The world’s first photographic experiments, pictures by 20th century greats Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, recent acquisitions by Linda McCartney gifted by Paul McCartney and his family, and newly commissioned works by Thomas Ruff, will go on display this autumn as part of the V&A’s new Photography Centre.

Opening on 12 October, the first phase of the Photography Centre, designed by David Kohn Architects, will more than double the space dedicated to photography at the V&A. The inaugural display will trace a history of photography from the 19th century to the present day through the theme of collectors and collecting. Drawn from the V&A’s significantly expanded holdings, following the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection, the display will show seminal prints and negatives by pioneers William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron and Frederick Scott Archer, alongside camera equipment, photographic publications and original documents to tell a broader story of international photography. It will also feature a digital wall to show the most cutting-edge photographic imagery.

To mark the opening, the V&A has commissioned internationally renowned German photographer Thomas Ruff to create a new body of work. Known for taking a critical and conceptual approach to photography, Ruff’s new series will be inspired by Linnaeus Tripe’s 1850s paper negatives of India and Burma from the V&A’s collection.

Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A, said: “The transfer of the historic Royal Photographic Society collection provided the catalyst for this dramatic reimagining of photography at the V&A. Our collection - initiated 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 will provide 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.”

The entrance to the new Photography Centre will be through a spectacular installation of over 150 cameras. Nearby, an interactive camera handling station will offer visitors an understanding of how photographers view the world through their equipment. Inside the gallery, focused sections will look at a series of collections and collectors, including an important group of William Henry Fox Talbot’s cameras and prints; 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.

On display will be over 600 objects from across Europe, the US, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The Photography Centre will feature images by early colour photography pioneers, Agnes Warburg, Helen Messinger Murdoch and Nickolas Muray, and recent acquisitions by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cornelia Parker, Linda McCartney and Mark Cohen. A pioneering botanical cyanotype by Anna Atkins, images by the world’s first female museum photographer, Isabel Agnes Cowper, and motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge, will join photographs by some of the world’s most influential modern and contemporary photographers, including Eugène Atget, Man Ray, Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman and Martin Parr.

The Photography Centre will feature the ‘dark tent’, a 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 will be screened, along with a slideshow projection of rarely-seen magic lantern slides revealing the first attempts to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1921 and 1922.

The opening of the Photography Centre will be accompanied by a three-week spotlight on photography across the V&A, including a series of talks by leading photographers, screenings, events, courses, workshops and a Friday Late.

Situated in the V&A’s North East Quarter, the Photography Centre will reclaim the beauty of three original 19th-century picture galleries. It is part of the V&A’s FuturePlan development programme to revitalise the museum’s public spaces through contemporary design and the restoration of original features. A second phase of the Photography Centre, planned to open in 2022, will expand it further, providing a teaching and research space, a browsing library and a studio and darkroom for photographers’ residencies.

In addition, the first two titles in The V&A Photography Library, a new series of publications in partnership with Thames & Hudson, will accompany the opening. In September 2018, the V&A and Royal College of Art will launch a photography pathway as part of the History of Design MA programme. Students will learn about the history of photography through the V&A’s collections and expertise.

Following the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society collection in 2017, a new purpose-built storage facility has been created on site. When not on display, photographs can be viewed in the V&A’s Prints & Drawings Study Room. The V&A Photography Centre is supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation and other generous donors. Upon opening, Gallery 100 in the new centre will be known as The Bern and Ronny Schwartz Gallery.

Images:

John French, John French and Daphne Abrams in a tailored suit published in the TV Times, 1957. John French Archive / Victoria and Albert Museum.

