Blogs

On 12 March De Montfort University's Photographic History Research Centre will present two seminars which are open to the public:

• Women Photographers, Institutional Practices and the South Kensington Museum from Erika Lederman. This paper will locate the career of 19th century institutional photographer Isabel Agnes Cowper within the history of the photography and the institutional history of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum).  It will present the biographical details I have uncovered to date, and will identify other 19th century female professional photographers from whom the SKM acquired photographs.  It will examine the challenges involved in identifying and researching material culture produced by women and will suggest a multidisciplinary research approach that acknowledges the multiple strands of photography’s history.
• Future of the Past: Commemorating 150 years of photography in Hungary, 1989 from Catherine Troiano. In 1989, exhibitions of photography were staged around the world to mark 150 years since the announcement of the medium. In Hungary, the commemorations comprised twelve exhibitions staged in Budapest and collectively titled ‘the month of photography’. These events came at a poignant moment culturally, socially and politically. This paper aims to use the anniversary celebrations as a case study through which to understand photography’s place and purpose in Hungary’s broader socio-cultural landscape. It interprets the 1989 events as a lens into the Communist past and a forebear of the Democratic future, exploring how photography was posited within the framework of this political change.

Seminars take place from 1700-1830 in room 2.30 of the Clephan Building. They are free and open to all. See more here:  https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/march-12-2018-research-seminar-in-cultures-of-photography/

World renowned daguerreotypist and teacher Dr Mike Robinson brings his three day workshop back to Lacock. Participants will make their own daguerreotypes from start to finish. The workshop which usually sells out is limited to only six participants and early booking is advised.

Details: foxtalbotmuseum@nationaltrust.org.uk

The Martin Parr Foundation has a number of  events coming up over the next few months. They include book signings from Niall McDiarmid, Bieke Depoorter and Peter Bialobrzesk. April 20-21 sees the film premiere of Do Not Bend - The Photographic Life of Bill Jay and a day seminar of British photography in the 1970s and on 12 May Parr will be leading a tour around the Foundation and archive. McDiarmid's Portraits exhibition continues until 12 May. 

To find out more see: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/events/ or download the attached MPF_Upcoming_Events_March-May_2018.pdf.

I am trying to trace correspondence (nearly 40 years of if) between daguerreotypist Prof Leone Glukman (Dublin) and William Constable (Brighton) which I have seen reference to. Anyone know where it is?

Dominic Winter's auction catalogue, which includes the John Hannavy collection of cased images, is now available on line: https://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/catalogues/78_dw_9_mar_2018_low_res.pdfhttps://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/dominic-winter-catalogues

Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903-1917) committed itself to the establishment of photography as a form of art and in the course of its publication became an important distributor of European modernism in the United States. In both respects the international network of the journal was an important prerequisite. Camera Work’s global reach manifested itself in the content of the texts and images as well as in the production of the magazine, its distribution, and reception.

As one of the outputs of international research project this conference examines Camera Work’s internationality. It analyzes cultural specifics, intercultural relationships, and their theoretical reflection. With a special focus on the reception and distribution of Camera Work in Japan, the presentations investigate transpacific and transatlantic connections. The aim is to identify specific conditions, such as the extended duration of Pictorialism in Japan, its amalgamation with the aesthetic strategies of New Vision, and simultaneous integration of traditional Japanese pictorial formulas, materials, and motives. In addition, the technical and material requirements for the institutionalization of Camera Work in Europe and the U.S. are examined, for instance the international correspondence of the people involved and the reproduction techniques used—facts that shed light on the social background of Pictorialism and emerging modernism.

The Japanese case asks for a theoretical and methodological discussion on modernism in the plural whilst the second example requires an angle of vision from below, especially with regards to an elite venture such as Camera Work. The conference thus opens up a further emphasis: it invites the investigation of the localization of research on the topic of Camera Work itself.

