Blogs

Photographer Ans Westra had a long and rich relationship with the Alexander Turnbull Library, depositing her significant collection of documentary photographs over many years. Following her death on 26 February 2023 Turnbull staff members Mark Strange (Senior Conservator Photographs) and Paul Diamond (Curator Māori) reflected on her legacy. You can read their blog on the National Library of New Zealand website and browse Ans' digitised work.

Many other tributes were paid to Ans' by the photographic community and the arts and culture sector, including this blog by Athol McCredie (Curator of Photography at Te Papa Museum of New Zealand).  {Suite} Gallery are the agents for Ans' work, and their site includes more biographical information, examples of her extensive photographic legacy and a link to the recording of her funeral.

Ian Smith (life dates unknown) photographed for the American magazine LIFE in 1945/6 and was listed on the masthead as a staff photographer. Numbers of his images of British politicians of the period, of movie stars, directors and producers, and his reportage of life in England in the aftermath of WW2, are held by Getty Images.

I have started a Wikipedia article on him. However there is scant information about his life. Does any other member have information on this quite significant British / Scottish photographer? I would be most grateful for any leads.

This symposium adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship that is deconstructing the male-dominated history of commercial and industrial artistic production. The programme will bring together current interdisciplinary perspectives on women’s experiences of work and the gendered dynamics of commerce in the creative industries in Britain between 1750 and 1950.

We invite critical and creative papers as well as those that present case-studies or deliver in more collaborative formats.

Contributions may focus on, but are not limited to, women at work or women’s involvement in the development of technologies i.e printmaking, photography, film and computing, women’s work in textiles (including dressmaking and millinery), design, architecture, advertising, bookmaking and publishing, the performing arts, music, TV and radio.

We are particularly interested in papers that consider the following topics:

• Spaces of women’s work: the workshop, the studio, the office, the factory, and work carried out from home (i.e. sweated trades) 
• Overlaps in women’s professional and domestic roles
• Collaboration, networks and unions of women workers and professionals
• Women’s management of finances and the economic factors of their work
• Women’s experiences of discrimination in the workplace in this period
• Anonymity or invisibility of women’s work and theft of their intellectual property
• Demands of emotional labour in the creative industries
• Distinctions and slippages between professional and amateur ‘work’
• Historiographies of women’s work in the creative industries
• Portrayals of professional women in literature and the visual arts
• How the campaign for suffrage intersected with, or affected, women’s work in the creative industries.

We invite abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers. Please submit abstracts and a short biographical note to Erika Lederman, Hannah Lyons and George Mind at womenworkcommerce@gmail.com by 6pm on Friday 30 November 2018.

‘Women, Work and Commerce in the Creative Industries, Britain 1750 – 1950’ is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and organised by Collaborative Doctoral Partnership students Erika Lederman (De Montfort University/V&A) Hannah Lyons (Birkbeck, University of London/ V&A) and George Mind (University of Westminster/National Portrait Gallery).

UPDATE: Conference registration is now available here. 

Women, Work and Commerce in the Creative Industries, Britain 1750 - 1950

Saturday 9 February 2019, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Keynote Speakers: Dr Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Dr Patricia Zakreski

Call for papers

In research I am conducting about the first exhibitions of photography, I have been made aware of entries in the 1841 Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition catalogue. 

Roddy Simpson, in his book The Photography of Victorian Scotland, states that four Daguerreotypes were exhibited, but information I received directly from the RSA indicates only three were displayed.The catalogue provides entries for three Daguerreotypes, all by a photographer identified only as "Montreal, D. 18 Drummond Street, Paris."

I am unable to find anything online about this individual, and I am posting this to see if anyone has any further information. Here is the entry page from the catalogue:

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.