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An exhibition of photographs by Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron from the Royal Collection will go on display from 31 January until 27 April 2011 at Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House, in the Lake District.

31 January - 27 April 2011

Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House
Bowness-on-Windermere
Cumbria
LA23 3JT

More details are at: www.blackwell.org.uk

People looking to uncover the true spirit of the iconic and currently ubiquitous wartime poster, Keep Calm and Carry On, may want to head to the Royal Air Force Museum to see the real backdrop of this chirpy wartime notice. The Mayor of London’s photographic and image based exhibition, commissioned by Boris Johnson for City Hall to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the London Blitz, is heading from its temporary home for a spell at the historic Hendon site.
Dedicate to the individuals involved in the emergency, volunteer, transport and specialist services who kept London going during the darkest days of the War, the exhibition features hard-hitting wartime images together with histories culled from the collections of various London organisations.
Each of dramatic photographs vividly portrays the story of London’s people, their determination and ‘Blitz Spirit’ at time when 30,000 Londoners were killed, entire communities destroyed and countless thousands left homeless.
The aerial bombing campaign on London during the Second World War ran from September 7 to May 11 1941. During this period 50,000 bombs and millions of incendiary devices fell on the city.
“We are particularly honoured to display this collaborative effort,” said Ian Thirsk, Head of Collections at the Royal Air Force Museum, “Iwhich narrates the story of how so many of the capital’s organisations were central to the on-going delivery of vital public services during late 1940 and early 1941.”
Mayor of London Boris Johnson also welcomed the exhibition's showing at the RAF Museum and similarly paid tribute to the “bravery and dogged determination of the men and women who battled to keep London going in the face of a terrifying and unremitting bombardment. This tremendous spirit and resilience remain at the very heart of the capital and we owe a huge debt of gratitude and respect to all those who helped secure London's future.”
The rarely seen images have been provided by London Transport Museum, the Museum of London, the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection, the Fire Brigade Museum, London Ambulance Service, Barts and London NHS and the Royal Pioneer Corps Association.

The London Blitz 70th anniversary Exhibition, The Bomber Hall of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon until May 31 2011.

Following recent discoveries in the John Rylands Library Special Collections, UNDEREXPOSED is an exhibition in Collaboration withThe Museum of Science and Industry, celebrating the life of one of Manchester’s early photographic pioneers, J.T. Chapman.

Chemist, inventor and photographer, Chapman invented some of the processes that were to become standard in early photography. However, he is widely omitted from history books as he published his formula under the pseudonym ‘Ostendo non Ostento’ (I show, not boast). Working from Deansgate, Manchester, Chapman also invented and sold his own cameras and projectors.

The exhibition also showcases a selection of glass plate negatives, recently discovered and linked to the Langford Brooke family of Mere Hall in Cheshire, which have been cleaned, re-housed and digitised by CHICC.

CHICC is The Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, a JISC funded project to develop a Centre for Heritage Digitisation, based within the University of Manchester.

The John Rylands Library will be holding a series of events associated with the exhibition, for more information please contact 0161 306 0555 or email jrul.events@manchester.ac.uk

The exhibition is at the John Rylands Library, Crawford Room, from Wednesday 29 September to Sunday 28 November. Admission is free.

There will be a curator tour on Wednesday, 3 November between 1200-1300 and 1400-1500, both of which are free.

Camille Silvy was a pioneer of early photography and one of the greatest French photographers of the nineteenth century. This exhibition includes many remarkable images which have not been exhibited since the 1860s.

Over 100 works, including a large number of carte de visites, focus on a ten-year creative burst from 1857-67 working in Algiers, rural France, Paris and London and illustrate how Silvy pioneered many now familiar branches of the medium including theatre, fashion and street photography.

Working under the patronage of Queen Victoria, Silvy photographed royalty, aristocrats and celebrities. He also portrayed uncelebrated people, the professional classes and country gentry, their wives, children and servants.

The results offer a unique glimpse into nineteenth-century society through the eyes of one of photography's outstanding innovators.

The exhibition has been curated by Mark Haworth-Booth.

