Birkbeck's History and Theory of Photography Research Centre has announced its Autumn/Spring 2016/17 seminar programme. Each is free and open to all, at 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.
Monday 24 October, 6:00-7:30pm
Room 106
Tim Satterthwaite (Visiting Lecturer, University of Brighton)
Spiritualising the machine: the modernist photography of UHU magazine
The photo-illustrated monthly UHU was at the heart of the progressive photographic culture of Weimar Germany. In a stream of articles and photo-pages in the late 1920s, UHU showcased the work of modernist photographers, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, alongside the radical new perspectives of scientific and aerial photography. UHU’s modernism offered more, however, than a simple embrace of technological modernity; like the great photographic exhibitions of the period, the magazine sought a reconciliation between the rationalising forces of the machine age and the organic principles of the natural world and traditional life. This talk describes how UHU’s modernist synthesis was expressed through a unifying aesthetic of repetition and regularity. The magazine’s photographs of microscopic plant forms, aerial landscapes, and the textures of urban life, were symbolic of alternative visions of social order – the organic or technocratic principles of an ideal future society.
Wednesday 16 November, 6:00-7:30pm
Room 106
Samuel Bibby (Association of Art Historians)
‘New! Art… Plus Added Social Purpose’: BLOCK and the Periodical Landscape of 1970s British Art History
Thursday 2 February 2017, 6:00-7:30pm
Room B04
Marcia Pointon (Professor Emeritus in History of Art, University of Manchester, and Research Fellow, Courtauld Institute of Art)
Robert Harris’s Photography at De Beer’s Kimberley Diamond Mine 1875-1890
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