December 2015 Blog Posts (19)

The work of photographer Frank Hurley is used on eight new stamps being issued by the Royal Mail on 7 January 2016. The set is being issued to commemorate Ernest Shackleton's polar voyage of 1914-1916. Shackleton's ship Endurance became stuck in ice and Shackleton with six companions then braved a voyage of 720 nautical miles in an open boat to the whaling stations of…

The Historical Group of The Royal Photographic Society has arranged another of its popular - and useful - Research Days on Saturday, 9 January 2016 at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. The day will consist of more than twelve speakers presenting short papers about their research and work in progress. Topics range from Arthur Marshall, Isabella Bird and…

This new publication by Steven F Joseph is the first comprehensive and richly illustrated overview of historical Belgian photographic literature. It presents comprehensive survey of both of illustrated books and of technical publications. It makes a major contribution to academic study in the field, with a corpus composed of 681 entries and, for each title, indicates…

The Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fonds / Rijksmuseum Fonds enables the Rijksmuseum to annually award two postgraduate Fellowships that stimulate outstanding object-based, photo-historical research by prospective curators from the Netherlands or abroad.

Fellowships are awarded for a six-month period. The focus of research should be related to the National Photo…

The V&A Photographs department will be producing a display in Gallery 38A titled: The Camera Exposed. It will explore themes around the presence of ‘the camera’, or some trace of it, in photographs. Spanning the history of photography, the display will present works that explore this theme different ways, from photographers’ self-portraits with their cameras to…

Bronwen Colquhoun, Assistant Curator of Photography at the V&A, London, is leaving to take up the recently advertised post of Senior Curator of Photography at the National Museum of Wales in February 2016. The role was noted on BPH in October -…

I am looking for information about an early image of the Rosetta Stone. Here is an albumen print by Mansell & Co., presumably from the 1870's. However it is not an image of the stone itself, but some sort of graphic image- a lithograph, a rubbing?  I know that such images were made as early as 1800, but can find no information about this particular graphic  Is it still…

The Science Museum is to present a major exhibition exploring the work of British photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph, which opens in the Museum’s Media Space in April, will present the birth of photography in Britain within its industrial and social context, and reveal the extent of Talbot’s remarkable experiments as the…

Call for Papers is now open for the upcoming ICOM-CC (Conservation committee) Photographic Materials Working Group Interim Meeting, to be held at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 21-24 September 2016. The theme of the meeting is: Uniques and Multiples.

Please follow the link below to find all details related to the Call…

Anthropology & Photography is a new open-access publication series edited by the RAIPhotography Committee. Emerging from the international conference of the…

From the 1850s to the 1950s, photography was one of the most open avenues for Jews in Britain to make a living, as well as to contribute to mainstream culture. If one’s picture was snapped for a price in Britain, the person behind the lens was more than likely born a Jew. Through the 1970s, Jews were prime movers behind nearly all things photographic in Britain, including…

A FINE AND RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF IRISH POET AUBREY THOMAS DE VERE (1814-1902), who was brother in law to Sir Henry Taylor (1800-1886). Carroll had been seeking an opportunity to photograph Taylor since July 1862, and when he was invited to lunch on 3 September,…

AN ALBUM OF EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS, SOME ATTRIBUTED TO MAJOR FRANCIS GRESLEY. [C.1859-EARLY 1860S]. This album includes 15 photographs of Radley College pupils and staff taken in 1859 by an unidentified photographer, comprising 12 individual portraits (each sitter named on the mount in pencil), and 3 group photographs: the 1st VIII, the 2nd VIII, and 'The Warden and Fellows of St…

Harold White FRPS visited the village of Lacock in 1944 to undertake an assignment for the British Council to take photographs for a pamphlet about English village life. Followers of the British Photographic History Blog may be interest in viewing a new community web site called Lacock Unlocked where Harold White’s photographs are celebrated. …

This is new book that looks at the developments of motion picture film technology from a British perspective between 1895 to 2015. Renowned film historian Kevin Brownlow says: 'the book is not only unputdownable - it's heavy enough to be unpickupable!' The book will be of interest to film archivists and those interested in the technical side of film and includes…

On the occasion of Professor Elizabeth Edwards’ retirement, the 2016 PHRC Annual International Conference will address themes from her complex and wide ranging scholarship on the cultural work of current and historical social photographic practices. Thus, Photography: Between Anthropology and History aims to showcase scholarship driven by engagements with research…

Carlos Relvas (1838-1894) is the best know among 19^th Century Portuguese amateur photographers’, he was a very healthy farmer from the Ribatejo region and built his unique “Casa da Fotografia” is his hometown Golegã  (http://www.casarelvas.com/ ; ). In the not too rich panorama of Portuguese photo history he has…

The British Journal of Photography has been digitised up to 2005 with the remainder to be completed early in 2016, BPH first reported on the project here back in 2013. The digital archive is currently only…