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/

Bonhams has an exceptional album of early photography mainly taken by Dudley Charles Fitzgerald de Ros and Alfred Suzanne. The 244 photographs date to the early 1860s and show the family and social circles of de Ros and include the royal family at Windsor where de Ros was an equerry to Prince Albert and then Queen Victoria.It is estimated at £15,000-20,000. The album was discovered recently by the vendor is a small provincial auction house.

The lot lots notes state: 

An exceptional album, newly discovered, of early 1860s photographs taken by or relating to the family and social circle of Dudley Charles Fitzgerald de Ros, 24th Baron de Ros, and including many by Alfred Suzanne, the chef of Fitzgerald de Ros' father-in-law Thomas Grosvenor Egerton, 2nd Earl of Wilton. The album sheds new light on these two photographers, both members of the Amateur Photographic Society, and the use of photography in the recording of English society life.

THE MAIN PHOTOGRAPHERS:

Dudley Charles Fitzgerald de Ros, 24th Baron de Ros (1827-1907), son of William FitzGerald de Ros and Lady Georgiana Lennox, was an army officer (who in 1859 was appointed Major in the 1st Regiment of the Life Guards), and Royal courtier serving as equerry to Prince Albert from 1853 to 1861, and subsequently to Queen Victoria, from 1861 to 1874. He was also a noted amateur photographer, elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1857, and the Amateur Photographic Association of which he was elected Vice President in 1862. The Royal Collection Trust owns a fine series of photographs (mostly of members of the Royal family, including Albert and Victoria) taken by Fitzgerald de Ros in 1858-1859, and also a portrait of him taken by Camille Silvy in about 1860. In 1853 he married Lady Elizabeth Egerton, daughter of Thomas Grosvenor Egerton, 2nd Earl of Wilton (1799-1882), whose children Arthur (1833–1885), Katherine (1835–1920), and Alice (1842–1925) all feature in the album, as do his son-in-law, the celebrated cricketer Henry des Voeux, and other family members and friends.

There are 65 photographs attributed to Fitzgerald de Ros, who is identifiable in several of Suzanne's "genre" photographs - see below, and in two cases with photographic equipment, once with camera and stand identified as "Our Artist", and once holding a camera lens. His subjects include 2 views of the chapel at Windsor Castle; the boathouse and dock at Strangford Lough, County Down in Ireland where the Fitzgerald de Ros family had an estate; several regimental and family groups (some with horse and carriage), a good cricket group, and many portrait roundels.

Alfred Suzanne, born in 1829, entered into the service of the Earl of Wilton in the mid-1850s serving as his cook (or "chef de cuisine") until the Earl's death in 1882. As well as ministering "to the delights of the table at his lordship's generous board", Suzanne also "was a musician and an artist, whilst his work as an amateur photographer is worthy of the most unqualified praise. He has indeed gained something like notoriety in this department... It was Suzanne who took the portrait of Fred Archer in his hunting-dress, upon the occasion of the visit of the celebrated jockey to Melton Mowbray, where the Wilton family have their seat" (Charles H. Senn, Practical Gastronomy and Culinary Dictionary, 1892, pp.500-501). Like Fitzgerald de Ros he was a member of the Amateur Photographic Association, exhibiting with them from at least 1862 to 1868, and is also known to have practised in some commercial capacity as a photographer, as carte-de-visite portraits with his name "Suzanne" and location "Melton Mowbray" are known (see V. & A. Museum, website).

There are approximately 105 photographs attributable to Suzanne (including 6 signed in the negative, 2 of which are of the Egerton family home Heaton Hall, Lancashire), in addition to approximately 30 photographs of artworks by him (these signed "S" in pencil). The Suzanne images include fine larger photographs of "genre" (or "living tableaux") images in which Fitzgerald de Ros, his sisters, family and staff are identifiable as "actors". These include women fencing (2), a gypsy encampment (featuring Fitzgerald de Ros with a fiddle), a magician's show (with Fitzgerald de Ros as the magician in front of a table of tricks), a drowned man pulled from the river by two women, apple pickers (2, featuring Fitzgerald de Ros on a ladder, and three female relatives), a travelling medicine man/salesman (Fitzgerald de Ros, standing on a cart surrounded by an audience), boys playing dominoes, and three women gardening.

