Blogs

Women's History Today, the journal of the Women's History Network, has published a paper on Ann Cooke, the photographer working 1844 and 1857, mainly in KIngston-on-Hull. Cooke has been widely recognised as an early female photographer working independently. She was enumerated in the 1851 census as the sole woman 'phootgraphic artst' although as research by the same author has shown many women were working but remained hidden.

The paper by Dr Rose Teanby, undeprinned by extensive research, brings new insights into Cooke's career and family life for the first time. 

‘A Second Self’: Mrs Ann Cooke, Widow, Mother and Pioneering Professional Photographer
Dr Rose Teanby
Women’s History Today, 16, Summer 26, 4-11
The full journal is available as a digital downloand to non-members for £5.
See: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/womens-history-today-summer-2026-edition/

Although not reproduced in the paper the following images from a daguerreotype then in the Taylor collection, and subseuquently sold at auction, were published in Arthur Gill's 1979 paper. They are shown here for the record. Of course, if any reader has any other examples of Cooke's work please make contact...

Inconjunction with an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery, London, is this associated publication. Whippersnappers is the first book to tell the history of children as photographers, from school societies in the 1880s, via post-war camera clubs and radical 1970s workshops, to the coming of digital cameras.

Annebella Pollen shows how photography was presented and promoted to children — by camera companies, comics, and teachers — and how the children themselves chose to use it. They include the girls whose trick photographs of the Cottingley Fairies first fooled, then angered, the nation; and the family given cameras and limitless film for a year by a national newspaper.

Tracing photography’s movement from elite pastime to accessible hobby, including a wealth of photos taken by children — of pets and friends, teachers and toys, fairies and ghosts — it presents a unique child’s-eye view of the world, seen through the camera.

Whippersnappers: How Children Became Photographers
Annebella Pollen
Four Corners Books, 2026
Hardback with cut-flush cover
24 x 19 cm, 330 pages
£25
978-1-909829-26-8
To be published: 25 September 2026
Preorder here: https://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/books/whippersnappers/

Born and raised in a liberal Jewish family in Vienna, Edith Tudor-Hart’s legacy is defined by her pioneering social photography and her pivotal role in the recruitment of Kim Philby as a Soviet agent. Arrested for her involvement with socialist groups, Edith emigrated to England in 1933 to escape political and religious persecution. There, her photography came to reflect her socialist ideals, and her clandestine work for the Soviet Union meant she would spend the rest of her life under the suspicion and close surveillance of MI5.

The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart is the culmination of Peter Stephan Jungk’s enduring fascination with his cousin’s life. His vivid portrait reveals a woman whose life was shrouded in secrecy and whom – in his confession to MI5 a decade before Edith’s death – the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt called ‘the grandmother of us all.’

Peter Stephan Jungk is an Austrian-American novelist, non-fiction author, and documentary filmmaker. His notable works include Crossing the Hudson, The Perfect American and The Snowflake Constant. 

The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor Hart
Peter Stephan Jungk, translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
Haus Publishing, May 2026
£20, 280 pages, hardback
See: https://www.hauspublishing.com/product/the-darkrooms-of-edith-tudor-hart/

In 1974, photographers Terry Dennett and Jo Spence made repeated visits to 'illegal' Gypsy and Traveller sites in and around London. They got to know the people who lived there, documenting their lives in sound and image. The results of their project never formed a dedicated exhibition or a comprehensive publication, either then or since. Our Studio Was The World makes this powerful and still strikingly relevant work accessible to a new audience, with over 280 newly scanned (and in some cases newly discovered) images and previously unpublished texts. 

As Dennett commented, Gypsies and Travellers were 'persecuted terribly... talk about the Nazis!' Today, they remain socially marginalised, over-policed and discriminated against.

Together and individually, Terry Dennett and Jo Spence are among the most influential figures in radical British photography, with their impact extending far beyond image-making - into publishing, exhibiting, teaching and shaping photographic theory. Our Studio Was The World is the first in a ground-breaking trilogy of books - alongside Terry Dennett: The Crisis Project and Jo Spence: The Unknown Recordings - which explores their unpublished work, ideas and committed socialist perspective.

Our Studio Was The World
Terry Dennett & Jo Spence
MuseumsEtc, 2026
£35 (print) or eBook £25
Details:https://museumsetc.com/products/our-studio-was-the-world?variant=42460921757777

The latest issue of the free print and online publication The Classic is now available to view. The issue includes articles on photographers Fan Ho, Carlo Mollino, and Germany's first art director Willy Fleckhaus, and a feature on collecting beyond the print: copper photogravure plates, negatives, contact sheets and more. 

