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.
Michael Pritchard's Posts (3179)
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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
The Face of Suffrage is a new large scale art installation created to celebrate 100 years of Votes for Women by Helen Marshall The ‘Face of Suffrage’ artwork is a floor-based, 200 metre square photo mosaic consisting of more than 3,500 images of females from across the West Midlands.
It will be located on the concourse of Birmingham New Street Station. The artwork will be made up of a combination of historical images, women involved in the Suffrage movement from the early 1900s, and from photographs made today by people that have photographed the women in their lives and wish to join in to commemorate and celebrate their stories.
It will be exhibited from the 15th November to the 14th December.
In association with The Face of Suffrage there are a series of free public talks.
Wed 21 November at 6pm, The Face of Suffrage artist Helen Marshall
Lloyds Room at Birmingham Hippodrome. Lead artist of The Face of Suffrage Helen Marshall speaks about the project in Birmingham and her other collaborative projects nationally and internationally.
www.thepeoplespicture.com
Wed 12 December at 6pm, Historian Dr Nicola Gauld
Lloyds Room, Birmingham Hippodrome. Historian, writer and academic expert on the Suffragette movement Dr Nicola Gauld provides an overview of the Suffragist Campaign and a specific look at Birmingham and women's stories.
www.nicolagauld.wordpress.com
Thurs 10 January at 6pm, Artists and Community Archivists Anand Chhabra and Geoff Broadway
Gowling Room, Birmingham Hippodrome. Artists, Photographers and Archivists Anand Chhabra and Geoff Broadway talk about the community archives Apna Heritage and Living Memory and the role of women in archive histories and community photography archives.
www.bcva.info www.livingmemory.live
*These are free & unticketed events, please arrive 15 minutes before the scheduled start time to secure a seat. Information: http://grainphotographyhub.co.uk/portfolio-type/the-face-of-suffrage-talks-programme/
The Martin Parr Foundation (MPF) which runs a gallery and archive in Bristol, based on Parr's own work but extending to British documentary photography, has launched its new membership scheme. The aim of the scheme is to open up access to the Foundation’s library and huge archive collection, as well as giving members discounts on talks, screenings, workshops and in the Foundation's bookshop.
Membership contributions will help the Foundation keep entry to the gallery free, grow its archive collection and champion overlooked and emerging photographers. The scheme offers a tiered membership:
Foundation Members paying £35 a year will receive:
- Invitations to Private Views with a +1 (incl. complimentary drinks)
- Access to Martin’s library of over 2000 photobooks
- A behind-the-scenes tour of the archive and studio
- 10% off all items in their bookshop… and much more
Supporter Membership and is priced at £125 a year. This includes:
- All of the benefits of the base-level membership, plus:
- A Foundation tour led by Martin Parr himself
- Discounts on tickets to talks, screenings and workshops
- And a signed 10x8” Martin Parr print, shown below.
Patron level is £750 which provides all of the benefits of the first two tiers, plus:
- Your portrait taken by Martin Parr
- An annual Patrons dinner with Martin
- Priority booking for exclusive events
Full details of the membership scheme can be found online at: www.martinparrfoundation.org/membership
Jon McCall | Head of Membership & Fundraising | Martin Parr Foundation | T. (+44) 0117 329 3270 | martinparrfoundation.org
This print has been personally selected by Martin Parr to celebrate the first year of the membership scheme. It was taken in Margate, 1986, (the same year as his seminal collection The Last Resort was published). The image has rarely been exhibited and did not appear in print until Life's a Beach was published in 2012.
BPH member Ben Lewis is trying to find more details about this photograph and the London photographer William E Gray who worked independently and was also associated with the company of Henry Dixon and Son Ltd which absorbed his business in 1931.