Other notable images include "The Servants" (playing draughts), "The Grooms" (with carriage and horses), Grey and his sisters with a caged parrot, Earl Wilton and family with dog seated on cobbled pavement, two maids (one writing), an elaborate still life with game and fruit arranged on an outdoor table, landscape with a wooden footbridge over a river, views of Melton (3, including a fine image of a cricket match on the green in front of the church), family or friend groups with some against a cloth backdrop, large portrait of Earl Wilton seated, and his son Arthur standing with top hat and umbrella. Other notable sitters, who recur in groups or as portraits include members of the Craven family (Lady Elizabeth Charlotte Craven having married Arthur Egerton, 3rd Earl of Wilton, in 1858 - includes an unusual close-cropped image of William Craven, Cecil Boothby and Grey all smiling), and the noted cricketer Henry des Voeux (who was married to Earl of Wilton's daughter Alice, including his portrait, but also seated in a good group image against an outdoor cloth backdrop.

OTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS INCLUDE:

H. Lennox (possibly Lord Henry Lennox, elected a member of the Photographic Society of London, or a Lennox related to Fitzgerald de Ros' mother Georgina Lennox, 20 images, mostly portraits taken outside, one sitter identified as Viscount Grey de Wilton, another the Duke of Manchester); O. Forester (6 images, including a view of Melton Mowbray), Sir George Wombwell (1 image, a parrot in a cage placed on a table beside a dog on a chair), André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (2 small portraits), G. Vivian (1, portrait), Caldesi (probably Leonida Caldesi who was employed by Prince Albert as a photographer in the late 1850s, coinciding with the period Fitzgerald de Ros also took photos of the Royal family, images of both men now held by the Royal Collection Trust, 2 images, a woman on a horse with studio backdrop), Lake (1 image, portrait of a man, possibly Fitzgerald de Ros, holding a camera lens), Heber (1 image, group portrait of 3 young women identified as "Miss Coventrys", one possibly the "Miss Coventry" photographed by Camille Silvy, see NPG website), Tutor (4, portraits).

Fine Books, Maps & Manuscripts
Bonhams, London
Online, ending 19 June 2025
lot 80. See the full lot description here

The only known photographs of Ada Lovelace - two daguerreotypes by Antoine Claudet and a third by an unknown photographer - the three were previous exhibited at the Bodleian Library in 2015. The two daguerreotypes date to c.1843. Lovelace (18145-1852) is considered a pioneer of computing. They passed through the family to the present owner G M Bond. The lot is estimated at £80,000-100,000. 

The lot following (lot 82) comprises two portraits of Lovelace's children and a female member of the Lovelace/Byron family by Kilburn and a Beard patentee. 

Fine Books, Maps & Manuscripts
Bonhams, London
Online, ending 19 June 2025
lot 81. See: https://www.bonhams.com/auction/30730/lot/81/lovelace-ada-the-only-known-photographs-of-ada-lovelace-3/

Read the Bodleian description here

In celebration of Four Corners's 50th anniversary this year, Work in the Margins offers a fascinating exploration of Four Corners’ filmmaking history. The exhibition investigates the early life of 113 Roman Road: a space for experiments in communal living, collective working, and collaborative filmmaking as part of a flourishing local counterculture. 

Four Corner Films – as it was known - was the creation of four film students – Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece, Ron Peck and Wilfried Thust. Frustrated by the hierarchical structures of mainstream film and TV, they squatted a former grocer’s shop in Bethnal Green in 1975. Here they created a film workshop and cinema space that would become a hub for an experimental, independent film culture which aimed to democratise the process of filmmaking, exhibition and education. 

Four Corners’ films were made collaboratively with their subjects. Nighthawks (1978), was a grounding-breaking film about a gay teacher’s everyday ‘double life’, while the experimental documentary Bred and Born (1982) explored women’s experiences of family life, centring on four generations of women in an East End family. Youth workshops focused on the lives and creative strengths of teenagers. The young Ruhul Amin went on to make A Kind of English (1986), an exploration of migration and diasporic identity in east London’s Bangladeshi community. 

Alongside the film workshops, cinema seasons in the tiny 40-seater space at 113 Roman Road addressed world film history and contemporary films about women’s lives, power and powerlessness, and representations of migration and exile.  They were an ambitious experiment in rethinking the radical potential of a local, community cinema. 

Co-curator Hollie Price says, “Work in the Margins throws light on the vital, co-operative spaces for film practice and education that Four Corners created in east London in the late 1970s and 80s, and how they were shaped by values of creative independence, collaboration and dialogue.”

