Blogs

The launch of the Ethics of Medical Photography Toolkit will take place online on 16 October. The tool designed to support the ethical decision-making of people using historical medical photographs, as broadly understood. At the heart of this toolkit is the idea that engaging with ethical considerations will enrich our scholarship and practice.  

This toolkit is for everyone who encounters historical medical photographs in any capacity, including any researcher or visitor to archives and museums, as well as the wide range of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Museums and Archives) professionals who care for and provide access to medical photography collections. 

Join us for an afternoon discussing the toolkit, how to use it, and what's next for The Ethics of Medical Photography Network. The multidisciplinary network brings together historians, ethicists, archivists, heritage scholars, artists, photographers, social scientists, and the public, with the Wellcome Collection as project partner, to generate theoretical and practical resources to research, curate, and disseminate historical medical photographs in an ethical way. To balance the ethical needs of heritage institutions, researchers and the public, this network will move beyond the looking/ not looking dilemma [Moeller, 2009] to ask:

• how does our understanding of the ethics of medical photography, and of medical photography itself, change when we focus on race, disability, gender, class and age rather than consent, privacy and anonymity?
• how can we widen access to early medical photographs while respecting the dignity of both historical subjects and present viewers?

This network and the activities it organises have been funded by an AHRC Research Networking Award.

You can join the Network mailing list here and Check out our website 

Please complete this form to register your attendance at this seminar. We will use your email address to send you the seminar's link the day before the seminar.
https://lnkd.in/epFYkkh8

Congratulations to Dr Michael Pritchard and British Photography History for its milestone year and significant contribution to our discipline. The numbers (first page) speak for themselves for the hunger felt by the community for solid work and excellent editing (even for those of us who speak a different language). May you continue for a very long time. Iiiii

The British-born phootjournalist and Magnum photographer Ian Berry has died aged 92 years. He made his reputation in South Africa, where he worked for the Daily Mail and later for Drum magazine. He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/remembering-ian-berry-1934-2026/

The next Bloomsbury Photograph Fair will take place on 11 October running alongside the Bloomsbury Book Fair. This fair is always very popular and attracts lots of exhibitors and interest.

Bloomsbury Photograph Fair
Holiday Inn, Coram Street, London, WC1N 1HT
Website here
If you would like to exhibit at the fair get in touch with the organisers to secure your stand as places are limited.
Email: info@etcfairs.com

Early British cameras rarely come to auction these days but Churchill Auctioneers of Thame are to offer a very rare Powell's Binocular stereoscopic camera in its auction on 5 and 6 October 2026.

I was invited to have a look at the cameras (shown in my pictures here). The Powell sterescopic camera was the subject of a registered design of 27 December 1858 which describes the single lens model. The Binocular model probably came along soon afterwards. It was made by Horne & Thornwaite of London. Both models were available for dry collodion (as in this case) or for wet-collodion. The example at auction is lacking lenses, but is otherwise complete with focusing back, four double dark slides, tripod screw, and one supplmentary close (portrait lens). A single lens model from the Cyril Permutt collection was sold in 1988 and a Binouclar model in the late 1970s.

The Churchill auction catalogue is due to go live shortly. 

Both models were illustrated and described in several photographic manuals from c.1860 (below) and in H&T's catalogue (right) from the same year. 

See:  https://churchillauctions.co.uk/auction/october-5th-6th-two-day-sale/

Images: (top and left): Powell cameras to be offered at auction; (right): Horne & Thornthwaite’s catalogue in Robert W Hall’s The Fothergill Dry Process in Photography, London, Piper Stephenson and Spence, 1861; (below): the two models of Powell camera illustrated in W H Thornthwaite's A Guide to Photography, London, Horne & Thornthwaite, 1860. 

This talk explores how Black presence has been represented in Korean and Japanese photographic cultures from the mid-twentieth century onward. The Korean War and the Second World War brought large numbers of U.S. military personnel - including Black American soldiers - into both countries. Their arrival shaped not only social interactions on the ground but also the ways Blackness was visually framed and understood in East Asia, particularly in relation to mixed-race children born to Asian mothers and Black GIs.

