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

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

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

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

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

Dr Michael Pritchard 

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

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

Followed by questions from the floor and photobook signing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: William Russell, High Street, 1853

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

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

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

Tickets are £5 and can be booked here.

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

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

Read Ben's article here. 

From 2019 to early 2020 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinbrugh, shows off highlights from an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired jointly by the NGS and the National Library of Scotland. Amassed by collector Murray MacKinnon, The MacKinnon Collection documents Scottish life and identity from the 1840s through to the 1940s and includes photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Annan, Roger Fenton, George Washington Wilson, and others. The MacKinnon Collection is distinguished by the work of photographers who captured unprecedented images that brilliantly transport us back to a century of changing rural communities, growing cities and enduring historic sites, but also illuminate the faces and places that continue to affect our lives today.

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

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

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:

• Alfred Cheney Johnston (1884 - 1971) ‘The Cutter Sisters’, gelatin silver print, ca.1922, captioned in pencil, photographer’s stamp on verso. (Lot 2545) £1,000 - £1,500.
• Leif Erik Nygards (b. 1939) ‘Marilyn Monroe, Bel Air Hotel, June 27th, 1962’, chromogenic print, signed, titled, dated and inscribed in ink by photographer on verso ' MM photographed in Los Angeles / at Bel Air Hotel, June 27th 1962', photographer's printed copyright stamp 1962 / 1996, print no. 8 above inscription. Considered to be the last professional photograph taken of Marilyn before her death on 5th August, 1962. (Lot 2589) £3,000 - £4,000.
• Dora Marr (1907 - 1997) ‘Untitled’, depicting a nude taking off a robe, ca.1930s, gelatin silver print, mounted, with the estate sale stamp 'Atelier Dora Maar 1907 - 1997 19 novembre 1999 lot 86' on verso. (Lot 2563) £2,000 - £3,000.
• Irving Penn (1917 – 2009) ‘Nude 65’, 1949, gelatin silver print, printed 1949 -1950, mounted, annotations, limitation one of 23 stamp, titled, dated, photographer’s copyright stamp, numbered and signed by the photographer on verso. (Lot 2569) £10,000 – £12,000

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. 

See more: http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/hi/gnt/dsi2/index.php?function=show_static_page&id_static_page=1&table_name=dsi

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 fee waiver at the Home/EU rate
• tax-free stipend of £15,000 per annum.

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