Download here: https://theclassicphotomag.com/the-classic-15/

Quaritch has announced the publication of its latest book, The Photographer at Work: Documenting Civil Engineering 1853 to 1913. This catalogue of photographs highlights the intersections between civil engineering and photography from 1853 to 1915, lavishly illustrated with over four hundred photographic illustrations. Beginning with portrait photographs of the civil engineer  Robert Stephenson, The Photographer at Work highlights the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge and Montreal’s Victoria Bridge before featuring photographic albums on individual civil engineering projects, with a great deal of material on French infrastructure, the Paris metro, and the Panama Canal.

The photographs take centre stage, showing not only an impressive array of canals, water supply systems, harbours, lighthouses, railway bridges, and tunnels, but also fascinating portraits of builders and engineers at work.

The photographs and albums included in this catalogue are a part of the broader Andrews Collection of Civil Engineering. The overall collection of 7500 items includes not only printed books but also bound manuscripts, drawings, and an extensive archive of construction photographs, some of which have been presented here. The collection documents the development of engineering in the broadest terms and therefore includes European, Arabian, and Asian as well as North and South American material.

Mark E. Andrews has been collecting books about applied science and civil engineering since his university days in the late 1970s.  He is a member of the Grolier Club and the Association internationale de bibliophilie. In addition to writing numerous bibliophilic articles, he has published a series of catalogues documenting the books related to machines and hydraulics in his collection.

The Photographer at Work. Documenting Civil Engineering 1853 to 1913. 
Mark E Andrews
Toronto, AE Publications, 2025
£85, Square folio (280 x 280 mm), pp. xvi, 431, [9]; over 400 photographic illustrations, c. 150 of which full- or double-page; coloured endpapers, printed boards, with photographic dustjacket
See: https://www.quaritch.com/books/andrews-mark-e/the-photographer-at-work-documenting-civil-engineering-1853-to-1913/U70/

This issue of PhotoResearcher centers the role of the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome in global colonial and political contexts. The impetus behind creating “The Autochrome in Imperial History” is the Tassilo Adam Collection, housed at Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna. Adam, a plantation manager and photographer in the Dutch East Indies, gifted the photography collection, including his Autochromes, to the Weltmuseum Wien in 1940. A handful of these Autochromes depict the lavish estate of Karl Bosscha in Java, Indonesia. Their representation marks a shift in the conventional colonial gaze, turning inwards, by meticulously showcasing the European settler’s domestic sphere. This volume distinguishes itself from prior scholarship on the Autochrome by prioritizing the medium’s political deployment over poetic or aesthetic interpretations. The global perspectives presented through various case studies span cases across Iceland, Great Britain, the Russian Empire, colonial Indonesia, the United States of America, the French Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They demonstrate the Autochrome’s function as an instrument of imperial modernity, facilitating both the creation and dissemination of colonial viewpoints and the documentation of the empire’s aftermath. 

Read the editorial for free here. 

Table of Content

• Editorial, by Hanin Hannouch
• Housing Privileges: Tassilo Adam’s Autochromes of the Bosscha Estate in Java, by Hanin Hannouch
• Autochromes for Empire: J. C. Warburg at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, by Janine Freeston
• Extracting the View: Fred Payne Clatworthy’s Autochromes of the American West, by Rachel Lee Hutcheson
• The Autochrome in Iceland: Colour Photography on the Far Periphery of Europe, by Inga Lára Baldvinsdóttir
• The Reception of the Autochrome in the Russian Empire around 1900, by Nadezhda Stanulevich
• Between Center and Periphery: Autochrome Photography Through the History of Present-Day Slovakia, by Kitti Baráthová, Katarína Beňová & Janka Blaško Križanová
• Pepper’s Ghost. A Living Autochrome, by Bronwyn Lace & Anna Seiderer

The Autochrome in Imperial History: Color Photography’s Global Entanglements. Edited by: Dr. Hanin Hannouch / PhotoResearcher No. 44, 2025
Orders (physical journal or Pdf) to be sent to: office@eshph.org

This special issue of PhotoResearcher aims to inspire scholars, curators, and artists to reflect on photography festivals in an academic context and to investigate them as a phenomenon; a particular mode of presentation, circulation, and production of images.