The photograph was taken for the Cook Collection around 1902-7. It has a number "Photo Gray 28992"
Four years ago Ellen Nolan inherited a suitcase. Inside was an archive of hundreds of images and documents belonging to her Great Aunt, Nita Harvey, an English actress on the brink of Hollywood success in the 1930s. In 1933 Nita was discovered through a beauty contest, summoned to Hollywood and signed to Paramount studios. She was prepared for performing by her mother, who constantly photographed her. Ellen has been working with the archive to create a dialogue between the performativity of the domestic portraits of Nita taken by her mother and family, and the professional industry images taken by Paramount Studio photographers. This paper will discuss the role of clothes in Nita’s life and career, and their function in the archive.
Ellen Nolan is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography and Fashion Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester. She was previously a photography lecturer at the London College of Fashion. Her research focuses on aspects of representation and performativity in commercial and domestic family photography. It considers the use of photography as a means of exploring the act of representation as a meditation on photography and image performance. Ellen worked as a successful fashion and portrait photographer and regular contributor over a 15-year period to magazines, including British Vogue, i-D, Purple and The Sunday Telegraph. She has shot major fashion advertising campaigns for Dries Van Noten, Levis, Nike and Eley Kishimoto. She also directed pop videos and shot album covers for Beth Orton, amongst other international artists. She continues to work for and collaborate with British fashion designer Margaret Howell. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Photographers Gallery, Arles Festival and The National Portrait Gallery in London, where her work is part of their National Collection.
Courtauld Institute of Art
Friday, 9 November // 12.30-13.30
NITA HARVEY'S ARCHIVE
The Role of Clothes in the Life and Career of an English Actress (c.1930)
Organised by Dr Rebecca Arnold (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Free and open to all
RESEARCH FORUM SEMINAR ROOM
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION
FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
Newly qualified PhDs in photographic history may be interested in two Early Career Academic Fellow (ECAF) positions at De Montfort University. The position will ultimately lead to tenure in 2020. DMU is home to the Photographic History Research Centre and runs a MA history of photography programme.
See more here.
This auction includes many photographs from the mid-19th century through to the mid-20th century, covering many parts of the globe. Of great rarity is a group of glass plate negatives of China by Thomas Child, which are the only known negatives by Child to survive and were made in Beijing in the 1870s and 1880s (lot 201). We are also delighted to offer photographs from the collection of Sven Gahlin, including a number of important 19th century albums of Indian and Anglo-Indian subjects by Shepherd & Robertson, Samuel Bourne, Eugene Clutterbuck Impey and Sir Benjamin Simpson among others. The Gahlin collection also includes photographs by Thomas Annan (shown right), Herbert G. Ponting, Hill & Adamson, and early photographs of Canada by Frederick Dally (lot 168).
BRITISH ISLES
25. Annan. Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow. 1900
- Hill & Adamson. Afghans or Circassian armour
- James. Plans and photographs of Stonehenge, 1867
EUROPE
62. Constantinou.. Album of Athens, c.1860
- Terris. Marseille, c.1862
- Ponti. Venice, 1855
GENERAL
79. Dammann. Ethnological Photo gallery, c.1875
NEAR & MIDDLE EAST
96. Bonfils. Palestine album, 1870s
- Album of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Athanes, 1870s-80s
- Bonfils. Egypt, 1870s
- Bonfils. Syria, 1870s
- Egypt, late C19th
- Frith. Sinai & Palestine, 1862
- Beck. Views of Athens, c.1864
- Holmes. North West Frontier photographs, 1920s-30s
- American Colony. Mammoth photo of the Dome of the Rock, c.1900
- Frith. Mammoth plate of Jerusalem, 1858
- Lebanon. Collection of albums, c.1920s
- Mecca & the Hajj
- The Egyptian Mahmal
- Mecca and the Mahmal
- Bonfils & others. Palestine, Constantinople, Lebanon etc.