The exhibition is co-curated by Dr Hollie Price with Four Corners. It showcases rare material from Four Corners’ archive, alongside objects from personal collections, Bishopsgate Institute and MayDay Rooms. It is funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. 

The exhibition forms part of ‘The Four Corners Film Workshop: Independent Filmmaking and Exhibition in East London, 1975-1990’, an AHRC-funded project led by Dr Hollie Price (Keele University) in partnership with Four Corners. It is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

Dr Price’s project is producing a new history of Four Corners Film Workshop’s radical, social filmmaking practice in the 1970s and 80s. She is exploring Four Corners’ distinctive place in independent film culture of the period, contextualising its work as part of experimental documentary traditions in the history of British cinema, and focusing on its local film production and exhibition work in East London. 

This project is bringing the workshop’s archive and history into dialogue with local, community histories, memories and issues facing audiences living in Tower Hamlets and neighbouring boroughs today. This has included ‘Films of Resistance: Experimental Community Cinema in Bethnal Green’, a series of community screenings and talks in Bethnal Green exploring Four Corners’ early history, inspired by its cinema programme.  

Four Corners’ digital archive holds an array of production files, photographs, posters and organisational documents, and is a rich resource for learning about the organisation’s history of experimental, collaborative filmmaking practice, as well as for broader histories of alternative film production and exhibition. Working with Four Corners, Price’s research will enrich, build and open up this archive with new materials and histories. Click here to explore the digital archive. 

Work in the Margins: A Film Workshop in East London, 1975-86
13 June-19 July 2025
Free admission | Open Wednesday - Saturday 11.00am - 6.00pm 
Four Corners, 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London, E2 0QN
https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/work-in-the-margins-a-film-workshop-in-east-london-1975-86

Image credit: Unknown photographer, Joanna Davis filming ‘Bottled Garden’, c. 1973. 

The latest issue of British Art Studies (issue 26, May 2025) is now live. Of particualr interest to BPH is  that brings together new research on Camerawork and the problem of reproducing periodicals by Samuel Bibby. It is free to access. The abstract reads: 

Bibby, Samuel. “‘If the Spirit of the Original Is to Be Retained’: Ways of Seeing Camerawork.” In British Art Studies. London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale Center for British Art, 2025. https://main--britishartstudies-26.netlify.app/issues/26/ways-of-seeing-camerawork/.

Some of the most historic moments of the twentieth century will be shown in a new exhibition about the British photo-magazine, Picture Post (1938-57) at National Museum Cardiff. Picture Post: A Twentieth Century Icon reveals Britain’s transformation from the 1930s to the 1950s covering war and its aftermath, social reform and shifting public attitudes, as well as the advent of consumer culture.

Co-curated by Dr Tom Allbeson of Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture and Dr Bronwen Colquhoun, Senior Curator of Photography at the Amgueddfa Cymru, the exhibition takes visitors on a journey from the Blitz and VE Day during the Second World War, to the arrival of teenage fashions and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot in the postwar decades.

Bronwen Colquhoun, Senior Curator of Photography at Amgueddfa Cymru: “We are thrilled to be presenting this exhibition in the photography gallery at National Museum Cardiff and are hugely grateful to the Hulton Archive and Cardiff University Archives and Special Collections for their generous support. It was a huge task to select around 120 photographs from a collection of 4 million images in the Picture Post library. but we had a good sense of the three core themes we wanted to cover– conflict and empire, society and politics, and culture and leisure. We were struck by how many of the issues covered still resonate today, from the NHS and immigration, to changing gender roles and the cost of living. Alongside coverage of global events, the exhibition also represents some really powerful Welsh stories.”

In 1941, Picture Post published a special issue called “Plan for Britain” which discussed many topics subsequently covered in the famous Beveridge Report of 1942 and which reshaped society and politics after the war. This agenda for ‘cradle to grave’ support – which Picture Post helped promote – included vital reforms in education and healthcare. That special issue began with a letter from an unemployed miner, B.L. Coombes, from South Wales.From the late 1930s, Picture Post revolutionized the way Britain looked at itself. With circulation figures reaching 1.7 million copies at its peak, this groundbreaking photo-magazine captured everyday life, major events, and shifting social attitudes.