Benjamin Brecknell Turner. The Willowsway, Elfords, Hawkhurst, 1852. Albumen print. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

Rudolf Koppitz. Movement Study, 1926. Carbon print. The RPS Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

The Fellows Lunch: Curator Series is a set of four free lunchtime research talks given by recipients of Paul Mellon Centre Curator Research Grants. All are welcome but please book a ticket in advance. Two upcoming lunches are of particular photographic interest: 

• 15 May. How might women photograph war? With the support of a Paul Mellon Curatorial Award, Dr Pippa Oldfield investigated the ways in which women have responded to the First World War, both during the conflict and a hundred years later. She will share her research that led to the national touring exhibition No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War, which opened at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, in 2017 and is currently on view at Bristol Cathedral from 7 April to 1 July 2018. Pippa will discuss pioneering women who made images at or near the frontlines, including Mairi Chisholm, a First Aid nurse and ambulance driver in Flanders, Belgium; Florence Farmborough, a nurse with the Russian Red Cross; and Olive Edis, the UK’s first officially commissioned woman photographer sent to a war zone. She will also reflect on contemporary responses by artists Alison Baskerville, Dawn Cole, and Chloe Dewe Mathews, and consider how assumptions of gender have shaped the practice of war photography. See more and book here: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/forthcoming/fellowslunch-pippa/event-category/fellows-lunch

• 29 May. Four Corners and Camerawork were two examples of innovatory, workshop-based cultural film and photographic practice characteristic of the radical 1970s and early 1980s. This presentation will explore the curatorial approaches involved in assembling photographs, films, publications, documents and oral histories for an online archive and public exhibition. Through a discussion of the archival research process, this talk will trace the different and sometimes contradictory histories involved. The talk is given by by Carla Mitchell, Head of Four Corners' artistic programme development and Four Corners and Camerawork archive project. See more and book here: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/forthcoming/fellowslunch-carla/event-category/fellows-lunch

The only London screening of Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, produced and directed by Grant Scott and Tim Pellatt is being held at the Frontline Club on 8 May. 

Magazine editor, writer, lecturer, photographer, evangelist, mercurial force; Bill Jay was all of these and more. Bill Jay ignited the fire beneath British photography in 1968 with his magazine Creative Camera and fanned its flames via Album magazine, the ICA, the RPS, and camera clubs and polytechnics across the land before decamping to the University of New Mexico and on to Arizona State University. His lectures and teaching created a generation of American photographers, teachers, curators and publishers. He wrote twenty books and over four hundred articles, living a life filled with controversy and passion. 

Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay documents his life through archive images, audio and photographs alongside interviews with his friends, colleagues and family including Martin Parr, David Hurn, Homer Sykes, Ralph Gibson, Paul Hill, Brian Griffin, Daniel Meadows, Alex Webb, John Benton-Harris, Sue Davis, and Mary V. Swanson amongst others.

Following this screening, Grant Scott and Tim Pellatt will take questions from the audience.

To book click here: http://rps.org/events/2018/may/08/do-not-bend

A book published by www.caferoyalbooks.com titled Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay which features Bill Jay's portraits of photographers he interviewed and encountered will be available for purchase.  

Main image: © David Hurn / Magnum. Image above: © Tricia Kearney.

The History of Art department of the University of Oxford, is holding its Trinity Term Photography Seminar programme. Meetings takes places on Tuesdays from 1pm-2pm in St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities. The convenors are Geraldine Johnson and Sajda van der Leeuw. Open to all. 

May 1st (Tuesday, Week 2 – St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities)
The Literary Photobook: From Grangerisation to Post-Punk Box Sets
Paul Edwards (Paris Diderot University)

May 8th (Tuesday, Week 3 – St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities)
From Sandscapes to Glassworlds: The Visual Imagination of Vaughan Cornish, A Fin-de-Siècle Artist-scientist
Emily Hayes (Oxford Brookes University)

May 15th (Tuesday, Week 4 – St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities)
The Places of Malcolm Lowry and Kurt Schwitters
Cian Quayle (University of Chester)

May 29th (Tuesday, Week 5 – Note: Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities**)
Liu Shiyuan's As Simple as Clay: Photography and the Aesthetics of the Search Engine
Ros Holmes (University of Oxford)

June 5th (Tuesday, Week 7 – St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities)
Performing Portraiture in the GDR: Unreliable Narrators, Restaging Selves & Social Gists
Sarah James (University College London)

Photography%20Seminar%20poster-udated%20final-TT%202018.pdf 

* We meet in the Math Institute’s café for an informal lunch from 12:30pm to 1pm,
followed by the talk in St Luke’s Chapel or the Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities, from 1pm to 2pm.
Formal presentations begin at 1pm and finish by 2pm.

