December 2019 Blog Posts (9)

Four years ago we launched www.britishphotography.org to showcase our private collection of British photographs and to use the collection as an educational resource. Since then we have continued to develop the collection and the range of our activities. These include donations to public institutions, museum…

The Royal Collection Trust's online description of a James Robertson/Felice Beato’s image entitled Valley of Inkerman (see below) reads:

Photograph of the Valley of Inkerman. In the valley in the foreground there is a road to the right and a river in the distance to the left. Behind are steep cliffs with a row of huts near the base. The…

I recently purchased this CDV, the identification said only  "British".

The back is blank. Can anyone help me figure out this scene?

Thanks, David…

Professor Larry Schaaf will deliver the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group's 2020 Colin Ford Lecture providing a fascinating insight to his work on The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné.

Schaaf has been examining and compiling information on Talbot images worldwide for more than four decades. Beginning in 2014, with the backing of…

A new blog by Jamie Carstairs who manages the Historical Photographs of China project draws attention to Charles F Moore, who was born in Manchester, photographed in China and married a local Chinese woman.  He was a member of the London Amateur Photographic Association. Some of his surviving negatives are held in collections in Canada. 

The blog can…

The exhibition Pages from Photographic History is running at the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre a the Hermitage, St Petersburg. It acquaints visitors with the most important stages in the development of photography and touches on the technical, documentary and artistic sides of its evolution.

The exhibition is…

Numerous references to travelling photographers and mobile studios are sprinkled throughout the literature dedicated to photography. Robert Taft refers to photographic studios on board ships that sailed American rivers in his book Photography and the American Scene (Taft, 1938, p. 65-67). He recounts an undated anecdote about a confrontation…

BPH has just learnt of the death of Bill Barnes, the film history and collector who died in July at the age of 99 years. Barnes, along with his twin brother John, who died in 2008, was a collector and historian of early British cinema. For a time their outstanding collection was on display as as the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives. John managed the…

Just over a year since its acquisition, a taster of the vast MacKinnon Collection will be exhibited at the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG). The two institutions joined forces to purchase the collection — made up of more than 14,000 photographs dating from the 1840s to the mid-20th century in Scotland — in May…