Although photography festivals are not yet an established field of research in the history or theory of photography, readers of PhotoResearcher No. 43 will encounter a combination of international voices positioning festivals in a variety of socio-cultural settings: As engines of collaboration with local museums, as contributors to the visibility of the climate crisis, as engines of artistic production, etc. The inspiration behind this publication stems from the desire to honour the legacy of Belfast Photo Festival, which was founded back in 2009, and to take stock of how it changed the ecosystem which gave rise to it. Also, this collaborative publication expands BPF’s experiences through the journal’s authors and their unique perspectives in order to learn from them and to keep this unique form of experiencing photography alive and thriving.

PhotoResearcher No. 43
"Photography & Festivals: 15 Years Belfast Photo Festival"
Guest-editor: Michael Weir, CEO Belfast Photo Festival
Editor-in-chief: Dr. Hanin Hannouch, President of the European Society for the History of Photography 
Graphic Design: Bernhard Schorner
Image Editing: Robert Vanis

The journal’s editorial is open-access and can be downloaded here.

To order this special issue of PhotoResearcher: 
UK Residents order here or you can also visit Belfast Photo Festival's Photobook library in Botanic Gardens, Belfast from 5-30th June to buy a copy.
EU + Rest of the World Residents order here

Hannah Crowdy
New Resonances in Museum Collections: The Ulster Museum and Belfast Photo Festival

Vivienne Gamble
Vital Exchanges and Encounters: Photography Festivals and the City

Michael Weir in Conversation with Pål Otnes
Elective Affinities

Mafalda Ruão & Krzysztof Candrowicz
A Photography Festival Cosmology: On Social and Environmental Responsibility and Visual Activism

Toby Smith
Festivals as Climate Protest: An Opportunity?

Tom Seymour
The Future of Photography Festivals: A British-Irish Perspective

Founder Michael Weir in Conversation with Sebah Chaudhry
Looking Forward and Looking Back: 15 Years of Belfast Photo Festival

Louise Fedotov-Clements
Afterword

The second volume of Quaritch's series on the history of photography in China is now available. The History of Photography in China: Western Photographers 1861-1879 is the most extensive general survey, in any language, of Western photographers who began working in China in the 1860s and 1870s. Over eighty different photographers are discussed – from well-known professionals to little-known amateurs – with a mass of biographical information, much previously unpublished.

The book is divided into chapters on the Hong Kong Studios, Photography in Peking (Beijing), Photography in the Treaty Ports, Roving Photographers, The Ruins of the European Palaces in the Yuanmingyuan, and Photographic Periodicals. Documentary appendices list the published work of various photographers and print extensive extracts from contemporary reviews and other writings. The book concludes with a bibliography, general and regional chronologies, and a biographical index.

An acclaimed international authority on the subject, Terry Bennett has been collecting and researching nineteenth-century Chinese, Japanese and Korean photography for over twenty-five years. This volume is illustrated throughout with over 400 images, sourced from private and institutional collections worldwide.

The book is available at a pre-publication special price of £60 (normal price £70). To order please contact Daniella Rossi at the address below or email d.rossi@quaritch.com. Copies will be available for shipment on 6 December 2010.

For Christmas delivery, please place your orders by the following dates:

Domestic

First Class - Tuesday, 20 December

Second Class - Saturday, 18 December

International Airmail

Western Europe - Monday, 13 December

Eastern Europe, USA and Canada - Friday, 10 December

South & Central America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Far East (including Japan), Australia and New Zealand - Monday, 6 December

Details of volume 1 can be found here: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-publication-chinese Quaritch is also offering vols 1 & 2 for £100 (pre-publication only).

