Blogs

Well after a long gestation period the new exhibition I've been curating at the State Library of New South Wales has opened. Arranged chronologically Shot covers the years 1845 to 2022 and is a major retrospective of photography in Australia. With over 400 photographs by 200 photographers there should be content that is of interest for this group particularly in the early years with some rare photocrayotypes, Australia's oldest extant photo (a daguerreotype by Goodman), and rare Paget plates from Shackleton's expedition by Frank Hurley. Given the desktop version went online this week I felt it was a good time to share with you all. It includes examples of photographic formats from the inception of photography to the present and will be up until November 2024. 

Below is an excerpt from the introduction panel ...
This is the first exhibition to comprehensively review the breadth of the photographic archive held at the State Library of NSW — one of the largest, most diverse and significant in Australia. The two million photographs held by the Library represent tens of thousands of stories collectively forming a unique pictorial history of the past 175 years in Australia. The exhibition explores some of these threads — from the earliest surviving photograph in Australia to examples of nearly every format used since the inception of photography in 1839.

The exhibition includes works by some of Australia’s most acclaimed photographers and shines a light on works and formats often considered to be on the periphery of photographic practice. Arranged chronologically, we have aimed to include at least one photograph to represent each year between 1845 and 2022. The images include the work of over 200 press, amateur and street photographers; printers and commercial studios. This exhibition captures only a thin slice of the collection, but these 400 works convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole. We hope this approach allows space to contemplate the myriad stories they represent.
https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/shot

Geoff Barker, 2024

Dear All, Photographic Exhibitiosn in Britain 1839-1865 is back up and running. Thank you for your patience!  Happy Researching!

Kelley Wilder. Photographic History Research Centre

Thank you to all of you who answered our survey last year, of the Photographic History Research Centre's digital resources for photographic history. The time you took to answer our survey has been invaluable in assessing the range of users and research on these sites. It has also been gratifying to hear your messages of thanks, which have been passed on to those who originally created them.

I'm pleased to announce that we will be undertaking a security upgrade to safeguard the following sites for the future (in no particular order):

http://fentonletterbooks.dmu.ac.uk/

http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/

http://peib.dmu.ac.uk/

http://erps.dmu.ac.uk/

http://amelina.dmu.ac.uk/

http://rpsmembers.dmu.ac.uk/

DMU is committed to open access research, and the IT department (ITMS) is supporting PHRC's mission to make open research resources  for  photographic history. In the coming months there may be some disruption to the websites that you normally use. We hope that these interruptions will be short, and will not inconvenience you greatly. However, in the knowledge that there will be some inevitable down time, I would encourage all researchers who have time-sensitive projects not to delay any use they need to make of these sites. Work will begin very soon.

Again, Many thanks for all your efforts.

Kelley Wilder

Hemera, a London based curatorial collective specialising in photography, has just launched the London Photography Diary,  a website dedicated to listing photography exhibitions, events, and conferences in London: www.london-photography-diary.com.  The website also features photography related videos, reviews,  and an image sharing portal. Please check it out and join our mailing list to receive our weekly newsletters. The two curators who are editing the site are Sarah Allens and Rachael Graves.

We at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts have been investigating the early London career of British photographer Florence Vandamm, who worked in NYC from 1924 to her retirement in 1962.  We discovered that she opened her first studio in London in 1908.  This site has been very helpful at providing resources and links. 

The exhibition (Pioneering Poet of Light: Florence Vandamm & the Vandamm Studio) will open in mid-September and runs through the end of February.  Please visit. Click here: http://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/poet-light-florence-vandamm-vandamm-studio

We are blogging about Vandamm's work on the Library's www.nypl.org.  You can find them in he Vandamm channel or under my name.

Image: Re-discovered image from a glass negative of the Theatre Guild's 1928 production of Faust, NYPL.