Photographers in Korea and Japan turned their cameras toward the daily lives of these Black military communities, producing images that intersected with broader shifts in geopolitics and cultural perception. At the same time, international photography competitions that flourished in the 1960s introduced African subjects to East Asian audiences. One striking example is a widely circulated Japanese photography magazine that featured on its cover an arresting portrait of a Mucubal woman from Angola - submitted by a Portuguese amateur photographer. This visual influx unfolded alongside the significant deployment of Black American soldiers to the Vietnam War.

Taken together, these postwar photographic encounters reveal how portrayals of Black culture in Asia were entangled with the legacies of colonialism and the pressures of the Cold War. These forces both enabled and constrained possibilities for Afro-Asian solidarity, leaving a complex visual record that continues to shape contemporary understandings of race, identity, and transnational encounter in the region.

We also invite you to explore the rest of this year’s series which includes exciting research from leading thinkers Anne Strachan Cross & Matthew Fox-Amato, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Leigh Raiford, Zahid R. Chaudhary and Tiffany Fairey. Explore season two, view recordings, and register for all events here.

By/For: Photography & Democracy is a collaborative partnership between three photographic historians, Dr. Tom Allbeson, Dr. Colleen O’Reilly, and Helen Trompeteler. Our collective investigates photography’s assumed democratic credentials as an art form and a medium of mass communication. We believe a historical perspective on the complex relationship between photography and democracy is critical to understanding how the medium and related visual technologies can address the social and political issues of our time.

By/For: Photography & Democracy: War, Movement, and the Camera: Black Lives in Korean and Japanese Photography
Friday, 2 October 2026 at 13.00 (Eastern Time) / 1800 (BST).
Dr Jeehey Kim (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Arizona)
Learn more and register here.

The French Ministry of Culture has a website details all events registered to commemorate the 200th anniversary of photography being held between 1 September 2026 and 30 September 2027. 

The link is here: https://bicentenairephotographie.culture.gouv.fr/

In August 1976, workers at the Grunwick Film Processing Factories in the London Borough of Brent went on strike due to unfair working conditions. A month later, on the 1st of October 1976, 400 people marched from Cobbold Road to Chapter Road in support of the Grunwick Strike. This mass act of solidarity signalled that the strike was beginning to become a monumental movement in Trade Union and Labour History. The picketing was so significant that by the end of October 1976, the police attempted to limit the picketers to only six at the factory gates.

Join our Special Collections team online as we take a deep dive into the Grunwick Strike archival material held in the Trades Union Congress Library Collections at London Metropolitan University.

The team will each present ONE selected item from the collections and explain their reasons for choosing it. Materials include photographs, posters, press cuttings, and strike bulletins that tell the stories of picketing, police violence, and community solidarity. These primary sources show the united strength of the South Asian and Black workforce, and what it meant to walk out of your job and stand up for your rights in such a visible and dangerous way.

The Grunwick Strike: Solidarity in the Archives
Thursday, 1 October 2026, 1300-1400
Online
See more and register here

Following on from two previous tours the art historian Aneela de Soysa has arranged a further 14-day tour of Sri Lanka with a focus on Julia Margaret Cameron's final years in the country. Julia Margaret Cameron  was one of the most influential photographers of her nineteenth century and spent the last four years of her life in Ceylon. In 1875, aged 60, she and her husband Charles, then 80, left for British Ceylon to join four of their sons. By then she had made more than 1,000 photographs during a twelve-year career in England. Fewer than 30 of her Ceylon photographs survive.

The journey explores the social, cultural and economic context in which these final photographs were made, while introducing nineteenth-century colonial photography in Sri Lanka. Cameron's Ceylon images include plantation workers, villagers in Kalutara and portraits of the botanical artist Marianne North. The visit will also explore ancient sites which connect directly to the Cameron family: Hardinge Cameron was involved in restoration work at Anuradhapura, while Charles Hay Cameron made an early colonial drawing of the Sacred Bodhi Tree in 1830 after travelling through dense jungle to reach it.