Bernard Quaritch Ltd

40 South Audley Street, London, W1K 2PR

Tel: +44 (0)20 7297 4888 Fax: +44 (0)20 7297 4866

www.quaritch.com

William Blackmore (1827-1878) remains a little knownmillionaire mid-Victorian polymath. He was a successful lawyer based in Liverpool and subsequently London. An international financier involved in numerous North American land grants, he was also principal financier of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. His reputation by the mid 1870s within London financial circles was that he ‘has means of obtaining information in the City such as very few men possess.’ Blackmore visited Salt Lake City and met Brigham Young (1801-1877), president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and wrote a confidential report on the ‘Mormon Empire’ for the Cabinet of the British government and independent industrial leaders; in April 1872 Blackmore dined at the White House with United States President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885); he funded and populated with artefacts perhaps the leading ethnographic museum in 19th century Great Britain, located in his home town of Salisbury; he was an early patron of the leading Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and the commissioner of an influential set of watercolours of the Yellowstone region by Thomas Moran (1837-1926); and he was acknowledged by contemporaries to have so effectively exploited photography to document North American Indians that his photographic collection was copied to form the basis of the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Yet Blackmore’s legacy was to be comparatively limited. He went bankrupt and committed suicide in 1878. Shortly after his untimely death, his papers and other materials were consigned to storage and lay apparently unused for almost half a century. William’s other art collections were subsumed within those of his brother and loyal ally, Humphrey. Following Humphrey’s death in 1929 a major dispersal campaign began in earnest. While some of William’s business documents were saved, a significant number were apparently destroyed, and artefacts were subsequently dispersed through auction and sale to other public and private institutions. The Blackmore Museum was incorporated with that of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum after Blackmore’s death, and was amalgamated in 1902; it remained something of a place of pilgrimage to American archaeologists until the early 20th century. While a new gallery was built in 1933 linking the buildings of the Blackmore Museum to the Salisbury Museum, William’s museum was already in terminal decline and its collections were to be broken up and dispersed over a period of over four decades.

Anthony Hamber has written the first biography of William Blackmore to cover the wide gamut of his professional and private interests and the significance and impact of his wide ranging achievements. With reproductions of many Victorian photographs, and a diligently researched text, fully referenced with bibliography and index, Hamber’s work is a major contribution to understanding an important but neglected figure and his world.

Collecting the American West: the Rise and Fall of William Blackmore, by Anthony Hamber is published by Hobnob Press, December 2010, 320pp paperback, many illustrations,

The flyer can be downloaded here: Collecting%20the%20American%20West%20%20A5%20flier.pdf

The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger (OMLJ) was a British trade monthly that appeared from 1889 to 1903 and had a remit covering the magic lantern and illumination through to photography and the world of early cinema. The OMLJ featured news and opinions from each of the worlds and through its correspondence and advertising pages provides a unique insight into each of these areas at an important point in their history.

The publication only survives in a few national libraries and this limited edition DVD offers a rare opportunity for collectors, researchers, educational institutions and libraries to acquire a digitised run which is searchable electronically. The OMLJ covers a key period in the history of photography and the cinema. It appeared when the hand camera was rapidly being taken up by amateur photographers and at a point shortly before the motion picture camera was introduced. By the time of the OMLJ's demise in 1903 photography was widely practiced by amateurs and snapshooters and the cinema had evolved from its origins into a form of mass entertainment. The OMLJ through its editorial pages and advertisements charts these changes in detail.

This DVD provides a high-quality facsimile of all 5000 pages together with a searching tool supported by additional information around the personalities, companies and products that made up the industry at the time and which appears in the OMLJ pages.

The DVD From Magic Lantern to Movies (ISBN 978-0-9523011-1-0) is published on 15 October by PhotoResearch and costs £60 including UK and international airmail postage. It is designed to run on both Windows-based PCs and Apple Macs with Adobe Acrobat.

For more information and an order form click here.

After more than 150 years the British Journal of Photography is to cease weekly publication and will return to being a monthly. Established in 1854 as a monthly, the BJ went fortnightly in 1857 and then weekly in 1864. The 3 March 2010 issue will be the first of a redsigned monthly magazine. The move leaves Amateur Photographer (established 1884) as the only weekly British photographic magazine.

Changing market conditions and the growth of the internet have precipitated the change. The BJ has a strong web and blog presence but for the last few years its influence within photography has declined as it has focused more on press, fashion and the image, moving away from a more general concern with photography. It's heyday was probably during the 1980s when a range of contributors under the editorship of Geoffrey Crawley kept readers informed about everything from holography and history, to interviews with business personalities as well as photographers. It's worth quoting one of the aims of the journal from issue no. 1 of January 14 1854: 'The admirers of the art naturally desire to have more particulars, and the practical operators more full and precise records of the suggestions, experiments, and successes in various parts of the world' by the end of 1854 it was able to be claim that it held 'the position of principal Provincial organ of Photography'.

The change is the end of an era for the British photographic press. For most of its history the BJP was always the most important journal of photography reporting news and features across the full spectrum of photography. It is sad that has now ended.

Read nore here: http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=873499