January 2020 Blog Posts (17)

Today, the V&A announces the appointment of renowned photography curator and scholar Duncan Forbes as Director of Photography. Forbes will take up the newly-created role in April 2020 to drive forward the V&A’s reputation as one of the world’s leading institutions for the research, exhibition and understanding of international…

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese…

Hyperallergic has reported that Paris Musées is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums on open access — free of charge and without restrictions —…

How do scholars use photography in their research? What can they learn from photographs? What can we understand from them about our relationship with the photographs that we make and those that we encounter almost everywhere we go?

Edited by Dr Gil Pasternak from the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University (UK), The Handbook…

My last post to this blog concerned the two Valley of Inkerman photographs taken in 1856 by either James Robertson or Felice Beato, but more likely the latter. In this blog, the image entitled The Inkerman Ravine (see below) is discussed. Although Robertson’s signature is in the bottom right-hand corner, it also may have been the work…

I am very proud that my latest book Scotland in 3D - A Victorian Virtual Reality Tour was selected by The Scotsman, Scotland's leading newspaper, as one of their photographic books of the year. They commented that the book magically brought the Victorians closer to life. The book is currently on sale for £3 off in January at…

Dr Kelley Wilder, Director of the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University has been awarded a Professorship in Photographic History at the same university. Details of her inaugural lecture will be announced in due course.

More to…

A new photography fair which will be held during Photo London has been announced. The Classic Photograph Fair London will offer a wide range of images from early paper negatives and daguerreotypes to press photographs documenting the stormy 1960s.  

The fair will take place on 16 May 2020 from 0900-1800 at the Arcade, Bush House, 60 Aldwych, London…

A new exhibition at the Stonehenge Visitor’s Center, is celebrating the nation’s memories of visiting the prehistoric site. A 1875 snapshot of Isabel, Maud, and Robert Routh, who made the journey there by horse-drawn carriage was unearthed by descendants of the Rouths in response to English Heritage’s request for family photographs taken at Stonehenge over…

Cambridge School of Art has announced a symposium Telling our tales through ambiguous photography: Decolonizing the visual library of the African continent as part of the Stories of Kalingalinga exhibition programme at the Ruskin Gallery. The symposium is designed to trigger conversations between academics, practitioners and students and…

Sessions on the History of Stereoscopic Photography is a conference within a conference, hosted by the National Stereoscopic Association at the 46th annual 3D-Con in Tacoma, Washington.

In the last thirty years, scholarship on stereography has moved from the margins to a more central position in the…

Sport in its modern form developed contemporaneously with photography, and the growth of sport into a global phenomenon has been decisively influenced by its mediation in visual culture and photography. Photographs of sport, and of its most popular athletes, have long been essential not only to sports reporting but also to the commercial exploitation of…

The National Trust photography collections include around 550,000 objects located at 250 properties in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Dating from the 1840s through to today, they include prints, albums, cased objects, negatives, slides and photographic equipment. The in-situ nature of the collections sets them apart in the UK, offering rich…

Photographs are not simply images but also historically shaped three-dimensional objects. They hold a physical presence, bear traces of handling and use, and circulate in social, political and institutional networks. Beyond their visual content, they are increasingly…

You will work as a research assistant on a Paul Mellon funded project conducted by the National Trust and the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.  Your primary role will responsibility for co-ordinating a number of workshops involving academics and museum professionals, which are intended to explore approaches to the extensive…

In response to the exhibitions presented in the Photography Season at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, this conference will address the politics of photography in terms of its relationship to consumerism, capital and culture. The…

I recently acquired two small boxes of glass negatives, the first being magic lantern size plates are mainly of Blackpool landmarks,(will blog these shortly) the other is of figures in a range of costume, I know nothing about them and would love more information.…