Full details of the itinerary and cost can be found in the attached brochure which can be downloaded from the website, below. 

Sri Lanka: Julia Margaret Cameron. Photography, Empire and the Island
31 January-13 February 2027
led by Aneela de Soysa
https://www.aneeladesoysa.com/

The first memorial in Asia to photography pioneer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is nearing completion in Mavelikara, Kerala, India, in time for the bicentennial of the earliest surviving photograph from c.1826-27. The memorial in Mavelikara seeks to honour Niépce’s scientific curiosity, creativity and contribution to visual culture. It is intended not only as a commemorative monument, but a centre for learning, research and public engagement with the history of photography.

The project includes plans to present the story of Niépce, the development of early photographic processes, the historical importance of the first permanent photographic images, and the evolution of photography from its experimental beginnings to its contemporary forms.

The project is under the auspieces of the Joseph Nicéphore Niépce Foundation, set up by Saji Ennakkad (above, left), an artist from Mavelikara, and others. The memorial is being built at a cost of R50 lakh (around £40,000) and will recreate part of Niépce's residence at Le Gras. A bronze bust has been installed in front of the buidling. The site will include a gallery, museum, workshop spaces and performance stage. 

The memorial is being developed in connection with the worldwide celebrations of the 200th anniversary of photography. The organisers hope that its inauguration will become a meaningful cultural moment linking France, the French birthplace of photography, with India and the wider Asian photographic community.

The initiative also aims to encourage collaboration with French cultural institutions, museums, photographic historians, educational organisations and international photographic heritage networks. Through exhibitions, lectures, educational programmes and publications, the Foundation hopes to introduce new generations to the history and significance of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s contribution, under the banner From Le Gras to Mavelikara — two places, one photographic heritage.

Women's History Today, the journal of the Women's History Network, has published a paper on Ann Cooke, the photographer working 1844 and 1857, mainly in KIngston-on-Hull. Cooke has been widely recognised as an early female photographer working independently. She was enumerated in the 1851 census as the sole woman 'phootgraphic artst' although as research by the same author has shown many women were working but remained hidden.

The paper by Dr Rose Teanby, undeprinned by extensive research, brings new insights into Cooke's career and family life for the first time. 

‘A Second Self’: Mrs Ann Cooke, Widow, Mother and Pioneering Professional Photographer
Dr Rose Teanby
Women’s History Today, 16, Summer 26, 4-11
The full journal is available as a digital downloand to non-members for £5.
See: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-history-today-summer-2026-edition/

Although not reproduced in the paper the following images from a daguerreotype then in the Taylor collection, and subseuquently sold at auction, were published in Arthur Gill's 1979 paper. They are shown here for the record. Of course, if any reader has any other examples of Cooke's work please make contact...

A series of events is being held across September, October and November to engage with and reframe acess to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) historic medical photograph collection. In 2024, the Archives Service was awarded funding from The National Archive’s Research and Innovation fund to reframe access to the historic medical photograph collection. Continuing efforts to address the colonial legacies of our collections the LSHTM has partnered with Decolonising the Archive (DTA) to run a series of events in the Autumn.

For too long archives have been shaped by a colonial gaze- misrepresenting lives, cultures, and histories. You are invited - especially from communities featured in the collections - to help inform the record and co-create better futures for the shared heritage.

LSHTM was established in 1899 with funding from the Colonial Office with the object to facilitate British colonialism and white settlement through research and the treatment of tropical disease. The LSTHM Archives reflects this problematic past, with holdings including photographs of people from colonised nations taken by School staff and other donors. For many of these images there is little provenance, but it is assumed that these photos were taken without consent or an understanding of why they were being taken and how they might be used.

Owing to their sensitive nature, these photos have remained hidden as we are uncomfortable with researchers accessing them but through our decolonising work, we understand the importance of making these accessible in an appropriate way. This project has been designed to reframe access to LSTHM’s colonial medical photo collections, ensuring that we preserve and promote the collections in a respectful and equitable manner.

