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12201228252?profile=originalI have a collection of portfolios with photographs by J.F. Langhans.  Each portfolio containsa a group of photographs mounted, with both type and hand written notes, embossed with National Art Library, mostly ecclesiastical garments.  I received confirmation from V&A Museum that they were once part of their collection.  They still have a portfolio of the Iron Work as part of Industrial Arts.  A curator from V&A suggested I reach out to this group and tap into the great knowledge coming from the group.  I have also spoken to the langhans.cz organization, but they had little information on these.

Any information about J.F. Langhans or the other industrial art works that were covered in the commissioned work of King Edward VII, would be greatly appreciated.12201228098?profile=original

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12201190660?profile=originalBorn in England in 1958 I emigrated to Australia in 1986. I started taking photographs at the age of 17 before formal studies began in Australia at the age of 30. My photography is as much European as it is Australian and my archive contains many photographs of England, France and Europe.

In 2021, I celebrate 30 years of art practice with the creation of a new website (https://marcusbunyan.com), the first to contain all my bodies of work since 1991 (note: more bodies of work still have to be added between 1996-1999).

My first solo exhibition was in a hair dressing salon in High Street, Prahran, Melbourne in 1991, during my second year of a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art Photography) at RMIT University (formerly Phillip Institute out in Bundoora). Titled 'Of Magic, Music and Myth' it featured black and white medium format photographs of the derelict Regent Theatre and the old Victorian Railway's Newport Workshops.

The concerns that I had at the time in my art making have remained with me to this day: that is, an investigation into the boundaries between identity, space and environment. Music and "spirit" have always been an abiding influence – the intrinsic music of the world and the spirit of objects, nature, people and the cosmos ... in a continuing exploration of spaces and places, using found images and digital and film cameras to record glances, meditations and movement through different environments.

30 years after I started I hope I have learnt a lot about image making ... and a lot about myself. I also hope the early bodies of my work are still as valid now as they were when I made them. In the 30 years since I became an artist my concerns have remained constant but as well, my sense of exploration and joy at being creative remains undimmed and an abiding passion.

Now, with ego integrated and the marching of the years I just make art for myself, yes, but the best reason to make art is ... for love and for the cosmos. For I believe any energy that we give out to the great beyond is recognised by spirit. Success is fleeting but making art gives energy to creation. We all return to the great beyond, eventually.

Each photograph in this posting links to a different body of work on my new website. Please click on the photographs to see the work.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

SEE THE FULL POSTING AT https://wp.me/pn2J2-igh

 

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Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958)
An English fair
1993
Gelatin silver print

 

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Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958)
An English fair
1993
Gelatin silver print

 

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Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958)
Manchester Mardi Gras
1993
Silver gelatin print

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Eva Grant - 1950s Figure Photographer

12201183075?profile=originalArticle on the female figure photographer, Eva Grant. She was born in Istanbul, grew up in Greece, and became a student nurse in London. To supplement her meagre income, she did a bit of swimwear modelling, only to find out she had a real passion for being on the other side of the camera. She was active during the 1950s and early sixties. She published her own magazine called Line and Form that ran for around 40 issues.  https://pamela-green.com/all-about-eva-grant/

Image © Eva Grant

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12201088669?profile=originalWhen Roger Fenton arrived in the Crimea in March 1855 to photograph the war that had been raging for 12 months, the major battles of the campaign had already been fought.  And yet, the images that he captured of exhausted troops and desolate landscapes would become some of the most significant visual accounts of conflict ever produced, giving birth to the genre of war photography.

The first exhibition of Fenton's Crimean works in London since 1856, Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 explores how the photographer brought the stark realities of war into public consciousness for the first time, through more than 60 photographs from the Royal Collection. The exhibition also tells the story of the historically close relationship between the Royal Family and those who have served their country in battle, with contributions to the exhibition's multimedia guide by HRH The Duke of Sussex, photojournalist Sir Don McCullin and exhibition curator Sophie Gordon.