Programme

Friday 9 March 2018
Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK-ISEA, Zollikerstrasse 32, 8032 Zurich
15:30 Viewing of original issues of Camera Work (for invited guests only)
16:30 Registration
17:00 Welcome address: Roger Fayet, director SIK-ISEA
17:05 Evening lecture: Bettina Gockel, University of Zurich: “Camera Work and Gender in a Globalized Photographic World.”
18:35 Reception (Apéro riche)

Saturday 10 March 2018
University of Zurich, Building Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zurich. Auditorium, Room G01
9:30 Registration and coffee
10:00 Welcome address: Kaspar Fleischmann, Dr. Carlo Fleischmann Foundation
10:15 Opening remarks: Bettina Gockel, University of Zurich Seite 2/2 Kunsthistorisches Institut
10:30 Anne McCauley, Princeton University: "Production/Reproduction: Circulating Pictorial Photographs in the Era of Camera Work"
11:15 Lauren Kroiz, University of California, Berkeley: “Anne Brigman, Camera Work, and California”
12:00 Lunch
13:30 Julien Faure-Conorton, École du Louvre, Paris: “Making Camera Work an International Endeavor: Alfred Stieglitz and French Pictorial Photography”
14:15 Thilo Koenig, University of Zurich: “Camera Work in Europe: Italy and Germany”
15:00 Coffee
15:45 Catherine Berger, University of Zurich: “Camera Work: A Quarterly Containing All the Arts”
16:30 Reception (Apéro riche)
17:30 Evening lecture on the occasion of Bettina Gockel’s ten-year anniversary: Kelley Wilder, De Montfort University, Leicester: “The Furtherance of Modern Photographic History: On a Decade of Photo Historical Innovation.”

Sunday 11 March 2018
University of Zurich, Building Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zurich. Auditorium, Room G01
10:00 Registration and coffee
10:30 Yuko Ikeda, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo: “Jugendstil and the Japanese in Camera Work: Their Aesthetic Exchanges”
11:15 Kerry Ross, DePaul University, Chicago: “Magic in the Darkroom? Pictorialism and Amateur Photography in Early Twentieth-Century Japan”
12:00 Lunch
13:30 Jennifer Coates, Kyoto University: “Pictorialism and its After-Images: Post-War Japanese Cinema Culture”
14:15 Stephanie Tung, Princeton University: “A Fusion of Feeling and Scene: Liu Bannong and Art Photography in Republican Era Beijing, 1923-1928”
15:00 Coffee, discussions, farewells and final tours in Zurich

Symposium organized as part of the project “Camera Work: Inside/Out,” University of Zurich, Institute
of Art History/Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography, in collaboration with the
Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA)

Find out  more here: https://www.khist.uzh.ch/de/chairs/bildende/tgf/Projekte_Publikationen/camera_work.html

Contact: Catherine Berger, Rämistrasse 73, CH-8006 Zürich e: catherine.berger@uzh.ch

Victorian Giants. The birth of art photography showing at London's National Portrait Gallery from 1 March includes a number of events based around the exhibition. They include: 

Lecture: Through the Camera Lens, and What Lewis Carroll Found There. 1 March at 1900.  Lindsay Smith, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, explores Carroll’s fascination for the technology of photography, and for the material and conceptual aspects of photographs, in the context of his larger creative achievement. Book here.

Weekend Workshop: The Victorian Studio. 10 and 11 March. Photographers Kasia Wozniak and Eddie Otchere lead a one-day workshop in which you will experience a Victorian Portrait Studio, focusing on the camera, print technology, production values and fashion of the era - with a few modern workarounds. Each participant will gain an appreciation of the patience and care Victorian photographers had to consider in order to create affordable portraits, working with a model in a recreation of a Victorian studio setting, and using a large format camera to capture that one perfect shot on direct positive paper. You will develop and process your portrait, ending the day with your print. Book for 10th or the 11th.

