Sworders has a eclectic private collection for auction on 9 July. The catalogue notes that 'over the past forty years, this collection has been an inspiration and source of daily pleasure. Like dreams, the unexpected connections between disparate objects can open doors to new curiosities, new passions. It is our hope that the surprising juxtapositions found here will spark fresh journeys of discovery for their new custodians.'

The auction includes a significant amount of photography commencing with large groups of Czech, American, Canadian, German, and Japanese photobooks and illustrated maagzines, themes 100 years of celebrity culture, daguerreotypes, photographs, stereographs, and albums, work by Richard Billingham, Lartigue, Anders Petersen, Tony Ray-Jones, Angus McBean, Mark Gerson, Simon Norfolk, Berenice Abbott, Robert Capa, Ilya Kabakov, František Drtikol, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Sudek, Eve Arnold, Frederick Leslie Kenett, Cecil Beaton, Amelia Elizabeth Gimingham, large groups of mixed photography, themed lots including Ruskin, Czech, aviation, military, East European, cycling, boxing, theatre, film, stage, jazz, pop music, royalty, naval, civil war, medical, and press. 

DREAMS | A Unique Private Collection
Wednesday 9 July 2025 | 10am
In Person and Online

https://www.sworder.co.uk/auction/details/a1244-dreams--a-unique-private-collection/?au=1272

 Image: top: Tony Ray-Jones (1941-1972), 'A Portfolio of Fifteen Photographs 1967-1969' from 1975,  right: Blow Up, poster, 1967; left: Josef Sudek, lot 92; below, lot 38, A collection of flower and plant studies c.1890s and later, comprising various photographs of flower and plant studies by Amelia Elizabeth Gimingham

With a on-going renewal of interest in pictorialism this new book is a timely - and welcome - addition to the literature. It brings new insights in to one of the key photographic styles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pictorialism is a complex and multi-faceted movement. Initiated around 1890 in England, with antecendents back to the late 1850s, it rapidly spread across Europe and in the United States before reaching other parts of the globe. Its creators were mainly amateur photographers who wished to demonstrate the creative potential of photography and to liberate it from its simple function of copying or documenting by producing 'artistic' photographs able to convey the photographer's emotion. In order to do so, these photographers focused on what they called 'interpretation' and theorised the freedom to intervene in the making of an image, whether it be while taking the picture (soft focus lenses), on the negative (etching of the gelatine layer) or on the positive (use of specific printing processes such as platinum, carbon or gum bichromate, transforming deeply the image as recorded on the negative).

To defend their ideals and promote their vision of photography, the Pictorialists gathered in societies, clubs or brotherhoods, such as the Linked Ring in England, the Photo-Club de Paris in France, L’Effort in Belgium, or the Photo-Secession in the United States. They also organized countless international exhibitions dedicated to pictorial photography and published hundreds of illustrated books, magazines and portfolios, sumptuously printed in photogravure, the most famous example being Camera Work, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1903.

Popular at the turn of the twentieth century, the movement attracted numerous photographers and its leaders were known all over the world: Frederick H. Evans and James Craig Annan for Great-Britain, Robert Demachy and Constant Puyo for France, Heinrich Kühn and Hugo Henneberg for Austria, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White or Gertrude Käsebier for the United States. 

Eventually challenged by a new generation of photographers who wanted to develop an aesthetic based upon the 'inner qualities' of photography (objectivity, clarity, sharpness), Pictorialism was gradually replaced by New Vision after the First World War. Nevertheless, its ideals and resources did not disappear and its supporters were active during the interwar period and after both in Europe and the United States. As a proof of the vitality of this late – or second generation – pictorialist schools appeared at the time in countries that had previously had little or no involvement in the 1900s movement: Japan, the Czech Republic, Canada, Australia, etc. Although the approach of the photographers from that time evolved taking into account the graphic revolutions of the New Vision, they remained faithful in their endeavour to the aesthetic principles defined originally.

Anchored in the most up-to-date research, this new book – in French – aims at giving a clear and accessible overview of Pictorialism. It deals with the movement in its different aspects to convey a complete and detailed vision to the reader. It considers:

• The main photographers who associated their names with this movement;
• The different countries that took part in this collective adventure;
• The multiple printing processes specific to Pictorialism and that made its aesthetics famous (pigment prints, of course, but also other printing techniques, together with the autochrome and photogravure);
• A time-span longer than the one usually examined in order to include interwar Pictorialism, long forgotten in photographic studies.

Representative and emblematic photographs have been chosen for each selected photographer. Alongside the key figures are less prominent artists to emphasise the fact that Pictorialism was not only adopted by a few men and women whose names remain well-known today, but seduced numerous amateurs with various ambitions and careers, some of whom still wait to be rediscovered and studied.

Features of the book

Reflecting the broadness of the subject, this Photo Poche volume - the 181st in the series - is a double issue (248 pages) gathering 125 photographs by 77 photographers from 15 countries. Photographers are represented by either one, three or five photographs.