Tom Allbeson, based at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University said: “Picture Post was the leading British example of an international phenomenon – the birth of photojournalism. It was the first British magazine to showcase the technique of the photo-essay – our equivalent of Life or Paris-Match, effectively. It was started by a pioneering Hungarian editor called Stefan Lorant who fled Nazism for Britain in the 1930s. And before the establishment of large television audiences in the later 1950s, the photographs published in Picture Post offered a shared perspective on the UK and its place in the world. The topics covered by each weekly issue were discussed in homes, offices, factories, and on buses, trains and trams.”

While Picture post published photographs from across the world, it also reported on politics, society and culture from across the UK including many photo-stories about urban and rural communities in Wales. The exhibition includes documentary imagery by Grace Robertson about sheep-shearing in Snowdonia to street photography in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay by Bert Hardy, as well as portraits of Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton.

This free exhibition runs from 24 May to 10 November 2025.

For more information, visit: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/12572/Picture- Post-A-Twentieth-Century-Icon/

Image: A seamstress working in a tailor’s shop during the Blitz, London. Arriving for work as usual, Mrs Marsh works amongst the broken glass... News Photo - Getty Images © Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

DCMS has released the latest visitor numbers for those museums and galleries for which it has responsibility. Of particular note are the numbers for January-March 2025 which include the reopening of the NSMM on 8 January 2025. For comparative purposes the same quarterly period has been extracted on the graph above. The graph also reflects the museum's closure during the pandemic in 2021 and during the redevelopment work following its closure from June 2023. The numbers in 2024 shows cinema attendances which remained open during much of the main msueum closure. 

The first three months following the museum's reopening saw visitor numbers following reopening of : 16,797 (January), 32,608 (February) and 15,000 (March). The opening of the Sound and Vision galleries in July is likely to lead to an increase in visitors. 

In line with many museums the NSMM visitor numbers have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and that has been compounded by the extended clsoure for the redevelopment work. With the opening of the galleries on 10 July the museum will be looking to raise awareness of its offer and grow audiences in person and online. 

This autumn, Tate Britain will present the UK’s largest retrospective of photographer Lee Miller. Spanning the full breadth of Miller’s multifaceted practice, from her participation in French surrealism to her war reportage, the exhibition will reveal how her innovative and fearless approach pushed the boundaries of photography, producing some of the most iconic images of the modern era. Around 230 vintage and modern prints, including works on display for the first time, will be presented alongside unseen archival material and ephemera, shining a light on the richness of her photographic legacy.

Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State. She initially studied painting and stage design, but her time as a professional model inspired her to pursue photography. Tate Britain’s exhibition will trace her journey from modelling in New York, where she was photographed by celebrated figures like Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen, to working behind the lens in Paris where she moved in 1929. There she began working with Man Ray, combining surrealist ideas with technical experimentation in a period of explosive creative exchange. Together they discovered solarisation, in which reversed halo-like effects are created through exposure to light during processing, exemplified by the newly discovered Sirène (Nimet Eloui Bey) c.1930-32. Alongside her work with Man Ray, Miller also apprenticed at French Vogue, established her own commercial photographic studio and starred in Jean Cocteau’s groundbreaking surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète 1930, extracts of which will be shown in the exhibition.

By the early 1930s, Miller was fully enmeshed within Paris’s avant-garde circles. Turning her lens to the city’s streets, she created a series of photographs capturing the surreal in the everyday: an early example shows a web of semi-congealed tar oozing across the pavement towards a pair of anonymous feet. Through crops, disorienting angles and reflections, Miller reimagined familiar Parisian sights ranging from Notre Dame cathedral to a Guerlain shop window. Returning to New York in 1932, she set up Lee Miller Studios Inc. and opened her first solo exhibition. In both the United States and Europe, Miller exhibited regularly alongside fellow pioneers of modern photography, and her work was published in numerous artistic journals and magazines. Moving to Cairo in 1934, she continued to use her camera as a tool of exploration. Tate Britain will present her celebrated surrealist image of the Siwa Oasis Portrait of Space 1937, alongside depictions of contemporary Cairo, the Egyptian desert, and travels across rural Syria and Romania, some of which have never previously been exhibited. By this point in her career, Miller had a sprawling transnational network of friends, and the show will present her playful portraits of artists, writers, actors and filmmakers, including Charlie Chaplin and Leonora Carrington.

