two technologies that co-evolved in the 19th century and that have had a profound impact on society ever since. As David Campbell writes, “the technologies of the gun and camera…evolved in lockstep.” (Campbell 2012; Landau 2002; Virilio 1984). My paper extends this notion by analyzing further the many different and often unexpected aspects of the historical relationship between cameras and guns. Drawing on new archival research on 19th and early 20th century camera and firearm production and consumption in Britain and the U.S., my paper documents their complementarity at several levels (of structure, chemistry, industrial organization, research, and marketing), aiming to address how and why the technologies function, why they are interoperable, and how their study highlights new ways of thinking about technoscience and the ‘black boxes’ of history. Technologies such as cameras and guns, I suggest, pose certain shared methodological problems for historians and raise broader questions about the writing of history and the role of the historian in ethical discussions about their production and use.
Information on past events at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/research/photography
Images:
Nick Knight for i-D magazine
Laurie Simmons, Walking Gun (1991), gelatine silver print, Metropolitan Museum of Art