The text gathers:

• An introductory essay presenting Pictorialism, its history, characteristics and stakes;
• A record for each photographer, giving key information to understand their work;
• Appendices consisting of:
  • a glossary of technical processes;
  • a bibliography of the most important pictorialist publications;
  • a bibliography of modern studies on the subject.

Moreover, all the works reproduced are precisely captioned, dated and identified, as to their technical process.

List of photographers

Germany: Rudolf Dührkoop, Georg Einbeck, Hugo Erfurth, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Theodor et Oscar Hofmeister, Baron A. de Meyer, Nicola Perscheid, Otto Scharf ; Australia: John Kauffmann ; Austria: Hugo Henneberg, Heinrich Kühn, Hans Watzek ; Belgium: Émile Chavepeyer, Gustave Marissiaux, Léonard Misonne, Émile Rombaut ; Canada: Harold Mortimer-Lamb ; Spain: Antoni Arissa, Antoni Campañà Bandranas, José Ortiz Echagüe ; United-States: Paul L. Anderson, Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Anne Brigman, Alvin L. Coburn, William E. Dassonville, F. Holland Day, Rudolf Eickemeyer, Frank Eugene, Adolf Fassbender, Paul B. Haviland, Gertrude Käsebier, George H. Seeley, Edward J. Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Karl F. Struss, Clarence H. White ; France: George Besson, Fernand Bignon, Maurice Bucquet, Mme A. Deglane, Robert Demachy, Pierre Dubreuil, Alfred Fauvarque-Omez, Alphonse Gibory, André Hachette, Céline Laguarde, René Le Bègue, Charles Lhermitte, René Michau, Antonin Personnaz, Constant Puyo ; Great-Britain: James Craig Annan, Malcolm Arbuthnot, Mme G. A. Barton, Walter Benington, Will et Carine Cadby, George Davison, Frederick H. Evans, Alfred Horsley Hinton, Charles Job, J. Dudley Johnston, Alex Keighley, James McKissack, F. J. Mortimer, J. C. Warburg ; Italy: Mario Caffaratti, Domenico Riccardo Peretti-Griva, Guido Rey ; Japan: Ōri Umesaka ; Netherlands: Henri Berssenbrugge, Bernard F. Eilers, John Vanderpant ; Czech Republic: František Drtikol, Drahomír Josef Růžička, Anton Josef Trčka ; Russia: Alexis Mazourine ; Switzerland: Fred Boissonnas

La photographie pictorialiste
Julien Faure-Conorton
Collection « Photo Poche », Actes Sud, 2025
248 pages, 19,50€
ISBN: 9782330120108
Order here

Images: top: Constant Puyo, Éventail, 1900, héliogravure (L’Art photographique, 1900), Collection Raphaël Debilly,Paris; left: F. Holland Day, Achille, 1903, platine, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-cns-00168]

Museum Dialogues was initiated as a 12-month research networking project aiming to transcend the disciplinary boundaries of art history, visual culture, photography, new media, museum and curating studies and bridge theory and practice. Bringing together academic researchers and practitioners, the programme has supported the exchange of innovative solutions, inquiries, and practical challenges relating to the exhibition, collection, and interpretation of photography. During 2024, three workshops were held on Zoom, as well as an international conference held in Sunderland, UK and online. 

You can read reflective articles about the workshops and conference, and view new videos and digital murals on the website www.museumdialogues.co.uk 

We're in conversation with independent archivist and educator Cassia Clarke as she introduces her new book Preserving the Familial Archive, facilitated by writer, playwright, artist/curator and scholar Michael McMillan. Preserving the Familial Archive is Cassia Clarke’s debut publication, offering practical, sustainable, and cost-effective strategies for preserving printed photographic archives in your home. Covering everything from fact-finding, handling, packaging, storage, making tough choices, and the emotional complexities of preservation. Cassia also shares personal anecdotes from her own preservation journey, making the process both relatable and insightful.

Cassia Clarke is an independent community archivist and artist educator whose work focuses on acquiring, critiquing, reconstructing, and sharing knowledge, with an emphasis on compassionate conservation and person-centred facilitation. Cassia prioritises learning as a form of freedom and enjoyment. 

Michael McMillan, Arts.D. is a British born writer, playwright, artist/curator and scholar to parents from St Vincent & the Grenadines, who is best known for the much-loved and critically acclaimed The Front Room installation that has been iterated nationally and internationally. His interdisciplinary practice centres around the praxis (theory and practice) of ‘the creative process, ethnography, oral histories, material culture and performativity’.

Preserving the Familial Archive
6 August 2025 at 1830 (BST), £5
London Archives, 40 Northampton Road, London, EC1R 0HB
Booking here

A new photography exhibition Then and Now: London’s transport in photographs opens on Monday 23 June at London Transport Museum in Covent Garden to mark the 25th anniversary of Transport for London (TfL). The new photographic display explores how public transport in London has evolved amid social change. Visitors will be able to compare scenes from the capital’s past with the present day, revealing the major influence transport infrastructure has had on the city’s development. 