There are a series of lectures and events around the exhibitions - details here: http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/camille-silvy-photographer-of-modern-life-1834-1910.php

National Portrait Gallery - 15 July-24 October 2010

Tickets £5/£4.50/£4

To book advance tickets call 020 7907 7079 (transaction fee applies)

Exhibition organised by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, London

The National Portrait Gallery's Camille Silvy exhibition opens this week on 15 July. For any BPH readers in London the NPG bookshop is already selling curator Mark Haworth-Booth's book and catalogue of the show along with other relevant books, poster, cards and souvenirs. As one would expect the book is a fascinating read with well-reproduced illustrations and excellent value at £20 (hardback only). The exhibition space itself remains hidden behind locked doors...

Details of the exhibition and associated lectures and events can be found here: http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2010/camille-silvy1.php Most of the events are free but are likely to be popular and you are advised to turn up early to ensure a place.

Made at Lacock Abbey by William Henry Fox Talbot in August 1835, the world’s first photographic negative changed the world. A new exhibition, Celebrating the Negative launching on 3 July at the Fox Talbot Museum will display images by John Loengard, a highly acclaimed American photographer, who travelled the world during the 1990s visiting archives and photographers’ studios to see the original negatives of images that have changed photography and the world.

The images show the original negatives in the hands of the archivist or photographer which brings their scale into play and points up the fact that the negatives are objects as well as images.

The negative is not just another picture – it is THE picture. There is an intimate connection between the negative and the subject. Looking at a negative you are looking at an artefact of a time and place. The sun that shone on Abraham Lincoln on that day in 1863 was captured by that negative. All of the positive prints from that negative were made later, probably on a different day and by different sunlight and almost certainly not in the presence of Lincoln. Loengard says of Fox Talbot’s discovery: "It is a quirk of nature that silver and chlorine combine in the dark but separate when struck by light, leaving behind tiny, black, round particles of silver.

The 1st Negative

Talbot asked Lacock’s village carpenter to make up a few small wooden boxes to which he could insert his microscope lenses. These cameras, dubbed ‘Mousetraps’ by Talbot’s wife Constance, due to their size and shape, were the cameras through which he was finally able to capture an image.

On a sunny day in August, 1835 he aimed a mousetrap camera at the latticed window in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey and in a few minutes he had made the world’s first photographic negative.

Three of the original ‘Mousetrap Cameras’ have been loaned to the museum by the National Media Museum. It is their first visit to their original home of Lacock Abbey in more than 75 years.

There will also be examples of the most important negative processes on display and an explanation of how they were made and how each was a technological advance in the history of photography. Roger Watson, curator of the Fox Talbot Museum says: "This is a really important and exciting celebration for us at Lacock. The negative is the primary image. It is the sensitive surface that faced the subject and first recorded the light. All positive prints are secondary images derived from the negative and are therefore one step removed from the original scene. The negative was the eye witness and the positive print the story related after the fact."

In August a recreation of the first photographic negative using Talbot’s original formula and methodology in a new mousetrap camera made by Mark Ellis, a carpenter who currently lives in Lacock will be re-enacted. Present at this re-enactment will be Talbot’s great-great granddaughter Janet Burnett Brown."

Participants at a (fully subscribed) workshop in August entitled ‘The Dawn of Photography’ will recreate all of Talbot’s earliest photographic experiments including working with modern replicas of the mousetrap camera. They will be working in and around Lacock Abbey and there will be staff members to answer questions about what they are doing.

Lacock Abbey

3 July-12 December 2010

Ikon presents Seeing the Unseen, a revisit of the gallery’s 1976 exhibition of high-speed photographs by the pioneering American scientist and photographer Dr Harold E. Edgerton (1906-1990). Forming part of Ikon’s retrospective of the 1970s It Could Happen To You, this presentation takes place in Birmingham’s Pallasades Shopping Centre, in a shop unit just a few doors away from Ikon’s home during that decade.

The 1976 exhibition formed Edgerton’s first solo presentation in Europe, and was conceived as a collaborative effort between Geoffrey Holt and John R. Myers, then both lecturers in fine art and photography at Stourbridge College of Art. Their aim was to draw attention to the breadth of work created by of ‘one of the masters of the optical unconscious’ which had, until that point, been largely neglected by the art world.

