May 2022 Blog Posts (25)

Another Country offers a lively, vital rethinking of British documentary photography over the last seven decades. This collection includes a diverse range of photographers working in an exciting array of photographic and artistic modes, encompassing images from iconic reportage to photo-text pieces, from self-portraits to political…

Rachel Nordstrom has announced that she will be leaving her post as Photographic Collections Manager at the University of St Andrews, at the end of May. She has been at St Andrews for nine years and was appointed to her…

The Scotsman is reporting today that documentary photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert has gifted his archive to St Andrews University, in part with the support and advice of Rachel Nordstrom. Jeremy is a founder member of Document Scotland.

As The Scotsman notes: …

To celebrate and mark Her Majesty The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the National Portrait Gallery presents a new digital display, a…

Tate has announced the launch of the Tate Photography Series, a new publishing programme providing an introduction to some of the most important and exciting photographers at work today. Four titles will be published each…

Photographs made in the 1870s are to help with the conservation of the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry. In a new partnership London's V&A Museum and the City of Bayeux have agreed to share research and expertise around the Tapestry. This is in lieu of planned loan of the Tapestry to the UK which was abandoned after a condition report discovered the Tapestry…

One of the highlights of the recent Photo London fair was James Hyman's The Countess of Castiglione. The exhibition has now opened at Hyman's gallery in London.  The exhibition includes over fifty rare portraits of the Countess from the 1850s to the 1890s. Directed and staged by the Countess, herself, and created in collaboration with the studio…

I am looking for any kind of information relating to photographs of Western travellers pictured in costume while on their travels in Egypt. I know that several commercial studios based in Cairo and Alexandria, such as Schier & Schoefft (see image attached), Facchinelli and Dittrich, offered this service, but I am having trouble finding examples…

Photography from daguerreotypes, through collodion and on to contemporary work is being offered at auction By Chiswick Auctions on 24 May. The sale includes one previously unrecorded portrait, part of a set of four by Julia Margaret Cameron (est £12,000-15,000), Beard studio daguerreotypes and work from Paul Strand, Rodchenko and others. 

The…

The purpose of the Curatorial Fellowship is to further develop expertise in the history of photography by researching the collections of the V&A, while gaining vital curatorial experience working in a museum.  The Curatorial Fellow will divide their time between key curatorial duties (including cataloguing, collections care, display, exhibition and…

Join leading experts, curators, and photographers in the virtual re-launch of Trans Asia Photography, the world’s first and only open access journal devoted to research on Asian photography. Established more than a decade ago, the journal has moved its base to Toronto and relaunches this year with a new publishers, Duke UP, and new editors, Thy Phu, Deepali…

A forthcoming symposium focuses on an often-neglected aspect of photography history - photographs of and by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and more broadly, women and early photography around the world.

The project is inspired by our exploration of photographs taken by the Aberdeen-based photography studio of George…

Helmut Newton (1920-2004) was one of the most singular and successful photographers of his generation, known for his provocative fusion of fashion, portrait, and erotic subjects.

Philippe Garner, a 50-plus years veteran of the art auction world, has admired Newton’s work since he discovered it in the late sixties.

He met Newton in 1975 and…

Although not photography, the related optical instruments of the microscope and telescope presented new ways of seeing, as did the camera. In the seventeenth century, human vision was technologically enhanced with the invention of the telescope and then of the microscope. Scenes of wonder emerged as the assisted eye traversed the night skies or delved into…

The archive of Elisabeth Buchmeyer Lewis (1935-2018) has been acquired by Hundred Heroines which will be staging a first look at it in June. After studying at the London College of Printing, Elisabeth soon gained a reputation as a modernist photographer.  By the time of her death in 2018, she had created a vast collection of images with immense social,…

Dominic Winter’s first photography sale of 2022 comprises 253 lots, from the early to the nearly new. Highlights of the sale are two albumen prints by Julia Margaret Cameron, Alice Liddell as St Agnes and a portrait (see below) of Julia Jackson (Mrs Herbert Duckworth). The latter has interesting provenance and was gifted to the owner by the…

What is the shape and size of a photographic history that is written from the point of view of having no photographs? When photographs are destroyed, lost, repressed, or never intended to be permanent, it leaves a gap in what we usually refer to as our main research material.

By chance or by design, photographs disappear every day. They might be…

Today, Historic England has launched an interactive education tool which will display hundreds of images of the Queen visiting key heritage sites across England during her reign. The story map resource has been created by Historic England’s Heritage Schools team to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and will help school children learn about some of the…

On 10 May 1897 Isabella Bird was engaged to lecture on Western China at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Jacki Hill-Murphy who has recently published The Life and Travels of Isabella Bird will recreate this lecture, using some of the original magic lantern slides, and talk about the rest of Isabella's solo world travels and how…

A new exhibition titled The other Shakespear, which brings to life some of the earliest and finest images of the Arabian Peninsula is being launched this month at the Royal Geographical Society on Exhibition Road. This is the first time these photographs have been on public display for more than a century.  The photographs taken by Captain William…