Miller moved to London in 1939 at the outbreak of war and quickly became a leading fashion photographer for British Vogue. Presented alongside original magazines and archival material, the exhibition will showcase her inventive body of work made in Blitz-torn London. Works such as You will not lunch in Charlotte Street today 1940 and Fire Masks 1941 convey the pathos and absurdity of the city in wartime. Miller went on to become one of the few accredited female war correspondents, documenting not only women’s contributions on the home front, but also harrowing scenes from the front line, as well as the devastation and deprivation in post-liberation communities across France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Romania. Presented in dialogue with extracts from her vivid first-person essays, published in British and American Vogue, these photographs probe the brutal realities of war and its aftermath. The show will also include the portraits of Miller and David E. Scherman in Hitler’s private bath in April 1945. A radical performative gesture staged directly after the pair returned from photographing the Dachau concentration camp, these are considered to be some of the most extraordinary images of the 20th century.

In the years after 1945, Miller remained deeply engaged with an international circle of artist friends. From Isamu Noguchi in New York and Dorothea Tanning in Arizona, to Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet visiting Farley Farm, Miller’s home in Sussex, these portraits were her most powerful post-war works. Before leaving the exhibition, visitors will see a rare 1950 self-portrait showing Miller posed precariously on a ladder between two mirrors in Oskar Kokoschka’s London studio. Looking directly into her own camera lens, flanked by artworks, she captures herself as an artist among artists.

Lee Miller
2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
Open daily 10.00–18.00
Tickets available at tate.org.uk and +44(0)20 7887 8888
Free for Members. Join at tate.org.uk/members

Image: Lee Miller, David E. Scherman dressed for war, London 1942. Lee Miller Archives. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk 

These two talks discuss the dangers and beauty of Victorian Stereoscopic cards. They are aimed mostly at curators, archivists and collectors of stereoscopic cards but the general public is most welcome to join us.

TALK 1 at 1500 (BST). Toxicity in 3-D: Arsenic and the Hidden Dangers of Stereoscopic Cards

In this presentation, Kim Bell and Robin Canham will delve into the startling discovery of arsenic in the cardboard backing of 19th-century stereoscopic cards — an overlooked hazard in both institutional and private collections. Drawing on their ongoing research, they will explore how vibrant green pigments in the card mounts, often used to enhance the appeal of stereographs, were frequently made with arsenic-based compounds such as Paris green.

They will discuss the methods used to identify toxic materials in historical photographic media, the scope of the problem in Canadian collections, and the potential risks for those handling these materials without proper precautions. Importantly, they will offer practical guidance for safely storing, labeling, and accessing arsenical stereoscopic cards, and outline strategies for institutions and collectors to responsibly manage these materials while preserving their cultural and research value.

Kim is from the W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queens University, Kingston, Canada. Robin is from the Conservation Department, Royal Saskatchewan Museum, Regina, Canada.

TALK 2 (in 3-D) at 1540 (BST)  Arsenic and Old Lace: the potential Dangers but unmatched Pleasures of Victorian Stereographs

In this 3-D presentation photo historian Denis Pellerin, from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy, will show that although some stereoscopic card mounts may be potentially hazardous, nothing can replace the wealth of information and the huge variety of topics – a lot of which were never photographed in other formats – these cards from the Victorian era hold on their relatively small surfaces.

With the help of simple precautions and by encouraging digital use of what constitutes an amazing, comprehensive and unique encyclopedia of the nineteenth century, Denis will try and demonstrate that institutions and collectors should embrace the risks that may exist and choose from a wide variety of display methods to share these incredible images with the public. Nothing can draw a person into an image and hold them there in the way a stereoscopic image viewed in 3-D can. Isolated from your surroundings, you literally step into the picture and explore the scene as if you were actually there. There is no better magic carpet or time machine than a stereoscope and a set of cards, and there are no more risks from the armchair time and space traveller than there are travelling by plane or driving a car, while the rewards are unparalleled.

All the images in the second presentation will be shown side-by-side and can be seen stereoscopically. To enjoy the 3-D experience you either need:

• a lorgnette-type viewer (like the Lite and Steampunk Owls, sold by the London Stereoscopic Company – https://shop.londonstereo.com – or any other similar model) if you are watching on your smartphone.
• a mirror or prism viewer (see Steve Berezin’s website: https://www.berezin.com/3d/viewers1.htm) if you are watching the presentation on a larger display: tablet, computer or TV set.

Details and booking here

These two talks are part of Stereoscopic Day. See all events for 21 June here.