** Note: in Week 5 (May 22nd) only, we will meet in the Radcliffe Humanities’ Seminar Room.
Sponsored by the Department of History of Art (Centre for Visual Studies)

A fascinating collection of more than 4,000 photographs uncovered in the Historic England Archive is giving up its secrets after more than 70 years and is now accessible to the public. Staff at Historic England’s Archive in Swindon recently discovered 4,050 black and white photographic prints documenting healthcare in Britain between 1938 and 1943.

Capturing hospital staff, patients, procedures and practices, the images provide an invaluable and extraordinary insight into medical and nursing practices during the Second World War, and immediately before the foundation of the National Health Service.

Thanks to grant funding from the Wellcome Trust 2,100 images have been digitised as part of the year-long project to conserve, catalogue and digitise the entire collection. The collection is being made accessible to a wide audience for the first time and can be viewed and searched on the Historic England website.

Historic England has also produced resources for secondary school teachers to help students explore the history of medicine as we mark 70 years of the National Health Service in July.

The photographs were taken by the Topical Press Agency, but how and when they were acquired by the Archive remains a mystery. They record improvised wartime hospital wards, blood donation and transfusion, infection control, treatment of burns and early plastic surgery, alongside nurses in training and relaxing in their time off.

Each photograph is accompanied by a typed description which gives extensive background information including date, location and details of equipment and procedure. Many descriptions also include the names of the doctors and nurses shown as well as captions that capture the zeitgeist of the era, such as “the cares of house-keeping and raising a family can play havoc with a mother’s looks and bodily shapeliness.”

Duncan Wilson, Historic England’s Chief Executive, said: “The Historic England Archive is full of countless gems but the Topical Press Agency images are particularly striking. Thanks to the Wellcome Trust we are able to conserve these photographs and share them with new audiences. They have the potential to expand our knowledge of wartime medical practice and revolutionary treatments and help us delve deeper into the history of healthcare.”

Abigail Coats, Archive Cataloguing Officer at Historic England, said: “Working with this collection everyday has been fascinating and a real joy. The photographs reveal health and welfare provision at a time of social upheaval and change. But they also show staff having fun and unwinding after a long working day. You can see just how far some medical developments have come, but also what has stayed largely unchanged. I’m very proud to be a part of bringing this unique collection back to life and that we’re able to share this fantastic resource with the public.”

Chris Hassan, from Wellcome’s Humanities and Social Science team, said: “These unique images offer a wealth of insights and surprises. Taken at a time of transition and rapid development for healthcare in the UK, these photos bring to life this fascinating period of medical history.”

Memories of Nursing

We showed the collection to four nurses who trained and worked in hospitals in the North West in the 1940s and '50s. From bedpans and cut-throat razors to drainpipe climbing and hospital superstitions, watch Dorothy, Audrey, Margaret and Jean's testament to the spirit of the age. Video: https://youtu.be/Inx6etz-oYo

Our Archives 

The Historic England Archive is a national archive of the historic environment, with many major collections covering the architecture, archaeology and social history of England. The archives largely date from the mid-19th century onwards. They relate to the historic environment in the widest sense, including architectural and archaeological archives and aerial photography. 

The collection can be viewed at HistoricEngland.org.uk/medical

Travel back in time to Woking’s past at a new exhibition Photographs around Woking: Sidney Francis in the 1920s and 1930s which shows glimpses of what Woking was like nearly 100 years ago.