The exhibition features 40 striking photographs, bringing together historical images from the Museum’s collection – some dating back to the 19th century – alongside newly commissioned contemporary images by photographer and TfL Train Driver, Anne Maningas.To mark the 25th anniversary of TfL, London Transport Museum commissioned Maningas to document public transport in the city today. Her new images are responses to highlights from the Museum’s collection.   

Anne Maningas is a self-taught, internationally published photographer whose work explores the themes of journeys, being in transit and public transport. Her unique perspective is influenced by her role as a Train Driver at TfL, where she brings a deep understanding of the city’s transport network to her work. As part of her collaboration with London Transport Museum on this exhibition, Maningas was loaned a vintage Bronica medium format film camera from the 1990s – previously used by a Museum photographer and curator. A passionate analogue photographer, Maningas uses traditional film and mechanical cameras to create evocative images that reflect the rhythm of urban life. All the contemporary images featured in the exhibition were produced using analogue processes, highlighting her commitment to traditional photographic techniques.  

Photographer and TfL Train Driver, Anne Maningas said: ‘As someone who works within the transport network, it was a privilege to document it from a different angle. These photos are my way of showing the quiet beauty in the movement of the city. Being able to use analogue film for this project added a sense of continuity with our transport heritage, and it was especially meaningful to shoot with a vintage film camera once used by a London Transport Museum photographer.’  

Matt Brosnan, Head Curator at London Transport Museum said: ‘Photography has played a vital role in documenting the lives of Londoners as they travel across the city and its transport workers as they keep our capital moving. Our striking archive images bring to life London’s rich history and transport past. That’s why we commissioned Anne Maningas to create a contemporary response to standout images from our historic collection. These images reveal not only how the city has changed, but also how transport continues to shape the lives of Londoners every day.’  

Emma Strain, Transport for London’s Customer Director said: 'Seeing how London's transport network has developed from the past to where it is today, through this photography exhibition from one of our train drivers, is really impactful. Anne Maningas’ photographs help to show how integral transport is to the daily lives of Londoners and visitors and how transport services are continually improving. The transformation of London’s transport network since TfL formed 25 years ago is something we're immensely proud of and we encourage everyone to visit the Transport Museum to see this fantastic exhibition.' 

The Then and now: London’s transport in photographs exhibition will run until Spring 2026. For more information visit Then and now: London's transport in photographs   London Transport Museum's permanent photography gallery, where the Then and Now exhibition will be displayed, was made possible thanks to a grant from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund.  

Entry to the Then and Now exhibition is included with Museum admission. Adult tickets to visit London Transport Museum in Covent Garden include free return day-time entry for a whole year, and kids go free! To book visit: ltmusuem.co.uk   

Images: top: : Bus on Oxford Street at twilight, by Topical Press, 1935. Copyright London Transport Museum Collection; left: Interchange concourse at Piccadilly Circus Underground station, by Anne Maningas, 2025. Copyright London Transport Museum Collection. 

Leading Rosebury's Fine and Decorative auction on 10 July is a lot 142 a rare deluxe copy - one of twenty-five - of Emerson and Goodall's Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886). The volume was part of a total limited edition of 200, with the twenty-five deluxe copies containing forty platinum prints mounted on India paper, bound in vellum and other enhanced printing. The lot is estimated at £30,000-50,000 with a starting bid of £20,000. 

Eslewhere is a portrait of Winston Churchill, signed and from the estate of his valet, by Edward Steichen. It is estimated at £1000-1500, with a starting bid of £700. 

Fine and Decorative
Rosebury's, London, 10 July 2025
Emerson, lot 142 - see here

The programme and registration for this student-led conference is now open. Photographs are mobile and malleable. They travel between people and places, change appearance and form, and traverse through different settings and environments. In image-led societies, photographs are often disrupted or removed from their original contexts to be repurposed by governments, institutions and researchers, as well as by artists, communities, campaigners, and many others.  How, and to what ends, are these photographs being repurposed, and by whom? How does repurposing photographic materials impact social, cultural, and political phenomena? This conference aims to facilitate discussions on the reuse, recirculation, and transformation of photographs, and explore the ways in which they have been re-employed in both the contemporary and historical contexts. 

‘Repurposing Photographic Materials’ is a student-led hybrid conference on photography and visual culture, funded by Midlands4Cities through the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It provides a platform for speakers and audience members to share their ideas, receive constructive feedback, and establish valuable networks. The event is open to anyone interested in the conference’s research topics, including students, academics, artists, and practitioners. Updates will be posted to the website and to the social media pages.

