Blogs

10×10 Photobooks is pleased to announce a new grant cycle and call for applications as part of its annual photobook research grants program to encourage and support scholarship on under-explored topics in photobook history. For this cycle, 10×10 is looking for submissions related to 10×10 Photobooks’ forthcoming publication on the history of photobooks from Africa and its diaspora. We invite proposals for photobook research on Black identity, Africa and the African diaspora. The concept of the photobook for your study can be interpreted in the broadest sense possible: classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines, digital media, scrapbooks, posters, or other ephemera. The evaluation of proposals will consider the importance of the proposed topic, how significant and/or unknown is the subject, and the strength of the proposed approach.

10×10 Photobooks will award three grants for this 5th cycle for 2026-2027 cycle in the amount of $2,500 each, which will be paid in two increments during the course of the project. Grantees are expected to present the result of their research in a 15 to 20-minute Zoom presentation along with an approximate 1500 word printed essay, including illustrations and photographs. Final research needs to be in English and will be due within a year of the grant being awarded.

10×10 will assist where able and desired with in-progress review, identifying information, making introductions, etc. 

See full details here: https://10x10photobooks.org/research-grants-cycle5-call/

Just passing on this rare opportunity at the National Library of Ireland, which is hiring an Assistant Keeper Grade 1 in Photographic Collections. This curatorial role involves looking after the largest Irish photography collection in the world, and the largest photographic collection on the island, totalling more than 5 million photographs. This is a heavily consulted and unparalleled photographic national collection. Salary (for new employees) is €74k-€91k. Closes on 27 February 2026.

Reporting to the Head of Special Collections, the Assistant Keeper Grade 1, will play a key role in caring for and developing the National Library’s Photographic Collections.

The NLI’s photographic holdings comprise the largest collection of Irish documentary photography in the world. With just a relatively small percentage digitised, this collection is one of the most consulted collections in the NLI, via the online catalogue or through the Library’s very active Flickr community. Material from the collection is reproduced worldwide in books, journals and documentaries. The collection provides an incomparable visual history of Ireland and the Irish.

The Assistant Keeper Grade 1 (AK1) Photographic Collections will be responsible for the management and ongoing development of the NLI’s photographic collection, including supporting the provision of services to researchers whether onsite or online. As a member of the management team in the Special Collections department, the AK1 Photographic Collections will be a key contributor to departmental planning, work programmes and projects, providing expert input on the best use of resources and maximising efficiency.The role will support collection management, cataloguing and access, working closely with curatorial, conservation and digitisation colleagues to enable research, exhibitions and public engagement.

See: https://www.nli.ie/about-us/working-national-library-ireland

PHRC is pleased to announce the second season of its Research Seminars in Photographic Cultures and Heritage, a free, online series of talks and discussions exploring photography’s intersections with politics, technology, and cultural production.

The series investigates the rich and evolving field of photographic cultures and heritage, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to examine photography as a cultural artifact, historical record, and dynamic form of communication.

With a focus on critical methodologies, material practices, and global perspectives, the series addresses themes such as archival ethics, indigenous and everyday photography, technological shifts, memory and identity, and the politics of visual representation, dissemination and perception.

Through interdisciplinary talks and discussions, the seminars aim to expand and foster innovative insights into how photography and photographic practices are both shaping and shaped by cultural heritage – across time and space.

The programme for Semester Two 2025/26 includes three talks:

19 February 2026, 5.30pm – Associate Professor Donna West Brett (University of Sydney, Australia), “A Strange Tissue of Space and Time’: Modernist Photobooks & Propaganda”

26 March 2026, 5.30pm – Professor Sarah Parsons (York University, Toronto, Canada), “Feeling Exposed: Early Photography and Privacy in the United States”

7 May 2026, 5.30pm – PhD Candiate Javed Sultan (De Montfort University / Photographic History Research Centre), Constructing Dissent: Photojournalism and the Democratic Transition in Postcolonial India (1970s)”

Attendance and Registration

The seminars will be held online via Microsoft Teams and are free of charge.