Taken by former Woking resident Sidney Francis (1891-1973), the photographs offer an insight into life in Woking and nearby towns and villages in the 1920s and 1930s. The fascinating and uplifting collection of photos includes wedding parties, sports teams, Eid celebrations, parades, dancers and musicians, and is testament to the vibrant and diverse community spirit that has always been a part of Woking.

Visitors to the exhibition will discover local residents dressing up and celebrating Woking Carnival in 1927; family-owned businesses such as dairies, butchers, printers and confectioners proudly displaying their wares; crowds gathering for Remembrance Day memorials; religious holidays at the Shah Jahan Mosque (Britain’s first purpose-built mosque) and families coming together for modest yet joyful weddings.

Sidney Francis was born Sidney Francis Patient in Southwark. By the time of the 1911 census, he was working as a photographer’s assistant in Crawley, Sussex. By 1916 he was working as a photographer in Godalming. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Air Force, possibly in a photographic unit.

From 1923 Francis lived at 88 Maybury Road in Woking, where he also ran his photography business. Often describing himself as a “photographic chemist”, Francis’ work included wedding photography, commissions for local businesses, event photography for local newspapers the 'Woking News & Mail' and 'Surrey Advertiser', and commissions for ‘The Islamic Review’.  

The glass plate negatives of Francis’ work are now housed in the archives of Surrey History Centre, who have worked closely with The Lightbox heritage volunteers to curate this exhibition. Jill Hyams, Archivist at the Surrey History Centre, will be in conversation with Peter Hall, Exhibitions Manager at The Lightbox, on Thurs 20 September 2018, 7.00pm, discussing Francis’ life and the places, people and festivities which he captured. 

www.thelightbox.org.uk

Tom Reeves, from the Edward Reeves studio in Lewes, is giving an evening of photographs of Lewes from the archives of Edward Reeves. This is always a popular event – this talk will include newly researched material from the Edward Reeves Archive – early booking recommended!

Tickets and information from: https://leweshistory.org.uk/2018/04/25/edward-reeves-photographs-talk-on-wednesday-9-may-2018-730pm/

An event is being held on Thursday, 24 May, to celebrate the launch of the W W Winters Heritage Trust, a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with the objectives: for the public benefit to advance the education of the public in the history of photography, and in particular relating to W W Winter Ltd, the city of Derby and the East Midlands, in all its aspects by any means as the trustees see fit, including through: the presentation of public meetings and lectures; the dissemination of knowledge through appropriate publications; financial and volunteer support for the W W Winter Collection Trust; and support to manage, care for, make accessible and develop the collection. The Winters studio has been operating continuously since 1852. 

The launch event will include three speakers and takes place at the University of Derby, Room BM310, Britannia Mill, Mackworth Road, Derby, DE22 3BL at 6.30pm for 7pm. 

All are welcome and there is no charge, but RSVP to friends@wwwinter.co.uk by 17 May 2018. 

The  Centre for the GeoHumanities is pleased to announce that Professor Joan M. Schwartz (Queen's University Canada) will give the third Denis Cosgrove Lecture on the 23rd May 2018. Elizabeth Edwards, Visting Professor at the V&A Research Institute will act as respondent.

In 1866, the young Englishman Frederick Dally opened a photographic studio in Victoria, at the time, capital of the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island. In the remarkable visual legacy he produced over the next four years, we can discern the origins of an enduring vision of British Columbia—as an outpost of Empire, as a gold rush colony, as a Royal Naval station, as the home of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. We can also recognize the power of photography as a tool of documentation, visualization, and imagination.

Dally's images reflect ideas about land and life brought to British Columbia by government administrators, Royal Engineers, and Royal Navy officers; by miners, merchants, and settlers. Compiled into personal narratives of colonial service, commercial enterprise, and individual initiative, his portraits and views helped to reinforce old world values and shape new world traditions. Pasted into albums taken back east, enclosed in letters sent abroad, published as engravings in books and the illustrated press, they have helped to focus our thinking, shape our writing, and construct our ideas about place and progress, identity and belonging in British Columbia.