The programme: 

Day 1: Monday 7th July 2025

Panel 1: Repurposing Historical Photographic Practices and Processes (Chair: Jo Gane)

09:30 - 09:35 Panel 1 Opening (Jo Gane)
09:35 - 09:50 Jo Gane (Birmingham City University) Repurposing historical photographic processes: Re-creation
09:50 - 10:05 Martin Jürgens (De Montfort University) Repurposing in the 1840s? The case of multiplying the unique daguerreotype
10:05 - 10:20 Aindreas Scholz (Technical University Dublin) Reactivating Cyanotype: Repurposing 19th-Century Photographic Practices for Ecological Resistance
10:20 - 10:50 Panel 1 Q&A
10:50 - 11:05 Break

Panel 2: Photographic Interventions in Political Struggles and Transformations (Chair: Javed Sultan)

11:05 - 11:10 Panel 2 Opening (Javed Sultan)
11:10 - 11:25 V. Emmanuel Leon Bobadilla (University of Oxford) The affordances of photographic annotations: thinking through 'The Class' by Marcelo Brodsky
11:25 - 11:40 Emma Colombi (University for Foreigners of Perugia) Recovering the Past. The Contemporary Reuse and Re-signification of Italy’s 1968–1977 Protest Photography
11:40 - 11:55 Vincent Hasselbach (University College London) আওয়াজ উডা – কথা ক/ awaaz utha – kotha ko: potential histories and anticipated futures in the visual and material cultures of the 2024 monsoon revolution
11:55 - 12:10 Kateryna Volochniuk (University of St Andrews) Operational Images and Industrial Discipline: The Case of Soviet Photo-Accusations
12:10 - 12:40 Panel 2 Q&A

Panel 3: Reimagining Archival Photography in Contemporary Practice (Chair: Emma Hyde)

13:40 - 13:45 Panel 3 Opening (Emma Hyde)
13:45 - 14:00 Kamal Badhey (University of Brighton) Building Regional and Transnational Contexts with the Family Albums of the Apna Heritage Archive
14:00 - 14:15 Emma Hyde (De Montfort University) Digitisation as Repurposing: Photographs in the Age of a “Digital Revolution”
14:15 - 14:30 Daniel Rathbone (University of Warwick) Remembering Places: The People’s Parks Archive Project and Photographic Histories in South Africa
14:30 - 15:00 Panel 3 Q&A

Day 2: Tuesday 8th July 2025

Panel 4: Participatory Photography and Constructing Identity (Chair: Victoria Shaw)

09:30 - 09:35 Panel 4 Opening (Victoria Shaw)
09:35 - 09:50 Huw Alden Davies (University of West England Bristol) Collective Identity Through Community Portraiture
09:50 - 10:05 Molly Caenwyn Warren (University of Westminster) Repurposing the (Queer) Home in the (Home) Darkroom
10:05 - 10:20 Philip Waterworth (Sheffield Hallam University) The disabled flaneur: Using a method of collage to map and negotiate disability and assemble memories of place
10:20 - 10:50 Panel 4 Q&A
10:50 - 11:05 Break

Panel 5: Photographic Transformations in Social and Cultural Heritage (Chair: Daniel Rathbone)

11:05 - 11:10 Panel 5 Opening (Daniel Rathbone)
11:10 - 11:25 Madeleine Bonham Jones (Birkbeck, University of London) The Golden Age of the Ocean Liner: Postcards of RMS Aquitania and the Corporate Image
11:25 - 11:40 Devon McCulloch (University of Brighton) Alien Registration: The Passport Photo, Bureaucratic Procedures Past and Present
11:40 - 11:55 Alfisha Sabri (University of Warwick) Framing Imperial Fantasies: A Historical Study of Mussoorie’s Photographs and their Nostalgic Present
11:55 - 12:10 So Yin Tam (University of Oxford) Co-authorship in Focus: Contractual Metafiction in Conceptual Photography, 1970s–1980s
12:10 - 12:40 Panel 5 Q&A
12:40 - 13:40 Lunch

Panel 6: Photographic Representations and Re-presentations of Community Memories (Chair: Caroline Fucci)

13:40 - 13:45 Panel 6 Opening (Caroline Fucci)
13:45 - 14:00 Caroline Fucci (University of Leicester) Looking at the Big Picture: Archive, Narrative, and History in Biennial Exhibitions
14:00 - 14:15 Isabel Collazos Gottret (University of Leicester) Repurposing from within, weaving logic and purpose into the Artecampo Museum Archive
14:15 - 14:30 Emily Patten (University for the Creative Arts) A Lesbian Narrative: The Impact of Dissemination Methods on Tessa Boffin’s Photographic Tableau, The Knight’s Move (1990)
14:30 - 15:00 Panel 6 Q&A

Closing
15:00 - 15:05 Closing talk (Javed Sultan)

Repurposing Photographic Materials
Hybrid, 7-8 July 2025
Regisration is free
Leicester, De Montfort University
Full programme and abstracts here: https://studentphotocon2025.wordpress.com/

Christie's is offering the Yann Maillet collection of daguerreotypes online until 26 June. The collection includes many important daguerreotypes from 1839 including images from such key figures as Samuel Morse, Robert Cornelius, John Ruskin, Platt D. Babbitt, Henry Fitz Jr., Plumbe, Moreau, Durand, Eynard, Plumier, Francis Grice, Bogardus, Helsby, and more than two dozen plates by Southworth & Hawes, representing the process across north and south America and Europe. 