Those wishing to attend one or more of the talks on the current season are kindly asked to register through the  link below, with a joining link sent to registered participants one hour before the scheduled start.

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/photographic-history-research-centre-phrc

Volume 10 of the biographical series «Stories of Photographers» which was started in 2018, tells the story of an amateur photographer (all the previous volumes spoke of professionals). The works of Jean François Charles André Flachéron, known as Frédéric, are well-known, universally recognized for their high technical level, and of considerable economic value, but until now we knew little or nothing of his life and the information available in literature and on the web is not always correct. Frédéric’s photographic activities are limited to a few years, however, he was a respected sculptor and engraver of medallions who for a number of years, with his wife Caroline-Charlotte Hayard, ran a shop selling materials for painting and sculpture in Piazza di Spagna, in Rome.

Flachéron developed a chemical procedure (amended with regard to that of Fox Talbot and of Blanquart-Evrard) that became a benchmark for all those, professionals and amateurs, who wanted to photograph Rome in particular conditions of lighting and weather: the amended “Roman method” or “Flachéron method” was demonstrated particularly in the years 1849 to 1853 (he was active in the period 1847-1853).

Introduction

It is my pleasure to present volume 10 of the biographical series «Stories of Photographers» which was started  in 2018: this is an objective that I never expected to reach; nor would I have ever believed that this series would be so widely appreciated internationally (this simply drives me to undertake new research).

This is a special edition, also because it tells the story of an amateur photographer (all the previous volumes spoke of professionals): the works of Jean François Charles André Flachéron, known as Frédéric, are well-known, universally recognized for their high technical level, and of considerable economic value, but until today we knew little or nothing of his life and the information available in literature and on the web is not always correct (in many cases, information attributed to Frédéric have been confused with other members of the family, such as his brother Isidore).

Frédéric’s photographic activities are limited to a few years, however, as I mentioned, he was not a professional photographer but a respected sculptor and engraver of medallions who for a number of years, with his wife Caroline-Charlotte Hayard, ran a shop selling materials for painting and sculpture in Piazza di Spagna, in Rome.
Flachéron developed a chemical procedure (amended with regard to that of Fox Talbot and of Blanquart-Evrard) that became a benchmark for all those, professionals and amateurs, who wanted to photograph Rome in particular conditions of lighting and weather: the amended «Roman method» or «Flachéron method» was demonstrated particularly in the years 1849 to 1853, the period in which he was active.

His brother Isidore, previously mentioned, also lived in Rome for many years, a celebrated artist, he was – like Frédéric – certainly present at the meetings of the artists at the Caffè Greco, as were other members of the Flachéron family.

An important note on the surname: Frédéric signed ‘Flachéron’, with an accent on the ‘e’, but the documents at the public records office (above all the French ones) indicated him
and his family as ‘Flacheron’, without an accent. So, which should we consider correct? After much consideration I decided on the former, Flachéron, which he preferred also when he signed his photographic and sculptural works.

"Frédéric Flachéron of Lyon, sculptor and photographer", by Roberto Caccialanza
(volume 10 of the biographical series «Stories of Photographers»)
Text: English / Italian
152 color pages (73 figures), size 29.7x21 cm.
Soft-touch 300 gsm softcover, pages made of premium matte coated paper, 170 gsm.
Photography:k | series, January 2026
ISBN: 9791224051879
See: https://robertocaccialanza.com/vol.-10---frederic-flacheron.html

Michael Hoppen Gallery has announced that the Bodleian Library has acquired what it described as 'one of the most important albums of 20th century photography to come to light in recent years' - a previously unknown Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton album which Michael Hoppen Gallery exhibited last year. Compiled by Roland Haupt, an assistant to both photographers, it contain some of the first prints of Miller's best known photographs and other prints that were previously unknown. The Gallery noted: 'the Library will use their exceptional conservation department to preserve this historically important album and make it available to students and academics alike to study. We could not have hoped for a better home for Lee Millers work.'