Many of Dally’s images have become icons of British Columbia history. In this paper, I follow the lives and afterlives of some of these images as they moved through time and across spaces, both physical and digital. With an emphasis on context and meaning, order and materiality, this foray into oeuvre and archivesheds light on the role Dally’s photographs played in shaping both Victorian understandings of the nineteenth-century present and contemporary understandings of the Victorian past.

Moore Building, Lecture Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham

Admission is free, but booking required here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/3rd-denis-cosgrove-lecture-lives-and-afterlives-the-photographic-lens-and-legacy-of-frederick-dally-tickets-44717176278

Beaford Arts has secured funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to carry out a major conservation and digitisation exercise that will curate and publish online around 10,000 unseen images that together illustrate the late 20th Century social history of rural north Devon. It is seeking a freelance curator for the project.

The Curator will take overall responsibility for the successful development and delivery of a major exhibition in the Burton at Bideford during May and June 2019. S/he will oversee the selection, interpretation and display of a varied body of project content including but not limited to: black and white photographs from the James Ravilious and Roger Deakins collections, at least 80 Oral History recordings, film of various strands of project activity, a wealth of multimedia responses from children at 6 primary schools, the work of 6 artists in residence, responses from the project journals of around 25 volunteers, memories recorded at 20 reminiscence workshops in north Devon, and digital contributions made via our online archive www.beaford.org

Find out more and apply here: http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=31&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=728&cHash=29d5cb456af09554d10b8bb54d87a245

The first London exhibition devoted to the Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) and his photography in Asia will be shown from 12 April-22 June 2018 at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS. Thomson’s photography of China, Siam (Thailand) and Cambodia was widely praised by his peers and continues to enthuse new audiences today. The images are from newly discovered negatives held at the Wellcome Library, London.

John Thomson (1837–1921) was a Scottish photographer and writer who set off for Asia in 1862. Over the next ten years he undertook numerous journeys photographing countries including Siam, Cambodia and various provinces of China. Photographs from these journeys form one of the most extensive records of any region taken in the nineteenth century. The range, depth and aesthetic quality of John Thomson’s vision mark him out as one of the most important travel photographers.

Dr Michael Pritchard, Chief Executive of The Royal Photographic Society and photo-historian commented: “John Thomson is a key figure in nineteenth-century travel and documentary photography and this exhibition, which is long overdue, finally gives proper recognition to his career and stunning imagery”

Thomson travelled East as a professional photographer only two decades after the invention of photography. Working with the wet collodion process he travelled with cumbersome crates, glass negatives, a portable dark room, as well as highly flammable and poisonous chemicals. It took sheer perseverance and energy, through difficult terrain, to document regions where previously unseen by westerners. It is particularly remarkable that Thomson was able to make photographs of such beauty and sensitivity.

Thomson developed a method to photograph in tropical conditions which he subsequently taught to generations of young travel photographers at the Royal Geographical Society. During an era when his contemporaries were taking portraits in which their subjects looked stilted and wooden, Thomson captured the individuality and humanity of the diverse people of Asia, whether royalty or street vendor.

In Siam, Thomson was able to photograph King Mongkut Rama IV, his royal family and entourage, together with royal ceremonies such as the tonsurate ceremony and the presentation of the Lenten robes. Thomson’s panoramic views of the Chao Phraya River, temples and monks, dancers and musicians, are a unique historical treasure. In Cambodia, Thomson was the first photographer to visit Angkor Wat to record, what is now, one of the most important sites of ancient architecture in the world.

Between 1868 and 1872, Thomson made extensive trips to Beijing, Fujian and Guangdong travelling down both the Yangtse and the Min Rivers. In China, Thomson captured a wide variety of subjects from landscapes to people, architecture, domestic and street scenes. As a foreigner, Thomson’s ability to gain access to photograph women was particularly remarkable.