Of particular note to BPH are several daguerreotypes from Beard patentees, three views of Florence by John Ruskin, c.1846, and two views of a half-timbered building which BPH has identified as the Market House, Ledbury, Herefordshire. 

See the auction here

Images: top: lot 82. Unknown photographer(s), Half-timbered building, [Market House, Ledbury, Herefordshire], c.1846;  right: lot 32. John Ruskin (1819-1900), San Miniato al Monte, Florence, c.1846

The V&A's Photography Centre rooms 100 and 101 reopened today, Saturday, 14 June, with a new survey display of American Photographs. It is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 publication American Photographs, which capture a country in flux and at times turmoil. The display uses Evans's title to examine how photography has documented and shaped the United States. The V&A's collection of photography from America is one of the largest outside of the North America and over 300 works are on display. These range from photographs to publications and cameras, spanning the period 1840 to today, including recent acquisitions. The display will remain in situ until 2027 and coincides with the 2026 American bisesquicentennial commemorations. 

American Photographs
Rooms 100 and 101, until 16 July 2027
V&A Museum, South Kensington, London
Admission free
See details and display highlights: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/american-photographs

V&A website image: Anne Collier, Le femme la photo et Pentax, 2013, C-type print. 

The V&A Touring Exhibition Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron explores the path-breaking career of photography’s first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815–1879) was born in Calcutta (modern day Kolkata) to a French mother and an English father; in 1848, with her husband and children, she moved to England, where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles in which they traveled. Residing on the Isle of Wight, where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48. In only eleven years she would create thousands of exposures and leave an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Cameron’s prodigious drive helped her become a probing portraitist of leading writers, artists, and scientists, such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin, while her absorption with fine art, notably Renaissance painting, led her to create staged tableaux in a mode that has been perpetually rediscovered by photographers down to the present. Most distinct of all was Cameron’s wholly personal handling of her medium. Heedless of  contemporary conventions of technique, alert to the happy effects of accident, and indifferent to critical scorn, she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. Motion blur, highly selective focus, and even fingerprints on the glass negatives (which required developing before their emulsions dried) are among the idiosyncrasies of her singular oeuvre.

Cameron was quick to exploit publishing and promotional opportunities: at London’s South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum) she secured not only an exhibition in 1865 but, a few years later, studio space, and she was the first photographic artist to be collected by the institution. Arresting Beauty features prints from its initial purchase and from subsequent additions to its holdings, which have grown to number nearly one thousand. The exhibition includes Cameron’s large camera lens (all that survives of her apparatus), pages from her unfinished memoir manuscript Annals of My Glass House, and portraits she made in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after Cameron and her husband moved there in 1875.

The exhibition was developed by the V&A's Lisa Springer, International Programmes Curator, and Curator Marta Weiss who acted as curatorial advisor; and for the Morgan Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, and Allison Pappas, Jane P. Watkins Assistant Curator of Photography.   

Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
Until 14 September 2025
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
See more and selected images here: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/arresting-beauty

Image: Julia Margaret Cameron, A Group of Kalutara Peasants, 1878, albumen print. The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund. Museum no. RPS.1093-2017

Photo Museum Ireland, baded in Dublin, is seeking a Collection Manager & Digital Archivist which is both a strategic and hands-on position. The postholder will manage the development of our collection, overseeing acquisition, cataloguing, digitisation, and public access, including registrar duties for temporary exhibitions. This role will also take the lead on our artist-focused archival initiatives and digitisation projects. These include collaborative archival residencies and projects building on our recent archival digitisation projects.

The role also involves managing major collaborative projects, working closely with institutional and international partners. At the intersection of archival practice, digital innovation, and artist collaboration, this role supports one of the museum’s core strategic priorities of developing the Museum’s Collection.

This is a unique opportunity to shape Ireland’s most ambitious contemporary photography archive, to work directly with artists and estates, and to contribute meaningfully to a dynamic cultural institution that values creativity, inclusivity, and innovation.

Photo Museum Ireland is the national centre for contemporary photography, dedicated to advancing the development, appreciation and understanding of photography and visual culture across Ireland. We connect diverse audiences with inspirational and exciting photography and visual culture. 

Our mission is to support, curate and promote great photography while supporting both established and emerging artists to develop their practices. 

See: https://photomuseumireland.ie/collection-manager-digital-archivist/
To apply, submit your CV and a cover letter detailing your suitability for the role to recruitment@photomuseumireland.ie by 18th July 2025.

Nick Hedges, best known for his powerful campaigning photography of poor housing undertaken for Shelter in the late 1960s and 1970s has died.  Born in Bromsgrove in 1943, Hedges was one of the UK’s most compassionate documentarian photographers for almost 50 years, as well as a long-time campaigner for social justice. In the 1970s Hedges worked with organisations such as Half Moon Gallery in London, Newcastle’s Side Gallery, Camerawork and Ten.8 magazines, and from 1980 to 2003 he was head of photography at West Midlands College of Higher Education and the University of Wolverhampton. 