Working with our expert Consultants at Decolonising the Archive (DTA) we hope these conversations will help us to reconcile institutional archival practices with Community Archiving initiatives.

Decolonising the Archive (DTA) was founded in 2011 and focusses on the definition, safeguarding and activation of our collective archives, they have worked with, supported and trained hundreds of people across the UK and internationally. 

Reframing Access to Colonial Medical Photograph Collection, with Decolonising the Archive (DTA)
September-November, online and in person
See more and sign up here: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/library-archive-open-research-services/archives/decolonising-archives/reframing-access-historic-medical-photograph-collection

This hybrid symposium looks at photographic clubs and societies from a global perspective and follows on from a workshop held at Birkbeck in 2023. Assessing amateur photographic communities as a phenomenon is more urgent than ever because many of these minor groups were poorly documented at the time, and the majority of their collections have been broken up, dispersed, or lost. These amateur groups show the unrestricted flow of photographic knowledge, often through exhibition, unimpeded by geography or language, and made possible by the efficacy of print communities. Some amateur societies and clubs were founded for specific specialisms, concerns, and aesthetic preferences in a variety of locations, while others evolved from learned societies and earlier forms of education.

The earlier trend of forming clubs and societies for scientific and associational activity reflected broader developments in national and global trade economies. The variety of local photographic clubs and societies, as well as the benefits they provided, served as a vector for new ideas, new values, and new kinds of social alignment, as part of a larger surge in new forms of national, regional, and local identity inspired variously by, for instance, learned societies, Victorian arts and crafts organisations, or medieval guild influences.

The keynote speaker is Professor Emerita Elizabeth Edwards who will talk about Photographic Sociability and the Dynamics of Association. The programme is below or can be downloaded with speaker abstracts and biographies as Mapping C and S.pdf:

THURSDAY 26 November 2026
9.00–9.30 Registration and coffee
9.30–9.40 Welcome: Jason Bate, Birkbeck
9.40–10.10 Keynote Lecture (Chair: Jason Bate) Elizabeth Edwards – Photographic Sociability and the Dynamics of Association
10.10–10.25 Discussion
10.25–10.35 Comfort Break

PANEL 1. CONSTITUTING AMATEUR COMMUNITIES
10.35–10.45 Carolyn Bloore – The ‘Calotype Club’
10.45–10.55 Sandrine Chene – ‘When found, make a note of’. Photographic Forums in the Royal Photographic Society Journal
10.55–11.10 Peter Buse – The Liverpool Photographic Society and its Journal
11.10–11.25 Rose Teanby – ‘Ladies shall be eligible’: How the Photographic Society of London Helped to Promote Equality for Women
11.25–11.45 Discussion

PANEL 2. STABLISING AND TRANSFORMING COMMUNITIES
11.45–12.00 Alice Duncan – Framing Country: Amateur Photographic Clubs, the Australasian Photo-Review, and Settler-Colonial Ways of Seeing
12.00–12.10 Maria Manuela Gomes Gonçalves – From the Factory to the World: The Photography Section of the CUF Sports Group and Transnational Networks of Amateur Photography Under the Estado Novo
12.10–12.25 Jürg Schneider and Paul Weinberg – Was Afrapix (Also) An Amateur Photographic Club?
12.25–12.40 Discussion
12.40-13.40 Lunch (for speakers and chairs only)

PANEL 3. INDIVIDUAL-COLLECTIVE RELATIONS
13.40–13.55 Sara Dominici – Developing the Self: Amateur Photography Between Home and Club Darkrooms, 1880s-1900s
13.55–14.10 Carolin Görgen – Archiving Sociability: The Los Angeles Camera Club Archives as Ecosystems of Collective Photography
14.10–14.25 Discussion

PANEL 4. CONTAINMENT VERSUS REGIONALITY
14.25–14.40 Feargal Fitzpatrick – The Dublin Photographic Society: Tremors in the British Colonial Landscape
14.40–14.55 Ilya Leonov – Imperial Networking: Amateur Photography Clubs in Austria-Hungary, 1860s-1900s
14.55–15.10 Michael Pritchard – ‘no longer an appendage of the RPS’: The Postwar Decline of the Royal Photographic Society’s Affiliation Scheme for Overseas Societies
15.10–15.25 Discussion
15.25–15.40 Coffee Break