The Gallery described the album: 

The album begins with this brief and heartfelt introduction by its originator – Roland Haupt, who sets the scene perfectly:

…This is the story of my favourite photographer Lee Miller – Vogue war correspondent who followed the American army from the beaches of Normandy, 5 days after D-Day, up to the final entry into Berlin and after that she continued her journey visiting countries that had been occupied, having many exciting experiences – here are a few of the beautiful pictures she sent back…

The album, which is ostensibly a daybook or scrap book kept by their assistant, Roland Haupt, provides an empirical time capsule of this fast moving, dangerous and seminal period at the end of the WWII. Many of the seismic moments that Lee Miller witnessed and photographed so professionally, are here - from the surrender of the German army to American forces, the harrowing evidence she captured in Dachau and Buchenwald, and an unpublished version of Lee in Hitlers bathtub, taken by David E. Scherman, who she in turn photographed in the bath too. There are strangely banal and unknown photographs of Hitlers bedroom with his unmade bed (Lee had spent the night in it) and his rather ordinary living room and desk. These ‘innocent’ images however produce a chilling and unsettling realisation when one realises whose home we are looking at. Miller observed that:

… ‘Hitler had never really been alive for me until to-day. He'd been an evil-machine-monster all these years, until I bathed ate and slept in his house. He became less fabulous and therefore more terrible’…

The following section of this unique album is populated with beautifully perfect photographs by Cecil Beaton, many taken in North Africa, where Beaton was stationed towards the end of the war. His pictures show a more restrained and composed method of documenting what he saw. There is none of the horror of Europe - which so compelled Lee - to be found in Beaton’s photographs. In 1942, Beaton had travelled to North Africa. where he produced some of his most dramatic abstract studies focusing on the detritus of war in the dry endless desert landscape, which he described as surreal. Beaton did also record the hardships and physical extremes experienced by the troops, just as he registered the sometimes sublime beauty of the desert.

Scattered through the album, are other pictures taken by Beaton in London and of Beaton himself – possibly by Haupt, and as any day book would have, a haphazard cornucopia of mixed portraits, theatre sets and newspaper cuttings of the day showing his images used in the press.

Later in the album, where we find numerous images by the three photographers. There is an extraordinary print of a semi-naked Lee Miller with a plaster cast of her exposed torso, possibly made by her husband Roland Penrose, upended over her head. Penrose had photographed the cast being made on her body and was in keeping with their exposure and fascination with the surrealists movement in Paris before the war.

Amongst the album’s other crowded pages are photographs by Miller of firing squads, scenes of despair and grief around the camps. Jumping out of one of the pages is a desperate image of a pair of young SS guards, captured, beaten and tied-up in the back of a van staring directly into her lens. Miller's writing about the beaten guards was brief and offhand, suggesting that she found it difficult to put her feelings into words:

 ….’What is the nature of justice - and what the role of vengeance - in the aftermath of atrocity? And how is it possible to go on living in the world, with the full knowledge of humanity's capacity for evil?’….

Amongst some of the highly charged photographs, are other more traditional and gentler images which share a strange kind of classical beauty contrasting against the stark late winter war ravaged landscapes. A plethora of fashion pictures by Miller showing models resting during a fashion shoot - juxtaposed with war photographs - are easily mistaken for ‘bodies’ that she photographed after suicides or as casualties of war.

It is through this ability of her fluent and intuitive visual language, that Miller was able to make pictures of the horrors of war, of fashion, views and landscapes and of personalities with such professionalism, and moreover, with such a razor-sharp point of view. It is understandable how her integrity and image-making ability came to mean so much to all those who worked with her. She clearly knew how important her witnessing of the history that unfolded in front of her was, and that she had to make these difficult pictures to inform the world of an uncomfortable truth.

Populating some of the other more general album pages, are portraits of many distinguished and influential luminaries of the day, whose lives were intertwined during the war years through art, politics, literature, music and theatre. Picasso, Marlene Dietrich, Fed Astair, Noel Coward, Mervyn Peake, Bob Hope, Clifford Coffin, Margaret Bourke-White and many others are there.

