Blogs

New post on early Arctic photographs by George Rexworthy De Wilde - The first book to include photographs of the Arctic was published by William Bradford in 1873. The second was The Cruise of the Pandora by Sir Allen Young which followed Young’s 1875 voyage to confirm the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew. This rare publication contains 12 vintage albumen prints taken in 1875 by George Rexworthy De Wilde – all hand-pasted into the pages of the book. These important but little-known photos are the subject of this article. Read more ...  

This past weekend an exhibition of arctic photographs by Alexander Rodger and David Dickson, 1894-7, opened in St Andrews to complement an international conference entitled Polar Visual Culture.  The exhibition is at the School of Art History, open Mon-Fri, 9am-4.45pm until 30 September.

The conference blurb:  

The polar environment, and its potential destruction, is now receiving heightened attention in the mass media, with extensive scientific study and urgent results on climate change reported daily. Our objective is to focus attention upon the unique, prolific and hitherto under-examined visual culture - painting and graphic illustration, expedition and frontier narratives, installations and poetic geographies, films and photography - that the expeditions to the two polar regions have inspired since the early nineteenth century, and which forms a fundamental part of our perception of these environments.

All done now but abstracts are here: PVC Abstracts

And further detail about the conference: here