- Persia. A collection of photographs, C19th and C20th
- Persian Gulf album of Bushehr, c.1909
- Portrait of Ibn Saud by Robert Richie c.1950
- Arabia photographs, 1917-18
- Album of Syria, c.1874
- Abdullah Freres. Constantinople, c.1865
- United Arab Emirates collection
AMERICAS
- Hawaii, c. 1870s
- Frederick Dally. Album of British Columbia, 1867-70
- Bermuda collection, c.1870s
- Mexico album, c. 1896-1900
AFRICA
181. East Africa, 1904-09
- East Africa, c.1880s
- Comoros islands, 1885
- Morocco, 1910
- South Africa, Zulu War, c.1879
ASIA
- Borneo, Brunei and Malaysia album, 1924-26
- Bourne. Album of India, c.1865-80
- Bourne. Album of India, 1870s
- Bourne. India photographs, c.1870s
- Andaman islands, c.1919-21
- Gastaldy. Cambodia, c.1930
- ?Ponting. Ceylon
- Thomas Child. Negatives of China, c.1870s-80s
- China photographs, c.1920s
- China photographs, c.1906
- China Magazine, 1868
- China Album, 1906
- Gsell. Cambodia, 1860s-70s
- Gsell. Indochina, 1860s-70s
- Gsell. Cambodia & Vietnam, c.1860s-70s
- Gsell. Vietnam, c.1870s80s
- Hong Kong panoramas
- Bourne & Shepherd etc. India & Ceylon
- Frith series. India
- Baudesson and others. India
- India, views around Calcutta
- Shepherd & Robertson. India
- India & Nepal. Album of maharajahs etc., c.1880s
- Clarke and others. Album of India, c.1859-60s
- India. Album including Sikh and British military groups, c.1862-72
- Impey. Album of photographs of India, c.1858-63
- Gastaldy. Indochina, c.1930
- Gastaldy. Indichina, c.1930
- Japan album, c.1890s
- Kashmir Album, c.1886-92
- Korea. Photographs by Felice Beato, c. 1871
- Korea stereoviews, 1904
- Sikkim and Tibet, 1885
- Panorama of Yekaterinburg, 1880s
- Sumutra and Indonesia, c.1890s
- Philippines, c.1890s
- Pont. India, c.1860s-70s
- Portuguese Timor. C.1902
- Salzwedel. Indonesia, c.1870s-90s
- Schulze. Indonesia and Thailand, c. 1870s-90s
- Shanghai album, c.1900
- Shanghai panorama
- Siamese portraits, 1860s-70s
- Skeen. Ceylon and Java, 1860s-80s
- Skeen. Ceylon, 1880s
- Simpson. India, 1860s
- Thomson. China, 1873
- Assmy. Yangtze River, 1906
- Ponting. Polar photos, 1910-13
- Ponting. Polar photos, 1910-13
- Antarctic Expedition photo, 1901
269. Ponting. The Tenements, c. 1913
http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2018/travel-atlases-maps-a-natural-history-l18405.html
Bonhams' auction of fine books and photographs includes, amongst other photography lots, a pair of albums 'Presented to the Rev. Robert Vaughan Pryce... by his father George Pryce, F.S.A. on his Birthday, December 15, 1866", containing
Also ncluded is a picture of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, flanked by his assistants Nicolas Tredwell and William Jacomb taken by Robert Howlett at the launching of the Great Eastern in 1857.
The photographs section at the V&A Museum have issued a newsletter following the launch of the Photography Centre.
We are delighted to be in touch with an update about the exciting activity that has been taking place at the V&A these past months.
Phase One of the V&A Photography Centre is now open. To mark this occasion, HRH The Duchess of Cambridge undertook her first visit to the V&A as Royal Patron on 10 October, ahead of the Centre’s public opening on 12 October.
More information about Phase One and the inaugural display in the Photography Centre, Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital, can be found here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/news/our-new-photography-centre-is-now-open
More information about the ongoing Photography Centre FuturePlan project, including Phase Two, can be found here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/futureplan
The opening of the Photography Centre kick-started a month-long Photography Spotlight at the museum. Highlights include:
SNAP
Friday Late in collaboration with i-D
26 October, 18:30-22:00
More information can be found here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/friday-late
Collecting Photography/Photography as Collecting
V&A Conference
16-17 November, 10:30-17:00
More information, including a draft programme, can be found here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/BGnX1K7a/collecting-photography-photography-as-collecting-nov-2018
Further information about all the events taking place as part of the Photography Spotlight can be found here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/photography-spotlight:2018
We hope many of you will be able to visit the Photography Centre soon and look forward to hearing your thoughts as we work towards Phase Two.