This day book was started in 1943, and was printed and assembled by Roland Haupt. Lee Miller was an excellent photographic printer herself, and she learned some of her technique from Man Ray who she lived with in Paris with whom she grew fascinated by what was achievable with photography. She printed all her own work and some of Man Ray’s in her Paris days, and to begin with in her New York studio, where she then trained her brother Erik Miller to be her assistant and to take over the darkroom work under her supervision.

In Egypt, she used commercial processing, but it is probable that she took a firm role in supervising the making of the enlargements she had made, some of which were published and exhibited at the time.

During the London Vogue studio days in 1940 she at first found herself back in the darkroom, but she managed to train and encourage her assistant Roland Haupt to the point where he did all the routine work.

Haupt was tasked as the photographic assistant to Cecil Beaton too during the war years. He processed and printed many of their most important and celebrated works, made for Vogue and Bazaar. Haupt was often entrusted with their precious rolls of film. Lee would send the shot film to Haupt in the UK via an army courier which he would then process, contact and print in his small darkroom, and then, forward them onto Vogue.

Read more and see Michael Hoppen discuss the album with Philippe Garner here: https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/viewing-room/51-an-album-a-daybook-with-works-by-lee-an-exceptional-album-of-vintage-silver-gelatin-prints/

The announcement provides a useful reminder that the Tate's Lee Miller retrospective exhibition remains open until 15 February and the National Portrait Gallery's Cecil Beaton exhibition closed earlier this month but a book is available. 

By/For: Photography & Democracy is a collaborative partnership between three photographic historians, Dr. Tom Allbeson, Dr. Colleen O’Reilly, and Helen Trompeteler. Our second season of events begins on Friday 6 February. Please join us online with Anne Cross and Matthew Fox-Amato for their lecture, ‘To Show or Not to Show: Ethics, Censorship, and the Case of the Scourged Back’.

With a year of thought-provoking conversations on photography and democracy, upcoming lectures include Vindhya Buthpitiya, Leigh Raiford, Jeehey Kim, Zahid R. Chaudhary, and Tiffany Fairey.

Also, a reminder that at the end of our inaugural 2024/2025 season, we convened a reflective roundtable conversation with Shawn Michelle Smith, Brenna Wynn Greer, Thy Phu, Darren Newbury, Ileana L. Selejan, and Patricia Hayes. Together, they examined the stakes of photography in our contemporary moment and explored its complex entanglements with power structures and systemic injustice. Read the transcript of the conversation.

To Show or Not to Show: Ethics, Censorship, and the Case of the Scourged Back with Anne Cross & Matt Fox-Amato
6 February

Studio Ilankai: A Tamil Photographic History of Sri Lankan Citizenship with Vindhya Buthpitiya
6 March 

When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World with Leigh Raiford
10 April

War, Movement, and the Camera: Black Lives in Korean and Japanese Photography with Jeehey Kim
2 October

By/For & Zahid R. Chaudhary
6 November 

Imaging Peace: What might a photography of peace consist of? with Tiffany Fairey
4 December

All free to register and held via Zoom
See: https://www.byforcollective.com/programs

Late spring will see two new heritage plaques being unveiled. One will be for Julia Margaret Cameron, and the second will be a new plaque for Christina Broom. The dates and locations - both in London - and how people might attend will be announced here later. 

I recently came across a CDV album of portraits and topographical views. I bought it partly because I recognised one view to be of Hexham. After "my" conservator had removed the CDVs for cleaning, I was extremely pleased to learn that this view and 10 others carried an early backstamp of J. P. Gibson, Hexham. Some also carried a printed paper label, presumably also created by Gibson. I am sure that many members here are familiar with his name. His family had a chemist shop at Hexham Market Place, as shown in the Hexham view. A later version of the shop is now in the Science Museum, London. 