PANEL 5. THE GLOBAL ECONOMY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 
15.40–15.50 Julieta Pestarino – From Society to Photoclubs: Amateur Photographic Institutions in Argentina
15.50–16.05 Alise Tifentale – One Photographer, One Year, a Hundred Exhibitions: The Statistics of Ambition in Cold War Photo Clubs
16.05–16.20 Samuel Salgado Tello – Mapping an Invisible Tradition: An Ongoing Research Project on Latin American Amateur Clubs and the 1973 First Latin American Photography Meeting
16.20–17.00 Discussion
17.00 CLOSE

The event is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. 

Globe-spanning Networks: Mapping Photographic Clubs and Societies in Local, National, and Transnational Contexts 
Thursday, 26 November 2026, in person and online
Free 
Birkbeck Central Building, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7JL
Full details and registration by 24 November: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/65332/ 

On 30 October the British Library will open a major exhibition exploring the life and work of the bestselling novelist of all time, Agatha Christie. Marking fifty years since her death, the exhibition will examine not only the origins of iconic fictional creations like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple but will also go behind the characters and stories to explore Christie's world and legacy.

The exhibition will take visitors on a journey through Christie’s upbringing, her interests and travels and how she adapted her novels for the stage, through five immersive sections filled with items from her personal life, including her typewriter, professional and personal correspondence with other writers, family photographs and notebooks and typescripts for novels. There will also be clues and ‘Easter eggs’ dotted throughout the exhibition for Christie fans to sleuth out. Christie’s impact on the wider crime fiction genre will be explored through interviews within the exhibition with leading writers, broadcasters and notable fans.

Of particular interest the exhibition reveals Christie's active interest in photography through her own albums with photographs taken when she was accompanying her second husband MAx Mallowan on archaelogical digs in Mesopotamia. Christie took pictures throughout her life from her teenage years in to 70s.

As Dr Pippa Oldfield, the curator who uncovered Christie's photographic interest, notes photography is used in the plots of several of her novels.  In an intervciew with Oldfield the Financial Times reports “The extent to which Agatha entered into the endeavour really surprised me,” says Dr Pippa Oldfield.  Thee British Library will show Christie’s notebooks and typescripts, her 1937 Remington typewriter and a full-size replica of a 1920s Orient Express train carriage as well as her Leica camera and several photo albums, bringing the woman behind the modern murder mystery into focus.

Only a fraction of the photographic material held by the Christie Archive Trust in Devon will be exhibited at the British Library, but Oldfield and design historian Yasuko Suga are also co-curating a show dedicated exclusively to Christie’s photography, which will be shown in the British Library Entrance Hall next year. There are, 'many thousands' of images to wade through. 

Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery
30 October 2026 – 20 June 2027
London, British Library, Euston Road
See: https://events.bl.uk/exhibitions/agathachristie

Read the FT article which goes into much greater depth about Christie's photography here.

A selection of Christie images weer shown in 2015 see Amateur Photographer report here

Image: Agatha Christie boarding the EET Salon at lunchtime on the train from Bulawayo to the Cape. In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the world. Her husband Archie had been invited to join a trade mission to promote the British Empire Exhibition and Agatha was determined to go with him.© The Christie Archive Trust

Historic England’s website which displays images from its archive and its Aerial Photo Explorer service is partly offline as a third-party supplier has ceased trading and entered administration. Historic England (HE) has advised users that it will be displaying preview versions of its images but that ‘it may take several weeks to make available the full image set due to the volume of images we have in our Archive’.

Historic England has over 1.7 million online records, which includes hundreds of thousands of digitised photographs and aerial images across several platforms including over 540,000 on its Aerial Photo Explorer and 600,000 on England's Places out of a total archive of around 15 million items.