The Crimean War saw Britain, France, Sardinia and the Ottomon Empire allied against Russia's attempt to expand its influence into Ottoman territory.  The impact of the war on the Victorian public was immense.  Britain sent 98,000 men into the conflict, and thanks to improved communications and the presence of war correspondents, updates from the battlefield reached home in days rather than weeks.  The advent of photography meant that reports were no longer limited to unillustrated newspaper accounts or artistic depictions of battle, and the public was able to witness authentic images of war for the first time. 

Roger Fenton was already a respected photographer when he travelled to the Crimea, commissioned by the publishers Thomas Agnew & Sons to photograph people of interest for use as source material for a painting by the artist Thomas Barker.  Arriving several months after the major battle of Balaklava and the famous Charge of the Light Brigade, Fenton spent three months producing approximately 360 photographs, travelling and working in a mobile darkroom that he had converted from a wine merchant's van. The limitations of 19th-century photographic techniques, coupled with Victorian sensibilities, prevented Fenton from producing scenes of battle and death.  Instead, he evoked the destruction of war through portrayals of bleak terrains and haunted troops.  In his most famous photograph, Valley of the Shadow of Death (23 April 1855), he places the viewer at the bottom of a barren ravine littered with cannonballs, subtly referencing the earlier battles in which so many had lost their lives.

Fenton spent several weeks photographing the key figures of the war.  One of his best-known portraits, The Council of War (June 1855), shows the three commanders of the allied armies – Lord Raglan, Maréchal Pélissier and Omar Pasha – preparing for their successful assault on the Russian fortifications at Mamelon.  Lord Raglan died on 28 June 1855, shortly after the image was taken. 

In August 1855, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal that she had viewed some of Fenton's work, commenting that the portrait was 'one, most interesting, of poor Lord Raglan, Pélissier & Omar Pacha, sitting together on the morning, on which the Quarries were taken'. While the majority of Fenton's portraits depicted senior officers, his photographs also captured the conditions for troops on the frontline, from living and cooking facilities to the after-effects of battle.  One of his more disturbing images is Lord Balgonie (1855), which is the first visual record of someone suffering from 'shell shock'.  Balgonie was badly affected by the conflict and died in 1857 – his death at the time attributed to the war.  The image demonstrates Fenton's proficiency in creating powerful photographs without resorting to explicit imagery.

Fenton returned to Britain in July 1855, and in September his Crimean photographs went on display at the Water Colour Society on Pall Mall, the first of four London venues. The images raised awareness of the conditions endured by soldiers at a time when the wounded began to arrive home.  Queen Victoria, who had commissioned Fenton to produce portraits of the royal family in 1854, took a personal interest in the conflict and the welfare of the troops.  Keen that her concern was publicly known, she was the first British monarch to meet and support wounded soldiers in public, personally greeting troops at Buckingham Palace and during visits to hospitals.  She also instituted the Victoria Cross, which remains the highest award for gallantry in the British Armed Forces. On the exhibition's multimedia guide, recorded when the exhibition was first shown in Edinburgh in 2017, The Duke of Sussex speaks about how the photographs taken by Fenton and his contemporaries helped change attitudes towards those affected by their experiences on the battlefield.

Speaking about Fenton's image Lord Balgonie, the first visual record of someone suffering from 'shell shock', His Royal Highness says in the multimedia guide: 'There has always been a fascination about people returning from war, what they've been through and what they've seen.  The psychological impact of being on the battlefield is something that servicemen and women have had to deal with, but have often found it hard to talk about.  As a result of photographers like Roger Fenton and those who have followed him, the public have gained a better appreciation of these experiences and consequently, over the years this fascination has turned to appreciation and respect.'

Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 is at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 9 November 2018 – 28 April 2019, with Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs.

The accompanying publication, Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 by Sophie Gordon, is published by Royal Collection Trust, price £24.95 from Royal Collection Trust shops and www.royalcollection.org.uk/shop.

Visitor information and tickets for The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace:  www.royalcollection.org.uk, T. +44 (0)30 3123 7301.