Whether photographing the rich and famous or people in the streets going about their business, Thomson’s desire was to present a faithful account of the people of Asia. This body of work established him as a pioneer of photojournalism and one of the most influential photographers of his time.

His collection of 700 glass plates travelled back with Thomson to Britain in 1872 and since 1921 has been housed and expertly preserved at the Wellcome Library, London. These 150 year old glass negatives are in excellent condition allowing this exhibition to showcase very large, in some cases life-size, prints.

Exhibition 

13 April-23 June 2018
Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square London WC1H 0XG
Admission Free
www.JohnThomsonExhibition.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/johnthomsonlens
Twitter: @johnthomsonlens
Blog: www.johnthomsonexhibition.org/blog

Blog: www.johnthomsonexhibition.org/blog

About the Exhibition Co-curators
Betty Yao MBE - She discovered the John Thomson glass negatives at the Wellcome Library and embarked upon a world-wide exhibition tour. She has decades of experience promoting the appreciation and understanding Asian culture. Previous posts include Programme Director of Asia House and COO of Phoenix CNE satellite and cable television channel.

Narisa Chakrabongse is Founder and CEO of River Books and Founder of Bangkok Edge, a contemporary cultural festival in Bangkok.

Images (from top): John Thomson, Siamese Youth, Manchu Bride, Chiropodist 

The Martin Parr Foundation is presenting a programme of events, over the course of two days, celebrating and exploring British photography from the 1970s. The world premier of Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, produced and directed by Grant Scott and Tim Pellatt will take place on the 20th and on the 21st a seminar will look at British photography in the 1970s and will include John Myers, Marketa Luscacova in conversation with Ken Grant, Peter Mitchell, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and David Hurn in conversation with Martin Parr.

British Photography from the 1970S
Film Premiere & Seminar Day
Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK
20 Apr to 21 Apr 2018
Further details and limited tickets available here: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/events/british-photography-from-the-1970s/

There will be further screenings of the film, including London, see: http://www.donotbendfilm.com/

Image: Mr. Jackson, 1974 © John Myers

Autograph is looking for a Full Time Archive Manager to help it undertake a programme of work to catalogue and care for its unique photographic collection as well as assess the potential to achieve accreditation.

The archive contains digital and analogue assets dating from the 1860s to current day and includes work commissioned by us from significant contemporary artists and photographers. We are looking for someone with strong technical and practical project management experience of managing and caring for  culturally significant archive assets.

Autograph ABP is highly committed to achieving an inclusive workforce to carry forward our mission to address human rights social justice, identity and representation through photography. 

Deadline for applications: Friday 4 May 2018 by 5pm. Download the job pack and application form at autograph-abp.co.uk/news/vacancy-archive-manager

Cambrdige University Special Collections has six textbooks published between 1910 and 1914. In October 1907 it hired the British artist Alfred Hugh Fisher to journey around the British empire on behalf of the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC). He was hired to take photographs and make paintings in order to create a visual record of the people, landscapes and geography of the vast empire. From these images COVIC produced a series of illustrated lantern slide lectures and textbooks which were to be presented as geography lessons to schoolchildren.

The textbooks were accompanied by sets of lantern slides (no less than 350 per book) and the university would like to locate sets of the original slides.

Read more here: https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=16032#comment-33577

The final resting place of the photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) who photographed in China and Asia in the 1860s and 1870s has been recently located and is the subject of a project to restore it. Located in Streatham cemetery, south London, the badly eroded headstone has fallen over and is lying flat on the ground with the inscription barely legible.

Scottish photographer, John Thomson, was one of the first to extensively document the Far East between 1862-1872.  He photographed in China, Thailand and Cambodia, publishing his images in a series of books. In association with Adolphe Smith, he produced the seminal book Street Life in London (1876-77), a visual and written survey of the people of London.

Thomson was a member of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society) from 1879, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where he instructed many of the great Victorian explorers and expeditions in photography.