Of the ten other Gibson views, six feature Dilston (four castle and grounds, two the bridge over Devil's Water), two Hexham Abbey (interior and exterior) and two Corbridge (town views).

I have done a little research since receiving the images earlier this week but have not managed to find other Gibson CDVs with the particular backstamp shown on mine. Based on the presence of some early 1860s-dated portraits and a couple of "W&D Downey, So. Shields" backstamps in the album, I would guess that "my" Gibson's date from the mid-1860s. That said, some "teaser text" for a book on Backhouse and Mounsey suggests that Gibson didn't start making topograpical views until around the 1880s.

Can anyone provide more information on Gibson and his early work? I attach images of the Hexham view and a far less commecial one of an apple tree in Dilston (perhaps the children are Gibson's or thiose of the Earl of Derwentwater).

I would be happy to share more images with anyone interested in researching the album further. 

On this day in 1926 John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television from premises in London's Frith Street. The building which is now the renowned Bar Italia is already marked with a blue heritage plaque. One hundred years to the day it has been joined with a World Original Site plaque. A ceremony today marked the unveiling by Iain Logie Baird, formerly television curator at the National Media Museum, and John's grandson. 

The BBC with a particular interest in the event was there to film the unveiling which falso included Charlotte Connelly from the National Science and Media Museum which houses a Baird Televisor and Baird's experimental apparatus including test dummy 'Stookie Bill'.

See: https://worldoriginsite.org/television-john-logie-baird/
and https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/tv-100/#televisiongoespublic

The seminar is organised by Museum of Cinema - Tomàs Mallol Collection (Girona); Department of History and Art History of the University of Girona (UdG); Research Group on the Origins of Cinema (GROC); and the Research Project of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities entitled: 'The impact of electricity on turn-of-the-century cinema and photography: from transformations of vision to the animism of objects (1885-1919)'

The call for papers for the 15th Seminar is open. The deadline for submissions is 31 March, 2026. 

15th International Seminar on the Origins and History of Cinema
Electricity and its impact on modern visual and auditory culture
cfp: deadline: 31 March 2026
see: https://museudelcinema.girona.cat/eng/institut_seminari_2026.php
seminar: 5 & November 2026

The photographer Gus Wylie has died aged 90 years. Wylie was a long term chronicler of Scottish island life, and his home county of Norfolk, and much more besides. He was perhaps best known for his book The Hebrideans. The Photographs 1974-2004 (2005).

Wylie was taught at The Royal College of Art, London, the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, and directed the MA in Fashion Photography at the University of the Arts, London. He published five books, four of which are on the Western Isles of Scotland and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2005.

He graduated three times at Postgraduate level in, respectively, Fine Art, Photography and Cultural History, all of which were gained at the Royal College of Art, London, and the last of which was a PhD.

In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history of chemical photography through the lens of its deep connections to empire and industry. Dr Miranda Melcher discusses the book with Michelle Henning. 

Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives of British photographic manufacturer Ilford Limited, Professor Henning exposes the ways photography shaped how we see and understand the atmosphere while leaving its toxic residues in the air, soil, and water.

Structured as thirty-six short chapters and with over seventy illustrations, this innovative book begins in interwar London, follows the supply of Ilford products to photographers on the West African coast, and considers photography as a military technology linked to the development of chemical warfare. Combining close readings of photographs with discussions of low-light, tropical, and aerial photography, Professor Henning examines the extraction and development of photographic materials, their role in the current environmental crisis, and how they have shaped experiences of time and the environment.

See: https://newbooksnetwork.com/a-dirty-history-of-photography

Professor Donna West Brett is the 2026 Oliver Smithies visiting lecturer, at Balliol College, Oxford. She will be delivering two lectures during her residence. The first looks at Zeppelins. 