With best wishes,
V&A Photographs Section
Martin Barnes, Susanna Brown, Marta Weiss, Catherine Troiano, Rachael Chambers, Erika Lederman, Dan Cox, Marie-Kathrin Blanck and Lydia Caston.
Image: the new photography galleries on their first public open day.
Dr Juliet Hacking is speaking at two upcoming events:
Saturday 3rd November, afternoon
Workshop: An Insider’s Guide to Photography and the Art Market
https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/workshop/insiders-guide-photography-and-art-market
Friday, 16 November 2018 – Saturday, 17 November 2018
Symposium: Collecting Photography/Photography as Collecting - V&A
Download the programme here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/BGnX1K7a/collecting-photography-photography-as-collecting-nov-2018
Early French Masterworks from the Hyman Collection showcase rare, important works from the 1840s to 1850s by the first practitioners of negative-positive photography in France. This exceptional selection of 12 lots comprises 11 salt prints, of which three are accompanied by their unique paper negatives, and one albumen print. The 13 featured pioneer-photographers – Édouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Louis De Clercq, Alphonse Delaunay, John Beasley Greene, Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard, Firmin-Eugène Le Dien and Gustave Le Gray, Charles Nègre, Pierre-Émile-Joseph Pécarrère, Henri-Victor Regnault, Louis-Rémy Robert and Félix Teynard – all adopted the new medium of photography in France and contributed towards its technical and artistic advancement.
See the catalogue here: https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/UK040218
Image: J B Greene
Oscar Gustaf Rejlander (1813-1875) was a Victorian artist whose innovations in both the production and conceptual aspects of photography have secured him a place within the history of the medium. Surprisingly there has never been a major examination of his career ….until now.
The Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada presents the first-ever retrospective of the life and work of the celebrated Swedish-born, British photographer. Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer opened on October 19 at the National Gallery of Canada where it will be on view until February 3, 2019 before travelling to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition features 140 of Rejlander’s photographs, paintings, drawings and prints.
Oscar Gustaf Rejlander began his career as a painter who took up photography in the early 1850s. He is referred to as the “Father of Art Photography” in recognition of the path he paved for present day photo manipulation and experimentation. Rejlander often employed the technique of combination photography, where two or more negatives are combined to make a new, single image. The exhibition includes two of the four known surviving versions of his famously controversial composite photograph Two Ways of Life, or Hope in Repentance, produced in 1857 from more than 30 negatives. Rejlander is also praised for his collaboration with naturalist Charles Darwin and his influence on the work of British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and author Lewis Carroll. Their portraits, along with those of other influential 19th-century notables, including poet Alfred Tennyson are featured in the show.
“Oscar Gustaf Rejlander has a central place in the history of the medium. He was one of the first artists to show how photography could use allegory and narrative in the same way as more traditional arts such as painting and drawing,” said NGC Director and CEO Marc Mayer. “The National Gallery of Canada began acquiring photographs by Rejlander more than 35 years ago, and we are very happy to offer the public this overview of the work of this exceptional artist.”
The exhibition opens with work created during Rejlander earliest years in England - from 1839 to 1853. The section includes some of his non-photographic work including a large scale drawing along with some of his first landscape photographs. The second section of the exhibition contains several of Rejlander’s self-portraits and portraits of his wife Mary. In the third section photographs of Rejlander’s staged scenes of everyday life are on view followed by a series of photographic studies that Rejlander intended to be used as “photographic sketches” by other artists. One section of the exhibition examines Rejlander’s most famous work Two Ways of Life while the final section presents some of Rejlander’s studies of facial expressions made for Charles Darwin in preparation for his book, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals published in 1872.
“Rejlander’s photographs are highly relevant to artists who combine and rearrange images, not from glass negatives, but using digital tools,” said exhibition curator Lori Pauli, Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada. “Throughout this exhibition, I have tried to take a broader perspective of Rejlander’s contribution to the history of photography, before and after the creation of his most famous work known as Two Ways of Life. In Rejlander’s photographs we see a keen observer of human condition, whether he is showing us the comic side of everyday life or expressing compassion in his images of children.”