His photographs provide a rich and lasting visual record of the Far East and closer to home. It is fitting that his grave is restore to renew memorial to a remarkable man and his work.

A new exhibition of Thomson's photography China and Siam Through the Lens of John Thomson has opened at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London and is on view until 23 June 2018. 

Please donate to renovate John Thomson’s grave: www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/johnthomsongravestone

Image courtesy of Terry Bennett. 

The next Cultures of Photography seminar in conjunction with the Photographic History Research Centre takes place at De Montfort University, Leicester, on 9 April 2018 from 1700-1830. 

In a paper titled: For ‘the interchange of thought and experience among photographers’. The role of the photographic society in British photography Michael Pritchard will discuss some of his recent research looking at the role of the photographic society in nineteenth century Britain.

Cultures of Photography Seminars
Spring Term 2018| 9 April l Clephan Building 2.02b l 5.00-6:30pm
Open to all
@PHRC_DeMontfort
facebook.com/PhotographicResearch

For the past seven years, photographer Tif Hunter has nursed an interest in ‘tintypes’. These are handmade, one-off images which use a 19th century technique, developed in the early days of photography. First invented in the 1850s, tintypes were particularly popular during the Civil War in late 19th century America.

Messums Wiltshire is offering the unique experience of having a tin-type portrait taken by Tif in our 13th century barn. There are only twelve opportunities, across the course of two days for this to happen! Tin-types are original in ways that photographs from the 20th and 21st century simply are not. There are no negatives to print from and no other ways of creating identical multiple images. When Tif creates his beautiful prints he does so through using digital scanning and printing techniques. Tin-types, produced literally on a single tin sheet cannot be modified in anyway. Tif joins a whole host of makers such as the ceramicist and painter Makoto Kagoshima who have created one-off pieces of art in our medieval barn.

A tintype is a photograph with warm monochromatic tones on a thin sheet of metal. Tintypes, (or wetplates as they are also known) involve a cocktail of chemicals and must be prepared moments before the image is taken and developed and fixed immediately after. Each one-off tintype has a beautiful surface of marks and smears resulting from the chemistry involved. The final image is grainless with exquisitely smooth tones.

This photographic experience will be complemented by a pop-up exhibition – Mirror Mirror – Tif’s original tin-types and prints in the Long Gallery spanning the genres of still life and portraiture. This will be the prologue for our larger Image show on from 15 September – 21 October 2018 across both of our exhibition spaces. Image is a two-fold exhibition showcasing a diverse range of contemporary and historical photographers, with a focus on portraiture, encompassing Surrealism, fashion, celebrity and visual humour. This show will feature some of the most respected names in the industry such as Peter Beard, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, Mick Rock, Guy Bourdin and Neal Slavin. Upcoming and established women artists featured in our medieval barn will include Anna Fox, Alison Goldfrapp, Polly Penrose, Maisie Cousins and Juno Calypso.

Hunter’s pioneering work with tintype portraiture, combined with 21st century lighting techniques, has led to many commissions including those from The Jerwood Foundation and retailer Toast. Tif has worked for an international range of clients for over twenty years. His commercial work has been featured in Lurzer's Archive 200 Best Ad Photographers Worldwide. Hunter’s clients include British Airways, Sony and The Guardian. His personal work has been exhibited and sold at the Michael Hoppen Gallery. Tif Hunter lives and works in an 1850s saddlery workshop in Bermondsey, London.

Mirror Mirror
Private view & talk 16 May 2018
Portrait Experience 19-20 May 2018
See: https://messumswiltshire.com/mirror-mirror/

Messums Wiltshire

Place Farm, Court St, Tisbury, 
Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP3 6LW

E: info@messumswiltshire.com
T: 01747 445042

Rochester, NY will draw hundreds of people April 20th-22nd to celebrate the past and present of photography at the RIT Photo History Photo Future Conference. 