‘Disaster, Sensation and the Zeppelin Sublime’.
Zeppelins played a significant role in shaping the British home front experience during the First World War, which Trudi Tate characterised as ‘a fantasmatic, infantile, and pleasurable relationship to the war and its objects.’ In September and October 1916, three German airships were shot down over Essex, events that drew tens of thousands of spectators, including journalists, who collected souvenirs or photographed the wreckage. Despite widespread disillusionment with the war, the presence of zeppelins elicited a paradoxical mix of intoxication, exhilaration, and horror (Freedman, 2004), a response reflected in the broader public imagination. Photographs and illustrations of burning airships and bombed houses, reproduced in the illustrated press, formed part of the burgeoning visual culture surrounding these spectacular events. This lecture examines the public emotional response, the extensive visual culture, including media narratives, and the mass consumption of wreckage souvenirs and postcards that emerged from these spectacles, thereby constituting what became known as the ‘Zeppelin Sublime.'
12 February 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/february/12/oliver-smithies-lecture

‘Stasi Surveillance: Photography’s Material and Residual Traces’.
This lecture examines the entanglement of photography with the past and its potential future within a post-archival context. Specifically, it examines photographs taken by the East German Stasi from the 1960s to 1989, highlighting the extensive material and photographic residue that serve as tangible traces of surveillance activities. Through key case studies, the lecture considers photography’s multiple registers as a tool for covert surveillance and as an evidential record, which nonetheless become haunting traces of unseen surveillance forces and a testament to photography’s unsettling potential.
5 March 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford. 
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/march/05/oliver-smithies-lecture

All are welcome. Please RSVP to the college: office@balliol.ox.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

Following the death of Martin Parr on 6 December 2025 the Martin Parr Foundation has posted a short statement to reassure its members and the wider photography world about its future. It is reproduced here:

We've been asked a lot over the past weeks - What's next for the Foundation? - so we wanted to assure everyone that out mission remains the same. 

Martin put in place a sustainable plan for the Foundation's future and we will continue with our programme of events and exhibitions, as well as continue to grow our collection of photography and to nurture new talent. 

We will continue to hold BOP_Bristol, our annual photobook festival, and we'll still be involved in Bristol Photo Festival. 

We deeply miss Martin's presence, but we are strengthened by the outpouring of support from across the globe in response to Martin's death. If you would like to help us continue Martin's work supporting the photography commnity, please consider joining us as a Member, Supporter or Patron.

The Martin Parr Foundation and membership can be seen here: https://martinparrfoundation.org/

The Foundation's first exhibition of 2026 will be Martin's The Last Resort first shown in 1986 at the Serpentine Gallery, London.  It opens at the Foundation on 20 February 2026. Details on BPH - with some of the 1986 reports and reviews - in the next week or so.

Photo: Martin Parr at the opening of A year in the life of Chew Stoke at the Foundation in January 2023. © Michael Pritchard

Chiswick Auctions is to offer a group of 29 lots from the estate of Cherry Kearton (1871-1940). Kearton was one half of the Kearton brothers who are widely acknowledged as the pioneers of natural history photography and cinematography made in the field and underpinned by fieldcraft and scientific rigour. Both were Fellows of the Royal Photographic Society. Richard (1862-1928) and Cherry Kearton published their natural history photography widely in book form, through articles and lantern shows, and their films were widely exhibited. One lot is from British ornithologist C.H. Bentham, Richard Kearton's son-in-law and his co-author on Pocket Book of Birds (1925). 

The Cherry Kearton material includes Kearton's prototype rifle camera from c.1919, a tropical hand camera and his 3a Autographic Kodak Special model B camera, a selection of photographs (including correspondence and photographs with Theodore Roosevelt from 1909), press cuttings, documents relating to Kearton's publications, books, camera patents and manuscript material. One lot includes a selection 35mm nitrate ciné film. 

Michael Pritchard writes...Of the two Kearton brothers Cherry was widely acknowledged to be the more significant and 'demonstrated the outstanding value of the camera in the study of wild life', although the collaboration was a significant one until Richard's early death. As the photographic press noted the Kearton's books 'marked an entuirely new approach to the study of animal and bird life'. Although birds were the Kearton's initial subject, they expanded their work to include wider fauna and flora.