The supplier is believed to be Smartframe Technologies Limited which was founded in 2015. Henry Page and Shaun Walker from Mercer & Hole were appointed as joint administrators on 26 August 2026, after the company failed to secure additional funding needed to become self-sustaining.

Historic England has been a user of Smartframe's services for several years. In 2022 SmartFrame Technologies spoke about its image-streaming technology which allows high resolution images to be securely displayed and interacted with. It was used by Historic England for its Aerial Photo Explorer tool which used a Smartframe containing over 400,000 available aerial images. It was also being used as part of HE’s on-going main archive digitising programme.

As the piece noted its use by HE ‘is a great example of how SmartFrames and their interactive features can be used by image owners and publishers to fantastic effect’. It provided zoom-in functionality, full-screen viewing and maintained captioning with the image, all without affecting page loading times. For Historic England, the SmartFrame image-streaming technology provided image security through right-click and screenshot protection, and protection from image-scraping bots. It also provided detailed download and use analytics.

In 2024 Historic England issued a further £41k tender for the provision of Smartframe Technologies for the presentation of images on Its website.

In addition to Historic England, SmartFrame Technologies’ image-streaming and in-image advertising technology was used across a number of publishers, picture libraries and archives, and sports clubs and organisations.

Historic England and the administrators have been approached for comment.

A record nine museums, libraries and archives across England have earned an award of Designation for their collections in the most recent Panel meeting. The University of Exeter's Bill Douglas Cinema Museum Collection, functioning as a ‘People’s History’ of cinema, is amongst the latest group to seure the coveted status. The collection spans 400 years – from shadow puppet shows right through to today’s blockbusters. This collections includes memorabilia, posters, fan mags, scripts and more – totalling over 94,000 items.  

An award of Designation recognises a particular collection as being of national and / or international importance based on their quality and significance, as assessed by the Designation Panel.  Established in 1997, the Designation Scheme shines a spotlight on the excellence, diversity and creativity to be found in museums, galleries and archives across England, and how they enrich our shared cultural lives. An award of Designation means that the importance of the collection can be further demonstrated to funders, researchers and the wider public – all benefitting from a national or internationally recognised collection on their doorstep.  

The designation award covers all the holdings of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, which is a leading museum of moving image history in the UK. The collection offers a people’s history of the moving image from the 17th century to the present day, using material and visual culture to show how the experiences of both audiences and those involved in making moving images have changed the way we see the world. The museum holds over 95,000 artefacts, both historically important items such as an original Lumière Cinématographe, and original prints of the first panorama in the UK showing London in 1792, but also everyday items across three centuries that demonstrate our relationship to what we see on the screen.

The museum was founded from the collection put together by the renowned filmmaker Bill Douglas and his friend Peter Jewell, which Peter donated to the University of Exeter in the 1990s after Bill’s untimely death. The museum is free and open to everyone every day and attracts researchers from all over the world.

Dr Phil Wickham, the Curator of the museum said; ‘we are absolutely delighted to become designated as a collection of national and international importance by Arts Council England. This reflects both the significance of the artefacts we hold in the museum but also the importance of cinema and the optical media that preceded it on people’s lives over the last three centuries. Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell’s vision was that the wonder of moving images could be shared with everyone, and Designation will help us to take this ambition forward into the future.'  

Photopoetry: An evening of words and images
11 September 2026, 1830-2000
Free, V&A Museum, London
See: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/kVgemzk7Jb/photopoetry-an-evening-of-words-and-images-sep-2026

Read more about the themes behind the event here: https://photoworks.org.uk/david-solo/

The programme and speakers for Castles, Salons, and Darkrooms: Mapping the nobility’s impact on early photographic history (1840s–1860s) has been published and the conference is now open for registration. It is hybrid and takes place in Prague and via Zoom. 

Castles, Salons, and Darkrooms: Mapping the nobility’s impact on early photographic history (1840s–1860s)
20 October 2026
Free, in Prague or online
Programme and resgister by 15 October here: https://www.udu.cas.cz/en/akce/castles-salons-and-darkrooms