Lecture: Portraits for the Stereoscope: Seeing the Victorians. 22 March at 1900. Denis Pellerin, photo historian and curator of Dr. Brian May's collection of Victorian photographs, takes us on a stereoscopic journey through the studios of photographic artists including Antoine Claudet, William Kilburn, John Jabez Mayall and Thomas Richard Williams. Discover the Victorians as you have never seen them before, in full colour and in glorious 3-D. Book here. 

Lecture: Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius. 29 March at 1900. Colin Ford CBE, photographic curator and historian, looks at the life and work of Julia Margaret Cameron, who was not only a brilliant photographer but aimed to photograph as many Victorians of genius as she could. Book here.

Lecture: Outside/In: Clementina Hawarden’s Domestic Portraits. 10 May at 1900. Art photographer or portrait photographer—or both? Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865) won awards for artistic costume tableaux of her daughters. Using images selected from the 775 Hawarden photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, Virginia Dodier discusses how Hawarden’s photographic style evolved while her family remained the focus of her life and work. Book here.

Weekend Workshop: Pop-Up Wet Plate Collodion Studio. 12 and 13 May 2018.Come and experience one of the most popular early photographic processes, discovered in 1851 and used by photographers including Julia Margaret Cameron. Artist Almudena Romero is taking up residence for the day to create unique individual portraits in timed sittings. Book your half hour slot during which you will sit for your portrait and observe the process in real time via a video link from inside the dark room. Book here. 

There are a number of other photography-related events taking place at the Gallery during March-May. Find out more here.

Photo London and Hans P. Kraus Jr. are presenting an exhibition which looks at the pioneering work of the British inventor of photography William Henry Fox Talbot and the legacy of this within contemporary photography. With the opportunity to see vintage Talbot prints alongside contemporary artworks by artists and photographers including Adam Fuss, Cornelia Parker, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mike Robinson, Vera Lutter and others, this exhibition reflects on the influence and inspiration of the inventor.

To accompany the exhibition Cornelia Parker will be speaking in conversation with Hans P. Kraus Jr., and Vera Lutter in conversation with Martin Barnes, curator V&A, as part of the Photo London Talks Programme.

PhotoLondon takes place from 17-20 May 2018 at Somerset House, London. 

See more here: https://photolondon.org/event/sun-pictures-then-and-now-talbot-and-his-legacy-today/

Image: William Henry Fox Talbot, Thalictrum minus (lesser meadow-rue), probably early 1839. Courtesy of Hans. P. Kraus Jr.

The Duchess of Cambridge is to select photographs from the National Portrait Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography as part of a Patron’s trail.The Duchess will visit the exhibition on the evening of Wednesday 28 February, prior to its opening on Thursday 1 March.

As Patron of the National Portrait Gallery since 2012 and an enthusiastic, amateur photographer, The Duchess has written a foreword to the exhibition catalogue in which she discusses her interest in nineteenth-century photography, the subject of her undergraduate thesis while an art history student at the University of St Andrews. She also explains that photographs of children, which feature predominantly within the exhibition, are of particular interest to her. This is the first exhibition at the Gallery to include a Patron’s trail in which The Duchess will select a number of portraits, which will be displayed with additional information labels that will be written by Her Royal Highness.

The Duchess also points out that Queen Victoria and especially Prince Albert, became enthusiastic patrons of the new art form following its invention in 1839. One of the exhibition’s four featured photography pioneers, Oscar Rejlander, undertook commissions for the Royal Family and works by him have been borrowed for the exhibition from the Royal Collection at Windsor.

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will show together for the first time portraits by Oscar Rejlander (1813–75), Lewis Carroll (1832–98), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) and Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65). The four created an unlikely alliance. Rejlander was a Swedish émigré with a mysterious past; Cameron was a middle-aged expatriate from colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); Carroll was an Oxford academic and writer of fantasy literature; and Lady Clementina was a member of the landed gentry, the child of a Scottish naval hero and a Spanish beauty, 26 years younger. Yet, all three briefly studied under Rejlander, and maintained lasting associations, exchanging ideas about portraiture and narrative. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, they formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography. Their radical attitudes towards photography have informed artistic practice ever since.