Below image: Roger Fenton, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 1854 Images for use in connection with the exhibition, Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855, The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 9 November 2018 - 28 April 2019. Royal Collection Trust / (C) Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018. 12201088863?profile=original

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I am conducting research into the relationship between art and photography with reference to those who worked with Pre-Raphaelite artists specifically Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  There are several such as John Parsons, Emery Walker, William Downey and of course C L Dodgson.  Whilst there is some literature on Dodgson relating to this it is mainly restricted to his diary entries cross referencing with biographical details from other sources.  John Parson is more problematic; any information on him would be much appreciated and also on Downey and Walker.

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12201055668?profile=originalThe International Journal on Stereo & Immersive Media is a new open access and peer-reviewed journal that aims to reflect on the emergence of our progressively immersive media culture with a historical, critical and contemporary perspective. This immersive media culture depends both on state of the art technologies and on historical and archaeological media that once sought to expand our sensory experiences.

This Journal welcomes papers addressing the redesign of our sensory mediation, focusing on one or more of the following themes:

  1. Stereoscopic and Panoramic Photography (historical and contemporary)
  2. Optical and Otological Media Archaeologies
  3. Media Arts and Immersion
  4. Architecture, Games and Augmented Realities
  5. Urban behaviour and the Influence of Sound devices
  6. Sonic Art and New Technologies

Please find registration and submission informations at http://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/stereo/information/authors

Submissions deadline: 16 October

12201056461?profile=originalImage caption: Sir Charles Wheatstone and his family by Antoine Claudet,
Stereoscopic daguerreotype, circa 1851-1852 © National Portrait Gallery, London

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12201031467?profile=originalI finally got around to scanning some more of my black and white archive, this time further photographs from a trip to England in 1993 forming a new sequence. The photographs picture my now ageing mother (these were taken over 20 years ago), an English fair, medieval tiles and Highgate Cemetery, among other subjects. They become especially poignant after the recent passing of my father.

The image of  my mother plays off against a land that is noting an absence - maybe an absence of a certain type of yang force... even the "strong draught horse" seems to come from another time. My mentor said of the sequence: "Wow - that is really good Marcus". Praise I value highly indeed.

The photographs form a sequence and should be viewed horizontally. Please click on the long small image to see them in this format when viewing on Art Blart. See the full sequence at http://wp.me/pn2J2-842

Dr Marcus Bunyan

I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991 - 1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.

All images © Marcus Bunyan but can be used freely anywhere with the proper acknowledgement. Please click the photographs for a larger version of the image.

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Marcus Bunyan
An English fair
1993

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Marcus Bunyan
Medieval tiles
1993

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Marcus Bunyan
Covered figure with flowers
1993

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Another exhibition to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) from the same source (the Victoria and Albert Museum) as the exhibition I travelled up to Sydney to review last year.

I am always ecstatic when I see her work, no more so than when I view images that I have not seen before, such as that dark, brooding slightly out of focus portrait of William Michael Rossetti (1865) or the profusion of delicate countenances and gazes that is May Day (1866).

The piercing gaze of Julia Jackson (1867, below) always astounds, as though she is speaking to you, directly, from life. The r/evolutionary English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin (1868, below) is pictured - no, that's the wrong word - is materialised before our eyes at the age of 59 (looking much older), through low depth of field, delicate tonality and the defining of an incredible profile that imbues his portrait with the implicit intelligence of the man. I would have loved to have known what he was thinking.

See the full posting at http://wp.me/pn2J2-7Dw

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Victoria and Albert Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

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Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Jackson
1867
Albumen print
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

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Julia Margaret Cameron
Charles Darwin
1868, printed 1875>
Albumen print
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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12201025683?profile=originalIt was a flying visit to Sydney to see the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The trip was so very worthwhile, for I had never seen JMC's large contact photographs "in the flesh" before, let alone over 100 vintage prints from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection. They did not disappoint. This exhibition is one of the photographic highlights of the year.

When you think about it, here is one the world's top ten photographers of all time - a woman, taking photographs within the first twenty five years of the birth of commercial photography, using rudimentary technology and chemicals - whose photographs are still up there with the greatest ever taken. Still recognisable as her own and no one else's after all these years. That is a staggering achievement - and tells you something about the talent, tenacity and perspicacity of the women... that she possessed and illuminated such a penetrating discernment - a clarity of vision and intellect which provides a deep understanding and insight into the human condition...