Rejlander was among the favourite photographers of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert and some of his earliest photographs have been loaned for the exhibition by the Royal Collection in Windsor. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Gallery in Washington, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, have also loaned works for the show along with several other lenders from private and public collections. The exhibition includes 14 works from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer is presented with support from Scotiabank, a Founding Partner of the Canadian Photography Institute. The show travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it will be on view from March 12 until June 9, 2019.
Also opening October 19, 2018, in the space adjacent to the Oscar Rejlander exhibition, is PhotoLab 5: Althea Thauberger. The two-channel video installation by the Vancouver-based artist and filmmaker Althea Thauberger, coproduced by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Concordia University and the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI) of the National Gallery of Canada, was inspired by discoveries she made while visiting the archival collection of the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division, whose archives are now part of the CPI collection. The thousands of photographs in the archives were commissioned for print and other media over a 40-year period, yielding stories of life in Canada in the post-war era- from small-town scenes to major events- that define our national history. Thauberger’s video installation, titled L’arbre est dans ses feuilles, (The Tree Is in Its Leaves), interacts with images from the archives while telling an evocative story of its own. Audio for the 30 minute video is provided by poets Danica Evering, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Kama La Mackerel and Chloé Savoie-Bernard. The exhibition, which was organized by Andrea Kunard, the Associate Curator of the Canadian Photography Institute, is on display in the CPI Galleries until February 3, 2019.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a 300-page hardcover catalogue containing 225 colour and black and white images. With essays by the exhibition curator, Lori Pauli, and collaborators. The English and French editions are available for a price of $40 onsite at the Boutique and online at ShopNGC.ca.
See more here: https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/exhibitions-and-galleries/oscar-g-rejlander-artist-photographer
There will be a London Stereoscopic Company 3D talk at the Courtauld Institute on 31 October. Titled The Poor Man's Courtauld Gallery it will examine how artists and stereo photographers explored the same themes with the advantages and limitations of their respective medium.
Admission is free but needs to be booked.
‘The Poor Man’s Courtauld Gallery’: re-staging paintings for the Stereoscope.
Wednesday 31 October 2018
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN
Details here: https://courtauld.ac.uk/event/the-poor-mans-courtauld-gallery-re-staging-paintings-for-the-stereoscope
Lauren Ashley-Irvine, Conservator of Photographs and Paper, at the Victoria and Albert Museum has published a blog describing how one of the fascicles from Talbot's Pencil of Nature (1844) was conserved and prepared for exhibition in the museum's new photography galleries. The publication is part of the Royal Photographic Society Collection now held at the V&A.
Read the full blog here
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London from May to Ocbober of 1851, was the genesis of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Published to accompany the opening of the V&A Photography Centre, this book makes extensive use of the V&A collections and archival material related to the 1851 Great Exhibition.
Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition is the first comprehensive study of the seminal gathering of photographs and photographic equipment that marked the global launch of the form. It examines the role and impact of photography at the 1851 Great Exhibition and beyond, drawing together two decades of research to create a broader understanding of the step-change in image making and distribution represented by that event. With a Foreword by Tristram Hunt and an essay on photoscience by Nicholas Burnett.
While the Great Exhibition has received a variety of examinations, its role in exhibiting and furthering the cause and exploitation of photography and its impact on illustration, printing, publishing, and the arts has been largely underappreciated. More broadly, 1851 saw a massive change in information management: in the creation and dissemination of visually based graphic information characterized by images of the building, its contents and their display that collectively constituted the Great Exhibition. Photography played a critical role in this quantum leap.
The scale and scope of photography of the Great Exhibition is made evident through reproductions of images produced by a wide range of amateur and professional photographers who documented the Great Exhibition, some of which are the only known images of now lost works of art. Also shown and examined are prints produced by traditional reprographics and lithographs and the photographic originals from which they were derived.