The exhibition will be the first to examine the relationship between the four ground-breaking artists. Drawn from public and private collections around the world, it will feature some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history, including many that have not been seen in Britain since they were made.

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will feature the work of Swedish-born ‘Father of Photoshop’ Oscar Rejlander and will include the finest surviving print of his famous picture Two Ways of Life (1856-7), an example of his pioneering technique of combining several negatives to create a single final image. Constructed from over thirty separate negatives, Two Ways of Life was so large that it had to be printed on two sheets of paper joined together.

An album of photographs by Rejlander purchased by the National Portrait Gallery following an export bar in 2015 will also go on display together with other treasures from the Gallery’s world-famous holdings of Rejlander, Cameron and Carroll, which for conservation reasons are rarely on view. The exhibition will also include works by Clementina Hawarden, a closely associated photographer; the first major showing of her work since the exhibition Lady Hawarden at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1990.

Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, his muse for Alice in Wonderland, are among the most beloved photographs of the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. Less well known are the photographs made of Alice years later, showing her as an adult. The exhibition will bring together these works for the first time.

Visitors will be able to see how each photographer approached the same subject; both Cameron and Rejlander photographed the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the scientist Charles Darwin, and Carroll and Cameron photographed the actress, Ellen Terry. The exhibition will also include the famous studies of human emotion that Rejlander made for Darwin, on loan from the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library.

Lenders to the exhibition include the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Hulton Archive, Getty Images; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Munich Stadtmuseum; the Royal Collection; Tate; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Wilson Centre for Photography.

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will include portraits of sitters such as Charles Darwin, Alice Liddell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle, George Frederick Watts, Ellen Terry and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘The National Portrait Gallery has one of the finest holdings of Victorian photographs in the world. We are delighted that our Patron, HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, has supported this exhibition in such a direct and personal manner, given her longstanding interest in this material.  As well as some of the Gallery’s rarely seen treasures, such as the original negative of one of Lewis Carroll’s portraits of Alice Liddell and images of Alice and her siblings being displayed for the first time, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity to see the works of all four of these highly innovative and influential artists.’

Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London, and curator of Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography, says: ‘When people think of Victorian photography, they sometimes think of stiff, fusty portraits of women in crinoline dresses, and men in bowler hats. Victorian Giants is anything but. Here visitors can see the birth of an idea – raw, edgy, experimental — the Victorian avant-garde, not just in photography, but in art writ large. The works of Cameron, Carroll, Hawarden and Rejlander forever changed thinking about photography and its expressive power. These are pictures that inspire and delight. And this is a show that lays bare the unrivalled creative energy, and optimism, that came with the birth of new ways of seeing.’

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography 
1 March –20 May 2018, at the National Portrait Gallery, London www.npg.org.uk
Tickets with donation: Full price £12 / Concessions £10.50
Tickets without donation Full price £10 / Concessions £8.50 (Free for Members and Patrons)

It will tour to Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, from 30 June – 23 Sept 2018

I recently purchased this stereoview, apparently made in the UK. It looks to be 1850s- early 1860s. I believe this may be a portrait of he great P. T. Barnum,  There is no written information on it. I do know that Barnum regularly travelled to England during his career. perhaps he meant this as a kind of advertising. His jaunty stance seems in keeping with other photos of Barnum.

Does any member have a resourse that mentions or confirms a portrait stereoview of Barnum? Who may be the photographer? What event may have this been?

Or, is this just wishful thinking on my part? Any thoughts?

Included, photos of the stereoview, and crop of the famous Daguerreotype with General Tom Thumb, for reference.