Edgerton’s invention in the 1930s of a high-speed photographic process based on rapid, stroboscopic instances of light or ‘flash’ was a catalytic event in the history of photography, science and art. Using this method, his images revealed in great detail aspects of reality hitherto invisible to the naked eye. As Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edgerton made great strides in reconnaissance photography during the Second World War and later became the first to photograph test explosions of atomic weaponry. It is, however, the hands-on experimentation of ‘real world’ phenomena for which he is best remembered.

Edgerton’s remarkable multiple-flash pictures of tennis players, golfers and divers such as Swirls and Eddies of a Tennis Stroke (1939) break down intricate movements into singular moments. Other images appear to stop time: Milk-Drop Coronet (1957) illustrates the perfect crown formed by a drop of milk hitting a hard surface, whilst Cutting the Card Quickly (1964) shows a .30 calibre bullet, travelling 2800 feet per second, slicing a king of diamonds into two pieces. The startling Bullet and Apple (1964) portrays the explosion of an apple pierced by the bullet, moments before its total disintegration.

Edgerton’s film Seeing the Unseen (1939) is shown alongside his photographs plus an archive of correspondence, technical papers and printed materials relating to the 1976 exhibition.

This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Birmingham Central Library.

21 July – 5 September 2010

Unit 39-40, The Pallasades Shopping Centre, Birmingham

Events

Stopping Time in Stourbridge

Sunday 8 August, 2pm – FREE

The Pallasades Shopping Centre

Pete James, Head of Photography, Central Library Birmingham talks about the Pallasades exhibition and the photo-historical context through which Ikon’s 1976 Harold E. Edgerton exhibition came about. Refreshments are provided. Places are free but should be reserved by calling Ikon on 0121 248 0708.

Aspects of Edgerton

Sunday 22 August, 2pm - FREE

The Pallasades Shopping Centre

An event with Jonathan Shaw, photographer and Associate Head of Media & Communication, Coventry University and artist Trevor Appleson. The speakers discuss the influence of Edwaerd Muybridge and Harold Edgerton’s photography on their recent work. Refreshments are provided. Places are free but should be reserved by calling Ikon on 0121 248 0708.

Born in Kingston upon Thames in April 1830, Muybridge studied photography in Britain and built his career in America. Perhaps best known for his extensive photographic portrayal of animals and human subjects in motion, he was also a highly successful landscape and survey photographer, documentary artist, inventor, and war correspondent. Muybridge’s revolutionary techniques produced timeless images that have profoundly influenced generations of photographers, filmmakers and artists, including Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Douglas Gordon.

This broadly chronological exhibition will focus on the period of rapid technological and cultural change from 1870 to 1904. It will include the celebrated early experimental series of motion-capture photographs such as Attitudes of Animals in Motion 1878-1882, and the later sequence Animal Locomotion 1887. It will also consider how Muybridge constructed, manipulated and presented these photographs and will feature his original zoopraxiscope, which projected his images of suspended motion to create the illusion of movement.

Muybridge’s carefully managed studio photographs contrast with his panoramic landscapes of America, in which he balanced professionalism with a truly artistic sensibility. He was fascinated by change and progress and his photographs caught both the natural beauty of this vast continent, and the rapid colonial modernisation of its towns and cities. The exhibition will include many of his series of images of the Yosemite Valley, including dramatic waterfalls from 1867 and 1872, along with views of Alaska, Guatemala, urban panoramas of San Francisco, and his 1869 survey of the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad in California, Nevada and Utah. These photographs form a unique social document of this fascinating period of history, as well as representing a profound achievement of technological innovation and artistic originality.

Muybridge travelled between Britain, America and Europe throughout his career, studying photography in Britain, and later lecturing around the world. In 1874 while living in San Francisco he shot his wife’s lover dead and had her son placed in an orphanage, but was acquitted of the crime as a ‘justifiable homicide’, a story retold in Philip Glass’s opera The Photographer. He returned to England in 1894, and died at home in Kingston in 1904.

The exhibition is curated by Philip Brookman, Chief Curator, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington and at Tate Britain by Ian Warrell, curator of 18th and 19th century British Art, Tate, and Carolyn Kerr, curator, Tate Britain, and is organised with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington. A fully illustrated catalogue, produced by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, will be available