February 2014 Blog Posts (16)

The restoration of the United Kingdom’s first cinema - located in the heart of London’s West End at the University of Westminster in Regent Street – has been given the green light by Westminster City Council, as the campaign to raise funds for the landmark project moves into its next phase.

The Regent Street Cinema is celebrated as the ‘Birthplace of British Cinema’…

Explore amazing architecture and design via the RIBA’s world-class collections and an on-site photo shoot at exciting locations around London. Click this link for more…

The first large-scale retrospective on Shimooka Renjo opens in Tokyo at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography on 4 March until 6 May 2014. Shimooka Renjo (1823-1914) was a pioneer of photography in Japan who worked mostly in Yokohama, yet until recent years few photographs have been positively attributed to him and little information on his…

Alex. Keighley A Pioneer of the Pictorial Movement in Photography is a new book by Ray Vintner (ISBN 978-0-9927402-0-7, 186-pages, Linkhall Publications, 2013). The book is available from The Grove Bookshop, Ilkley, West Yorkshire, (e: info@grovebookshop.com or telephone 01943 609335) at a cost of £14 plus…

Sotheby's is to return to holding photograph auctions in London from May 2014. It moved photograph sales from London, where they had first started in 1971, to Paris in 2011 after a short hiatus. The last London sale had been held in Spring 2010. At the time Sotheby's claimed the move reflected market trends and the change made New York and Paris Sotheby's main centres for…

The Bodleian Library, Oxford, last night held a reception to thank supporters and donors who have helped it secure the Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot. The event was held on the 214th birthday of Henry Talbot who was born on 11 February 1800.  

The…

Archives and Cultural Industries is a conference taking place from 11-15 October 2014 in Girona. One of the themes of the conference is: 1839-2014.175th Anniversary of Photography. Management, processing and dissemination of photographic and audiovisual heritage in the 21st century.

For more information visit the website:…

The Art Newspaper reports on a story that BPH carried last year. It notes that the world’s oldest photographic agency Fratelli Alinari, founded in Florence in 1852, is in danger of closing. On 22 November 2013, the Italian website www.patrimoniosos.it, whose remit is to safeguard the country’s cultural…

The London based photography curatorial collective Hemera (www.hemera-collective.co.uk) has ambitious plans for 2014 and as such we are recruiting for a new member to join the collective. We are a group of four photography historians with a specific interest in historical photography and archives. We curated two exhibitions…

The first monograph on Cyanotype by Dr Mike Ware (cover shown right) was published by the Science Museum of London in 1999, but has long been out of print, and only accessible as a digitized part-version online at Google Books. The book was devoted to the study of photographic printing in Prussian blue, engaging with its history, aesthetics, practice,…

In the 19th century the East represented the realm of exoticism, fantasy and mystery. Literature and painting in particular used the lands beyond Europe as canvases for fertile explorations of the unknown and unlimited boundaries for imagination. By the latter half of the century, however, several pioneer photographers travelled to the Middle East and North Africa,…

BBC TV's The One Show last night, 3 February 2014, had a five minute slot discussing the war photography and work of Roger Fenton.

It was introduced and presented by photographer Giles Duley who was injured in Afghanistan in 2011 after he stepped on an IED losing three limbs. Taking part was Professor Roger Taylor and the curator of Stonyhurst College which holds more…

Widely acknowledged as one of the most talented photographers of the nineteenth century, Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879) was commissioned by the city of Paris to document both the picturesque, medieval streets of old Paris and the broad boulevards and grand public structures that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann built in their place for Emperor Napoleon III. This…

On the One Show this evening there will be a segment regarding the work of Roger Fenton and his portraiture of Queen Victoria. There will be contributions from renowned photographic historian Roger Taylor, and a demonstration of the wet-plate collodion process by Tony Richards, who recently contributed to the BBC drama series 'The Paradise'. 

The One Show…

George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, has made changes to The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library - one of the world's greatest libraries dealing with photography and film. Long-standing librarian and curator Rachel Stuhlman has been made redundant after nearly thirty-years and she is is now Emeritus Librarian and…

Lawrences of Crewkerne is to offer an important Felice Beato album on 31 January 2014. The album contains 68 albumen prints of China and Japan, including views of North Peiho Fort, the Emperor's Palace and the Summer Palace, Peking, Hong Kong, Yedo and Yokohama, the first leaf signed in margin (vertically), 'No. 20 F. Beato', and a further ownership inscription, 'Capt. Dew,…