The three- day conference includes presentations from academics, individual researchers and hobbyists alike. Topics to be covered range from photogravure, paper and chemicals, education, historical cameras and research projects (full program can be viewed here: https://www.rit.edu/twc/photohistoryconference/program ). The conference will be followed by an antiquarian photography sale on Sunday where conferees will be able to browse and purchase antique photography books, equipment,and ephemera. 

Registration is still open at: https://www.rit.edu/twc/photohistoryconference/register . This conference is sponsored by the Rochester Institute of Technology Library and the RIT Press publishing enterprise.

Dr Gil Pasternak of De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) has secured a grant of over £500,000 for a project DigiCONFLICT exploring the role of digital media in defining cultural heritage. Pasternak, Senior Research Fellow in Photographic History, will lead the research consortium consisting of a team of researchers from DMU, the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Linköping University in Sweden.

The grant was awarded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage (JPICH), which is part of the European Commission, and fits with the European Union’s Year of Cultural Heritage taking place during 2018.

The project will run between 2018 and 2021 to explore how national and ethnic communities around the world have used digital heritage to define and preserve their cultural assets and sense of morality.

With their research mainly considering case studies from Sweden, Israel and Poland, the three partner institutions will focus on oral history, multimedia museums and photography as the most commonly used media employed in digital heritage.

They will also commission other scholars, curators, archivists, digitisation officers and librarians from around the world to write related essays to give the project a bigger spread of data. “We will be looking into the realities that have been established around digitisation and digitalisation practices,” Dr Pasternak explained. “Digital heritage has largely become a lynchpin of educational and ideological efforts. As such it allows us to explore how established nations, culturally diverse societies and ethnic minorities transform around its making and dissemination.

“We will be looking at what happens to historical narratives, moral values and national and personal identities when politicians, policymakers, third-sector professionals and community members come together to turn tangible and intangible cultural products into digital data.”

Originally from Israel, now British, and of Jewish and Polish heritage, Dr Pasternak feels the subject matter of the project is of significance to individuals and societies alike. But he also believes that the current global interest in the impact of politics on national and personal identities makes this the perfect time to embark on this project.

He said: “At the moment we are living in a time when it is plainly visible how culture and cultural differences have become key political benefits as well as challenges in many countries. We will be looking into the way that majority and minority communities turn to digital heritage in order to claim and reshape spaces, histories and various social rights. Digital heritage is a medium that confronts the past and the present with each other, so our research will have both historical and contemporary value.”

Background

DigiCONFLICT will explore the impact of digital heritage on contemporary engagements with the past in specific national frameworks in Poland, Sweden and Israel. Focusing on oral history, photography and multimedia museums as some of the most common media used to digitalize cultural heritage, the project responds to the Call’s ‘Critical Engagements with Digital Heritage’ trajectory, endeavoring to challenge widespread claims about the universality and democratizing abilities of digital heritage. Even though digital heritage maintains the potential to increase cohesion across nations and social groups, it is equally used to cement elite power structures, define what counts as cultural heritage, and determine whose cultural heritage is worthy of preservation. While acknowledging the role digital heritage plays in shaping and distributing cultural heritage, the project’s point of departure is that digital heritage cannot be considered in separation from historical, cultural and national contexts.

The project has three main aims:

1. to explore how national politics affect digital definitions of cultural heritage
2. to investigate who creates and engages with digital heritage, and how, and
3. to study how the scope and value of cultural heritage are being negotiated and reformulated in a
   digital context.

The consortium will elaborate innovative research approaches to digital heritage through analysis of policy documents related to the case studies, to understand how specific institutions, governments and communities define, mark, and share cultural heritage. To achieve its aims, the consortium will employ interviews with professionals and members of communities who participate in the digitalization of cultural heritage. It will study what parameters affect the creation of digital heritage products, inquire what is gained and lost when cultural heritage becomes digital, and explore who the main beneficiaries are. Findings will mainly be disseminated via scholarly and mainstream publications, workshops, and a dedicated interactive website.