Birkbeck's History and Theory of Photography Research Centre has announced a series of new events and seminars which are open to all. They are free and take place at 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.
Collecting Our Past: Photographs, History and the Free Public Library 1890-1914
Thursday 19 November 6-7:30
Room B04 (Basement Lecture Theater)
Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University)
From the late C19th until the digital revolution collecting photographs of local historical interest was a major function of local collections in English free public libraries. This paper considers the confluence between the emergence of these local studies libraries, amateur photographic survey, and the adoption of open access public libraries in the UK. It argues that it is no coincidence that these three strands are interconnected because all are concerned with the expansion and democratisation of both the production and consumption of local historical knowledge. Such movements have a long history, back to the amateur antiquarians of the 17th and 18th centuries, but they were transformed through the commitment to mass education, as an increasingly large section of the population had to produced as citizens within a democratic society. Access to a sense of the historical past was part of this. I shall explore the role of photographs in the development of the concept of 'local history' for all in public libraries and how the intellectual and material practices of the library ‘performed’ this sense of history for all through the collecting of photographs.
(Some) Women Photographers 1839-1919
Friday 27 November 6-7:30
Room 112
Thomas Galifot (Musèe d’Orsay)
Dates in 2016:
Julia Margaret Cameron: New Discoveries
Tuesday 26 January 6-8
Marta Weiss (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Responding: Colin Ford (Former head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford)
Docile Suffragettes? Resistance to Police Photography
Wednesday 17 February 6-7:30
Linda Mulcahy (London School of Economics)
Picturing Modernization: Vision, Modernity and the Technological Image in Humphrey Jenning's Pandaemonium
Wednesday 9 March 6-7:30
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University & Birkbeck Institute for Humanities Visiting Fellow)
Law and Photography
Saturday 2 July 2016
Workshop
In collaboration with London School of Economics
For more information contact:
Dr Patrizia Di Bello
Senior Lecturer, History and Theory of Photography, Birkbeck, University of London,
E: p.dibello@bbk.ac.uk
www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history
www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/research/photography
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