April 2011 Blog Posts (36)

John Thomson, a Scot who was born two years before the invention of the daguerreotype and the birth of photography, is considered a pioneer of photojournalism and one of the most influential photographers of his generation.

At that time, foreign travel was much more arduous and rare than it is today, and photography was…

Some of you BPH members may have already come across this site, but nevertheless, a useful resource for those who haven't.

This national 'on line' catalogue contains art-historical information on the earliest photographs owned by the Rijksmuseum (Rijksprentenkabinet) in Amsterdam, the Print Room of the University of Leiden and 25 other museums, archives and libraries…

Amateurs and Artists: 19th and 21st Century Photography in the South West. A conference presented by Royal Photographic Society, Historical Group, from Friday, 13 May– Sunday, 15 May 2011 in the Lecture Theatre 2, Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA.



Early photography in Plymouth is an untold story.…

As mentioned in an earlier BPH blog, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just published a new book containing never-before seen photographs of Mecca taken by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje in the late 1800s.

The Islamic scholar Hurgronje was the first…

Bill Brandt portrayed the lives of all levels of British society in both staged and documentary photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. Now four of his works, including Soho Bedroom (1936), depicting a couple locked in a passionate embrace which was published in his influential book A Night in London (1938) can be viewed in a new exhibition at the Met,…

Did you know that the Mariannhill Monastery, near Pinetown (South Africa) was a fully fledged photographic studio (complete with painted backdrops for people to pose) from the 1880s to the 1930s? In the late 1890s this studio, then run by Brother Aegidius, produced an album of ethnographic photographs depicting the local Zulu people that found its way into the collections of…

Sydney lawyer and identity Arthur Wigram Allen, a tirelessly enthusiastic photographer, was fascinated by the social and technological changes occurring during his lifetime. His talent for amateur photography produced extraordinary pictures that offer a fresh insight into the Edwardian years in Sydney.

The Edwardian era was sandwiched between the great achievements of…

Bearer of better news this time round!

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) seeks a curator of photography. This person will oversee and manage the museum's extensive collection, and establish priorities for collections research and development, exhibition programming and interpretation. Additionally, the candidate will be expected to participate in scholarly and…

If your budget can't quite stretch to the Report of the Juries (1851), fear not as there is a selection of interesting 19th century photographs up for grabs at a forthcoming auction to be held at Bloomsbury Auctioneers on Wednesday 18th May 2011.

This includes one of the earliest instantaneous news photographs -  an 1855 stereoscopic…

Although BPH is not particularly commercially orientated every so often something comes along which deserves making a fuss of. British auction house Bonhams has a copy of Reports by the Juries (1851) up for auction on 7 June 2011. This particular copy was presented by W H F Talbot to his daughter Matilda in 1860 and come by descent to the present owner so it is…

Not a new book as such, as it was published in the tail end of 2009, but Todd Gustavson's "Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital " is nevertheless, a useful resource and one for a photo historian's library.

This cornerstone volume, created in collaboration with the world-famous George Eastman House,…

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Museum of London has recently announced that it has made 11 roles redundant, including three senior curator posts of pre-history, Roman history and photography. Two collections care experts and six front-of-house “hosts” have also taken voluntary redundancy.  

Another senior curator post (of social and working history),…

The daughter of an Irish missionary and wife of James Finn (the British consul at the twilight of Ottoman rule in the second half of the 19th century), Elizabeth Finn, was considered a pioneer in bringing photography to the region when she arrived in Jerusalem in 1846.

In 1850, a British missionary known only as Bridges arrived at the Finn home to recover from the…

An online petition has been launched save Newcastle's Side Gallery which opened in 1977. The Gallery has a commitment to documentary in the tradition of the concerned photographer. It commissions work in the North of England and shows historical and contemporary work from around the world. Talks are organised around most of the exhibitions. The Arts Council has axed Side…

Would anyone recognize the gentleman shown in this portrait by the Bristol photographer Thomas Protheroe? A cabinet card dated after 1881.

Did you know that Smithsonian's first photographer and curator of photography was a Scotsman?

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1843, Thomas William Smillie immigrated to the United States with his family when he five years old. After studying chemistry and medicine at Georgetown University, he took a job as a photographer at the Smithsonian Institution, where he stayed…

Anna Atkins? Constance Talbot?

Well, according to Roddy Simpson, a former secretary of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography and currently a photographic researcher at Glasgow University, he thinks the accolade should be bestowed upon Jessie Mann, who lived in Edinburgh in the 1840s.

Miss Mann, from Perthshire, was an assistant to Edinburgh-based photographic pioneers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, may have been the first female to use photographic…

Rescheduled from Autumn 2010, this symposium explores the impact and legacy of the photography magazine TEN.8. Published throughout the 1980s before it folded in 1992, TEN.8 was conceived by then Birminghambased Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon to bring together the city’s photographers. Its impact however, reached far beyond this initial aspiration.

Speakers include Derek Bishton, journalist and founder member of TEN.8; David Brittain, Manchester Metropolitan University;…