The road to spirituality is the road less travelled. It is full of uncertainty and confusion, but only through exploring this enigma can we begin to approach some type of inner reality. Julia Margaret Cameron, in her experiments, in her dogged perseverance, was on a spiritual journey of self discovery. In Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, he suggests Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs as the ideal music for a scene his character has written:

"Four Last Songs. For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve."

These words are an appropriate epithet for the effect of the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron in this year 2015, the 200th anniversary of her birth.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for Art Blart

Word count: 1,336

Read the full text here: http://wp.me/pn2J2-7lg

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Julia Margaret Cameron
Sappho
1865
Albumen print from wet collodion glass negative
Given by Alan S. Cole, 19 April 1913
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

In late 1865 Julia Margaret Cameron began using a larger camera, which held a 15 x 12-inch glass negative. Early the next year she wrote to Henry Cole with great enthusiasm – but little modesty – about the new turn she had taken in her work. Cameron initiated a series of large-scale, close-up heads. These fulfilled her photographic vision, a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture.

This striking version of Sappho is in keeping with Cameron’s growing confidence as an artist. Mary Hillier’s classical features stand out clearly in profile while her dark hair merges with the background. The decorative blouse balances the simplicity of the upper half of the picture. Cameron was clearly pleased with the image since she printed multiple copies, despite having cracked the negative.

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12201015453?profile=originalIn our contemporary image-saturated, comprehensively mediated way of life it is difficult for us to understand how "sensational" photography would have been in the Victorian era. Imagine never having seen a photograph of a landscape, city or person before. To then be suddenly presented with a image written in light, fixed before the eye of the beholder, would have been a profoundly magical experience for the viewer. Here was a new, progressive reality imaged for all to see. The society of the spectacle as photograph had arrived.

Here was the expansion of scopophilic society, our desire to derive pleasure from looking. That fetishistic desire can never be completely fulfilled, so we have to keep looking again and again, constantly reinforcing the ocular gratification of images. Photographs became shrines to memory. They also became shrines to the memory of desire itself.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for Art Blart

See the full posting here: http://wp.me/pn2J2-7oK

Photography - A Victorian Sensation shows at the National Museum of Scotland until 22 November. 

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Ross and Thomson of Edinburgh
Unknown little girl sitting on a striped cushion holding a framed portrait of a man, possibly her dead father
1847-60
Ninth-plate daguerreotype
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

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12200993468?profile=originalI thought it appropriate to notify you of my exhibition of memorial/postmortem photographs- Memorializing Infant Loss in 19th Century Photography. The exhibit is being shown at a conference at the University of Hertfordshire and opens July 16th.  The conference title is Perceptions of  Pregnancy…

The basis of the exhibit is my Sleeping Beauty Book series on memorial photography. The exhibit illustrates American and UK examples of postmortem portraiture.  Your audience may be interested in some of my recent news items in NYTimes and NY Magazine- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/nyregion/the-morbid-anatomy-museum-opens-in-brooklyn.html and http://nymag.com/health/bestdoctors/2014/cutting-edge-medicine-2014-6/
Our new photographic history website- www.burnsarchive.comI don't know if the HBO/CInemax TV channel is available in the UK, but on August 8th they will premiere a ten part series - a medical melodrama essentially based on my medical photographs and stories. The director is Steven Soderbergh and the lead actor- England's - Clive Owen. It is about surgery in the year 1900 and is a very realistic and accurate portrayal.
Thanks
Stanley B. Burns,MD,FACS
I will be visiting, Edinburgh and Dublin surgical societies
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London Photograph Fair Newsletter published

We've just sent out the latest edition of our Newsletter - which gives details of our forthcoming Fair on February 26th  and confirms the date for our final event of the year - November 11th.  To read the Newsletter please click here - or to sign up to join our mailing list click here. Anyone joining the mailing list will be entered in a draw for a £100 voucher to be spent at the Fair. (Image courtesy of Christophe Lunn.)12200939869?profile=original

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