The result of more than twenty years of research, this study is based on a number of contemporary sources including official publications, the archive of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, the correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, letters, newspapers, books, and articles in serial and periodical publications, as well as the Reports by the Juries, from which all 154 photographic images are reproduced in these pages.
Anthony Hamber is an expert on 19th century photography and the illustrated book, the contribution of photography to other forms of illustration, and the application of photography to art publishing. His first monograph, A Higher Branch of the Art; Photographing the Fine Arts in England 1839-1880 (Gordon & Breach, 1996) is a fundamental source of information in its field.
Available in the UK and Ireland from the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Anthony Hamber
New Castle, Delaware and London: Oak Knoll Press and V&A Publishing, 2018.
8.75 x 12 inches
cloth, dust jacket
396 pages, with folding floor plan of the Crystal Palace in pocket at rear
ISBN: 9781584563716
Price: £65
Order online: https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/photography-and-the-great-exhibition-155372.html
Boots Archive are delighted to announce the second phase release of the online catalogue of the Walgreens Boots Alliance archive collections. This digital resource, which launched in 2017 has been supported by the Wellcome Trust, through their Research Resources programme. The archive includes phootgraphy and material relating to Boots' involvement with amateur photography.
The catalogue currently comprises around two fifths of the total archive holdings (c5,000 boxes) with over 27,000 entries and 4,500 digitised images. Subsequent additions to the catalogue will be made on an annual basis over the next three years until the entire collection is incorporated. The majority of the entries on the site relate to the Boots UK collection, and the material charts the development of the business into large scale manufacturing, product development, research and healthcare and beauty retailing. Information relating to product development, which includes employee training, formulations, packaging and merchandising records, is a particularly strong element within the collection. The holdings also include a large number of store and factory photographs and building plans.
In addition to the material relating to the history of Boots UK, other significant holdings also include the business records of Walgreens; Dollond and Aitchison; Optrex Ltd; Timothy Whites and Taylors Ltd; Unichem and E Moss Ltd.
The archive catalogue can be accessed here: http://archives.walgreensbootsalliance.com/
In this lecture Deborah Ireland explores how the Royal Geographic Society's first instructor in photography, John Thompson, applied images to the science of geography, to guide and influence a new generation of travellers. Thomson had a career as a photographer in China and elsewhere in Asia and took the photographs for Street Life in London.
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR15 October 2018
at 6.30pm. Ondaatje Theatre doors open at 5.30pm
See more here.
The first day open to the public was a busy one for the V&A Museum's new Photography Centre as the pictures here show. Phase one of the Photography Centre more than doubles the space dedicated to photography at the V&A, spanning four new galleries. It opens with the major display Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital, beginning in the newly named The Bern and Ronny Schwartz Gallery (formerly Gallery 100). The show explores photography as a way of ‘collecting the world’, from the medium’s invention in the 19th century to the present day.
Drawn from the V&A and Royal Photographic Society collections of over 800,000 photographs, the display showcases some of the most exciting contemporary photography being created today. It also shows seminal prints by pioneers William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron and Roger Fenton, alongside negatives, camera equipment, photographic publications and original documents to tell a broader story about the history of international photography. In The Modern Media Gallery (formerly Gallery 99), a frequently changing selection of new acquisitions, a ‘Light Wall’ for displaying screen-based photography, and a ‘Dark Tent’ projection area complete the space.
To mark the opening, the V&A has commissioned two internationally-renowned artists to produce major new works. German photographer Thomas Ruff, known for taking a critical and conceptual approach to photography, has created a monumental series inspired by Linnaeus Tripe’s 1850s paper negatives of India and Burma, held in the V&A’s collection. Digitally reinterpreting photographs made over 160 years ago, Ruff gives Tripe’s important and haunting images a new context, emphasising their hidden details and resurrecting them with spectacular new life. Alongside Thomas Ruff’s new series, American artist Penelope Umbrico has created 171 Clouds from the V&A Online Collection, 1630 - 1885, 2018, the first work to feature on the Light Wall. Umbrico works mostly with images she finds on the internet, presenting them in ways that reveal the fluidity of digital photography. For this video, she sifted through the V&A paintings collection online and extracted details of clouds. The work explores the transition from fleeting clouds to material paint, and then from digital code to physical screen.
Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A, said: “I’m delighted to open the V&A’s new Photography Centre. The transfer of the historic Royal Photographic Society collection provided the catalyst for this dramatic reimagining of photography at the museum. Our collection – established by the V&A’s visionary first director Henry Cole - now seamlessly spans the entire history of photography, telling the story of the medium from the daguerreotype to the digital. Our new Photography Centre provides a world-class facility to re-establish photography as one of our defining collections. In an era when everyone’s iPhone makes them a photographer, the V&A’s Photography Centre explores and explains the medium in a compelling new way.”
Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the V&A, said: “The new Photography Centre brings to life some of the V&A’s most beautiful original picture galleries and provides a permanent home for one of the finest and most inspiring collections of photography in the world. The spaces and facilities allow visitors to access, explore and enjoy photography in its many forms. The Photography Centre encompasses more than a new gallery space. Beyond its walls lies an associated programme of research, digitisation, learning activities, publications, exhibitions, access to items in stores, and collaborations with other UK and international partners. Photography is one of our most powerful forms of global communication, and I’m thrilled that we can contextualise the past and present of this powerful medium in new and exciting ways.”
Visitors enter the new Photography Centre through a spectacular installation of over 150 cameras spanning 160 years. Nearby, an interactive camera handling station offers visitors an understanding of how photographers view the world through their equipment. Inside the gallery, focused sections look at a series of collections and collectors. This includes an important group of William Henry Fox Talbot’s cameras and prints; 1850s fine art photographs collected by Chauncey Hare Townshend, friend of Charles Dickens; Pictorialist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn’s collection of photographs by his predecessors and contemporaries; and a selection of some of the most significant photojournalism of the 20th century collected by Magnum Photos’ UK agents, John and Judith Hillelson. A stereoscope viewer gives an immersive 3-D experience of Crystal Palace alongside some of the first photographs ever taken of Japan.
Over 600 objects made across Europe, the US, Africa, the Middle East and Asia have been brought together for Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital. The display features images by early colour photography pioneers, Agnes Warburg, Helen Messinger Murdoch and Nickolas Muray, and recent acquisitions by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cornelia Parker, Linda McCartney, Marco Breuer, Pierre Cordier and Mark Cohen. A ground-breaking botanical cyanotype by Anna Atkins, images by the world’s first female museum photographer, Isabel Agnes Cowper, and motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge, join photographs by some of the world’s most influential modern and contemporary photographers, including Eugène Atget, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, Cindy Sherman and Martin Parr.
The Photography Centre also features the Dark Tent, a flexible multimedia projection and lecture space inspired by 19th-century photographers’ travelling darkrooms. Here, specially commissioned films revealing early photographic processes, including the daguerreotype, calotype and wet collodion process, are screened, along with a slideshow of rarely-seen magic lantern slides revealing the first attempts to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1921 and 1922, among other photographic projections.
The opening of the V&A Photography Centre kick-starts a month-long Photography Spotlight across the V&A. Highlights include talks by leading photographers Mary McCartney, Rankin and Chris Levine; the premiere of the collaborative performance piece Last Evenings by artist Garry Fabian Miller and musician and composer Oliver Coates; a screening of Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s Love Cecil; and special performances, events, courses, workshops and a photography-themed Friday Late on 26 October.
Admission is free.
See more here, including details of special events and a symposium: https://www.vam.ac.uk/season/2018/photography-spotlight#highlights
Image below: © Will Pryce.jpg / above: © Michael Pritchard
Make exquisite rich brown images using this 19th century print technique. Lead by photographic artist Catriona Gray who specialises in alternative processes, this short, three-hour workshop, will show you all you need to make gorgeous 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.
All materials included in the fee.
Darkroom London
Unit 10 Burmarsh Workshops
71 Marsden Street
London, NW5 3JA
See more and book for either workshop here.