Between 1968 and 1972, he worked for Shelter, National Campaign for the Homeless, highlighting the UK’s dire housing crisis, work that was shown at London’s Science Museum and in 2021 was published by Bluecoat Press as Home, alongside another book, Street. His images transformed how the urban poor were visualised in the UK. He also produced series on religious beliefs in Wolverhampton, the fishing industry in Tyneside, factory workers in the West Midlands, rural life in Worcestershire and more. 

He received the Royal Photographic Society's Hood medal 'for a body of photographic work produced to promote or raise awareness of an aspect of public benefit or service.' in 2016. His work is in the collections of the National Science and Media Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is archived at the Library of Birmingham.

Hedges spoke about his work in conversation with Martin Parr at BOP, Bristol, in 2021. 

See:  nickhedgesphotography.co.uk and thanks to bluecoatpress.co.uk which published two of Hedges's books: Street and Home.

An exhibition of Nick's Shelter work was shown as Make Life Worth Living: Nick Hedges’ Photographs for Shelter, 1968-72 in the Virgin Media Studio at Media Space at the Science Museum from 2014-2015. See: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/make-life-worth-living-nick-hedges-photographs-for-shelter-1968-72/

Images: top: Nick Hedges and Martin Parr in conversation at BOP 2021; right: Nick Hedges; below: photographers David Hurn (seated left), Daniel Meadows (standing), Nick Hedges and Martin Parr. All © Michael Pritchard. 

A new exhibition of previously unseen works by Magnum photographer Werner Bischof has opened at Lacock’s Fox Talbot Museum, in collaboration with Magnum Photos. An early adopter of colour photography through his use of the Devin Tri-Color camera, Unseen Colour brings the photojournalist’s re-discovered colour work to UK audiences for the first time. Bischof became an associate member of Magnum in 1948 and a full-member from 1949. Lacock, which is cared for by the National Trust, is hosting the exhibition for a full year in the gallery space of the museum.

Largely considered one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Werner Bischof’s iconic images explored what it is to be human. Famed for his black and white photojournalism of the post-war world, Bischof used the Devin Tri-Color camera  from 1939 onwards for fashion, still life and documentary work. In 2016, decades after Werner’s death (he died in 1954, aged 38), his son Marco discovered the glass negatives taken by the camera, carefully stored in triplicate. ‘They were always treated with special reverence.’ he says, ‘In their steel cabinets, they formed a kind of ‘mysterious room’. Composed of one identical image captured three times through different colour filters: red, green and blue, the resulting photos have an incredible resolution and unmistakable colour intensity.

Working with scanning specialists, Marco Bischof and Tania Kuhn of the Werner Bischof Estate worked over several years to bring the Devin Tri-Color  negatives back to light. The images in Unseen Colour, all taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, present a treasure trove of previously unknown colour photographs.  

‘Werner Bischof wanted to become a painter, contrary to the ideas of his father, a factory director,’ says Marco, ‘he became a photographer, his love of colour has always accompanied him. In many situations, he would first sketch before he began to take photographs. Today we are amazed by these pictures. But anyone who takes a closer look at Bischof's work knows that he used colour from the very beginning.’

Curator Andy Cochrane says ‘it’s perfect that the UK premiere of Bischof’s Unseen Colour is at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock. Henry Fox Talbot developed photography at Lacock as he couldn’t paint or draw. Constance Talbot is one of the world’s earliest women photographers, and unlike her husband Henry, preferred painting to photography. Werner Bischof’s exhibition at Lacock combines the ambitions and artistry of both Constance and Henry Fox Talbot.’    

The Fox Talbot Museum explores Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative at Lacock Abbey in 1835, with exhibitions celebrating both historic and contemporary photographic techniques from photographers around the world. Unseen Colour is the first in a three-year programme of exhibitions curated in collaboration with Magnum Photos.

‘We are particularly pleased to show the exhibition at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, the place where the first negative - also on glass – first had a home.’ Marco adds. 

Unseen Colour
 until 31 May 2026.
The Gallery, Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock
See: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/wiltshire/lacock/discover-photography-at-the-fox-talbot-museum#rt-the-fox-talbot-museum-at-lacock

 Images: top: Model with rose for beauty advertisement, Studio Photography, Zurich, Switzerland, 1939 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos; left: Model with rose, colour filtered light, beauty advertisement, Studio Photography, Zurich, Switzerland, 1939 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos

Finebooksmagazine has reported on the first display of a previously unseen photograph of the last lot on the final day at the sale of Charles Dickens' effects in 1870. The photograph by Edward Banes of Brompton, London, shows the auctioneer Franklin Homan selling the last last, a table which he had used as a rostrum during the sale. The lot was purchased by a Mr Ball who had requested the photograph. The taking of the photograph was described in the Photographic News on 19 August 1870. 