Summing up their contribution in 1940 the British Journal of Photography noted 'more than any other naturalists they developed photography and the photograph as the mode and the end of personal observation...and laid the foundation for a technique entirely different from any that had gone before'.

Cherry Kearton's work started in his native Yorkshire and spread more widely across Britain and then into Africa. Photography in daylight was supplemented by flashlight, and cinematography was added to still photography. Their work studying nature 'largely put an end to the wholesale slaughter of birds and beasts in the so-called interests of science' and their approach was followed by many other photographers.

Auction: The Art of Nature
Chiswick Auctions
10 February 2026 at 1100
Lots 66-94
See lot details here

Images: (top): a selection from 80 held in Kearton's library, including signed books (est. £600-800); (top, right): Prototype rifle camera c.1919 (est £2000-3000);  (centre): flashlight photograph of a maneless African Lion and Cherry Kearton holding a lion cub c1909 (est £100-150); (lower): Kearton's personal press cutting's archive (est 200-300). All courtesy Chiswick Auctions. 

BPH reported on a new book by John Bevis The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography in 2016 and the acquisition of a Kearton cinematographic camera by the then National Media Musuem in 2013. A second camera reputed to be owned by the Keartons was shown on the Antiques Roadshow in 2016. 

The Times Literary Supplement in an essay by Maria C Scott reports on the discovery of portraits by the Parisian studio of Nadar of Jeanne Duval, the long-term mistress of Charles Baudelaire and the 'Black Venus'. Scott examined the portraits and discovered further likely portraits in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Scott suggests that the portraits rewrite the representation of Duvall based on Baudelaire's biased accounts, and concludes 'What these photographs confirm above all is Duval’s strength of character, and that is surely what Manet was trying to capture in his portrait of her.'

See: Maria C Scott, ' Portraits of the ‘Black Venus'. Newly discovered photographs of Baudelaire’s muse', TLS, 23 January 2026, no. 6397 or:  https://www.the-tls.com/lives/biography/newly-discovered-photographs-baudelaire-muse-essay-maria-c-scott (paywall)

Image: Two previously unknown photographs of Jeanne Duval from the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Following the recent death of Colin Ford CBE Amgueddfa Cymru–Museum Wales has announced the establishment of the Colin Ford Endowment Fund. Before his death Colin gifted his personal collection of photography books, which reflects a lifetime’s worth of collecting, to the museum. The endowment fund will support the on-going purchase of photography books to continue to grow the Colin Ford Photography Library and reflect current photographic scholarship, curation and practice.

Colin Ford CBE HonFRPS was the Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru from 1993 to 1998. He was a curator, historian, museum director and broadcaster, whose professional life was largely dedicated to photography. His personal papers have been donated to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 

See more and contribute in Colin's memory here: https://my.museum.wales/donate/q/in-memory-colin-ford

In celebration of International Women’s Day, 8 March 2026, and building on the success of our 2025 conference-a-thon, we invited scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts to submit abstracts for participation in a free, online, global, 24-hour symposium dedicated to celebrating the contributions of women to the medium of photography from photography’s announcement in 1839 to now. This unique free event featuring 72 speakers aims to highlight the diverse and impactful work of women and female-identifying photographers, as well as those working with photography, across all countries, continents, cultures, and time zones, without a penny spent on travel or registration.  The recordings will be viewable for a month afterwards but only to those who have registered. 

Women of Photography conference-a-thon
International Womens' Day
8 March 2026
See the full programme and register for free here: https://womenofphoto.com/

A couple of BBC Radio 4 programmes have explored the lives and careers of two prominent photographers. This Cultural Life featured American photographer Annie Leibovitz who spoke to John Wilson about her career and cultural influences. Desert Island Discs interviewed Sally Mann who spoke candidly about her family and approach to her photography. Both programmes are available to listen to on BBC Sounds. 

Listen to: Annie Leibovitz. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002pqnk and Sally Mann: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002m1mv