The photograph was purchased by the Museum in December 2024 from Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, for £2,800, thanks to funding from The Dickens Fellowship. It is now on display one hundred years after the Charles Dickens Museum opened. 

BPH has also discovered that the photograph The Last Lot at Charles Dickens's Sale was registered by Edward Banes, Brompton, for copyright (See: British Journal of Photography, 26 August 1870, 406, and the registration should be available at the National Archives under COPY1 although does not appear online)

Read the original article here: https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/previouly-unseen-photograph-sale-charles-dickenss-belongings-display

The Dickens Museum is open Wednesday to Sunday from 1000 to 1700 at 48 Doughty Street, London. See: https://dickensmuseum.com/

Thanks to Steven Joseph for the Finebooksmagazine link.

The Paul Mellon Centre has announced its spring 2025 grants. The Centre received a total of 377 applications across ten awards, with a total of forty-four successful applications. You can view the full list of awards here. A number were given for phootgraphy research and to photography institutions: 

• Caroline Bressey (University College London) for the project Ordinary Lives: Photographic Encounters with Black Victorians (Mid-Career Fellowship)

and the following Event Support Grants: 

• AmberSide Trust to support the symposium Co-Authored Narratives: Socially Engaged Artistic Practices from the North East of England
• Ffotogallery to support the Feminist Library Series
• The Photographers’ Gallery to support the conference Visualising the Histories of Black Britain

The next round of funding opportunities will open for applications on Monday 4 August, closing 30 September 2025. The Autumn 2025 round will include all of the Centre's grants for organisations, as well as Author Grants, Research Support Grants and Andrew Wyld Research Support Grants for individuals.

Canaletto’s Camera explores the ways in which the great Venetian artist Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768) made use of the camera obscura – the forerunner of the photographic camera – as an aid to drawing and painting. It surveys Canaletto’s contacts with contemporary Venetian and Paduan scientists, in particular Francesco Algarotti who wrote on Newton’s philosophy and the camera obscura. Canaletto also relied on many measured drawings of Venetian buildings by his colleague Antonio Visentini, a debt that has not previously been recognised.

Steadman proposes that Canaletto used the camera for two purposes: tracing from real scenes, and copying and collaging drawings and engravings by other artists. By analysing camera sketches made by Canaletto in a notebook, he shows how the artist traced views in Venice and then altered the real scenes in his finished drawings and paintings. By using a reconstructed eighteenth-century design of camera obscura, the author and his colleagues have made drawings of views that Canaletto painted in London. Steadman has recreated both a veduta (a real view) and a capriccio (a fantasy) using Canaletto’s processes of ‘photomontage’. The experiments are detailed in the book, shedding new light on the artist’s procedures, and emphasising how weak and permeable the boundary is between the two types of picture.

Canaletto’s Camera
Philip Steadman
UCL Press, 5 June 2025
https://uclpress.co.uk/book/canalettos-camera/

The renowned American photographer Shane Balkowitsch will be talking about his career as an ambrotypist in Bismarck, North Dakota, and his extraordinary project to create 1000 portraits of Native American people using this 170-year old photographic technique. There will also be an opportunity to view many of Shane's original collodion photographs on glass which have been donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as his publications about the project.

In 2023-4, Shane's work was highlighted in the exhibition Collaborating With The Past at Pitt Rivers Museum.

Talk by Shane Balkowitsch
Tuesday 5 August, 14.00 - 15.30 
Westwood Room, Oxford University Museum of Natural History 
In person, free event. All welcome. No booking required.
See: https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/talk-by-shane-balkowitsch

Shane will also be attending the Wet Plate Collodion Weekend at Guy’s Cliffe House in Warwick, on 8-9 August 2025

In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce successfully captured a view from his window in the French hamlet Le Gras, using physical and chemical means to produce a permanent image. Even though Niépce’s earliest results predate this “Vue de la fenêtre” by several years, and despite the well-known fact that the Frenchman was not the only one who felt a “desire” at that time to embark on such novel forms of image making, the forthcoming year will initiate an extended period of commemorations. Beginning in 2026 and proceeding for almost a decade and a half, we will meet manifold occasions to celebrate the bicentenary of the “invention of photography.”

Such dates, dictated by a somewhat questionable calendar of media history, can easily obscure the true complexity of photography. A remarkably broad spectrum of technologies, materialities, applications, and practices has emerged. The anniversary invites us to consider photography as an ever-evolving concept. Since the beginning of public interest in the medium, there have been widespread discussions on how to “develop” and “improve” such technologies. Thus, the idea of photography has been wedded to discourses that establish and guide our thinking about the future.

Raising the question “What Will Photography Be?”, the third Essen Symposium for Photography in February 2026 aims at newly addressing interest in the medium’s prospective forms and uses. We invite speculations that critically engage with recent developments in the open and much-diversified field of visual media and try to position photography’s future role within such a realm. How will photographic media participate in the dynamics of current technological advancements? Furthermore, how can photography impact and promote such developments with respect to social, artistic, scientific, and everyday practices?

Some decades ago, the advent of digitally processed media stimulated widespread predictions of an “end” or even “death” of photography. In the meantime, such eschatology has proven to be misleading in understanding what photography is and will be. However, current debates on the impact of artificial intelligence, machine vision, and generative technologies revitalize such dire phantasies. In today’s context of ubiquitous imaging technologies—from smartphone cameras to radiology, micro- and telescopes, via satellites, drones, CCTV, and missiles to the perceptual infrastructures of autonomous systems—photography continuously emerges as an operative function of planetary media ecologies. It spans techno-political systems and participates in the reconfiguration of perceptual and epistemic conditions.

Competing perspectives on the future are inevitable, but every prediction ultimately implies a statement about the present. From where we stand now, we can only look ahead—or “speculate” in the word’s literal sense. We invite speculations that overcome ideas of an ending. Instead, we privilege dynamic models for reckoning with visual media’s evolution as complex remediation processes. They can help emphasize how the ecosystem of media has evolved as an ongoing process of recombining, merging, and integrating technologies and practices. How can we apply such an understanding to future forms of photographic media?

We are interested in ideas about photography’s future roles in social, artistic, scientific, and everyday realms. At the same time, we must return to the basic assumption driving such interests: What will we mean when we say “photography”? Will we discuss specific techniques, aesthetics, or practices bound to visual images? Keeping the lessons taught by “operational images” in mind, will we leave the idea of the visual behind us? In short, what will be our point of reference when we address something as “photography”?

We invite critical speculations that refer to three strands of interests:

1. Technologies and Aesthetics

• How will quantum computers change the status of the photographic through new (visually representable) causality?
• How will further nanofication of optical and computational technology extend, undermine, or change modes of perception?
• Nostalgia resurfaces in AI images that revive past aesthetics to legitimize their extractive modes of production. What role will photographic aesthetics play in relation to future image spheres?
• What metaphors do we use to describe current technological transformations, and what functions do they serve aesthetically, conceptually, and economically?

2. Theories and Methods

• What theoretical tools will we need to approach the expanding cosmos of visual media? How can established theories of photography make a meaningful contribution to discussions of novel forms of image-making?
• How will we learn from the ongoing migration of concepts from lens-based to virtual media?
• What will addressing an image as “photographic” mean and imply?
• How will we incorporate the lessons that “operational images” have taught us? Will concepts of the visual still be central to our understanding of photography?
• How will new forms of image production reshape how we conceive, address, and interpret the manifold histories of photography?

3. Politics and Agencies

• What will the impact of future forms of photography be on tomorrow’s societies and politics? When addressing this question, can we escape an exclusively dystopian frame
• What forms of labor will future forms of photography enable?
• Will photography contribute to creating a public sphere where critical discourse is increasingly shaped and controlled by algorithms and corporate interests?
• Will photography serve as a critical tool of political resistance—and how?
• How do we tackle the ambivalent potential between enhanced surveillance and democratic participation?

We welcome proposals from an interdisciplinary field of research. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Please send a title, 500-word abstract of the proposed presentation, and a brief CV. Please email your proposal in one PDF by July 31, 2025, at the latest, to:zentrumfuerfotografie@folkwang-uni.de

The Essen Center for Photography will provide lodging and reimburse the incurred expenses for economy-class travel.

Film Atlas has been released. It is a collaborative project from FIAF and the George Eastman Museum and seeks to provide an international visual guide to every motion picture film format, sound track and colour process - more than 600. As an encyclopedic online resource it pairs pair high resolution imagery with scholarly essays to document the history of film as a physical medium from the dawn of cinema to the present.

Facilitated by collaboration between international archives, this dynamic reference, research and teaching tool offers a comprehensive visual guide to every motion picture film format, soundtrack, 3-D and color process ever invented.

See: https://www.filmatlas.com/

The Hong Kong History Centre's Historical Photographs of Hong Kong project is conducting a survey of potential interest and users.  As part of this we would be really interested to know what types of photographs you would look for if you had the possibility to look for old photographs of Hong Kong (buildings, streets etc), this will really help us to design something that has the right search tools. 

We sincerely invite you to fill out this survey form. Make your answers as specific and detailed as you like, but please don't include any sensitive or personal information. We may use AI (e.g. ChatGPT) to process the responses so they could be shared with a third party. Thanks.

Hong Kong History Centre

香港史研究中心正在籌辦一個名為「香港歷史照片」的數碼平台項目。為此，如您有可能尋找香港舊照片（建築物、街道等），我們非常希望了解您會尋找哪些類型的照片，這將有助我們設計出合適的搜索工具。

我們誠邀你協助填寫此問卷。請盡可能具體和詳細填寫您的答案，但請勿包含任何敏感或個人信息，因我們可能會使用人工智慧（例如ChatGPT）來處理回應，有機會倏將這些回應與第三方分享。謝謝。

香港史研究中心

In addition to the survey, details of Centre's call for photographs are here: https://www.hkhistory.net/hphk-call/