Many thanks, David

To celebrate Charles Darwin’s 209th birthday today, the Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge Digital Library, and English Heritage Trust, have released online for the first time, two albums of portrait photographs presented to Darwin in 1877.  They were sent by his admirers in Germany and Austria, and in the Netherlands. Also online for the first time are the texts of a series of poems written in Darwin’s honour by Friedrich Adler, a young lawyer from Prague.

See the albums and poems here: https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/german-and-dutch-photograph-albums

The albums provide a snapshot of networks of supporters of Darwin on the Continent, and will also be a useful resource for people studying Dutch, German and Austrian social history. Very little is known about many of the people featured in these albums. If you can help to identify any of them, please get in touch.

Dr Francis Neary
Editor, Darwin Correspondence Project e: fjn26@cam.ac.uk
Website: www.darwinproject.ac.uk

BPH recently reported on a new film looking at the writer, teacher and photographic historian Bill Jay.  Do Not Bend: The photographic life of Bill Jay will premiere in the UK on 20 April at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, and will be followed by a panel discussion including David Hurn, Brian Griffin, Daniel Meadows and Grant Scott, chaired by Martin Parr.

A few tickets are remaining and are available here: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/…/british-photography…/  A seminar looking at British photography in the 1970s will take place on the following day. 

The second screening and an accompanying exhibition of Bill's portraits of UK based photographers takes place at the Oriel Colwyn/Theatr Colwyn, Wales on Friday 11 May 2018 / 6.30 to 10.30pm. The exhibition will be open from Saturday, 12 May-Saturday 30 June 2018. Following the film screening, Tim Pellatt and Grant Scott will host a discussion on Bill’s impact on the world of photography and share our experience of producing the film with a limited budget and minimal resources. Tickets can be purchased at http://orielcolwyn.org from 13 February.

Further screenings around the UK and US being announced over the coming weeks and months and a book featuring Jay's photographs of UK photographers will be published and available from 20 April. 

The amateur photographer and Princess, Alexandra, is featured in a BBC4 television programme Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection, Series 1, Modern Times. The programme is available on the BBC iPlayer and includes an interview with Sophie Gordon, senior curator of photography. 

See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05qh7j9 or visit the Royal Collection Trust page here.

In 1839 the world’s first major public exhibition of photographs took place at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, presenting examples created by one of the founding fathers of photography: William Henry Fox Talbot. From 2 March-7 May this historic event will be restaged at the National Science and Media Museum in Thresholds, artist Mat Collishaw’s virtual reality installation which plunges visitors directly into the environment of Talbot’s event, nearly 180 years ago.

Thresholds is a fully immersive portal to the past; visitors can walk freely throughout a digitally reconstructed room where they are able to marvel at Talbot’s inventions, touch the furniture and fixtures, and even feel heat from a recreated coal fire. Infrared sensors track each person’s movements, creating ghostly avatars that show their position and enhance the feeling of travelling through time. To complete the sensory experience Collishaw has created a unique soundscape, as Chartist protesters who rioted in 1839 on the streets of Birmingham can be heard (and seen) outside the room.

Collishaw said: “I have been looking to work with virtual reality for a number of years and I’m delighted that it has now become a feasible medium for me to use in an artwork. VR’s ability to enable visitors to revisit the birth of photography – a medium that has come to saturate our lives – is uncanny and compelling. It’s also quite appropriate as VR is the total 360 degree immersion of the viewer within an image, and is itself one of the many innovations spawned by the invention of photography.”

Thresholds (available to 13-year-olds and over. £3 entry) is a collaboration between Somerset House, the Blain|Southern Gallery, Library of Birmingham, and features imagery recreated from original Talbot photographs and equipment held at the National Science and Media Museum. The original exhibition was crowdfunded. 

See more here: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/whats-on/thresholds

Image: Thresholds at Somerset House © Richard Eaton

Photography is commonly understood as a static medium that 'freezes' the moment. This characterisation of photography privileges certain kinds of practice, draws a sharp distinction between it and moving-image media such as film and video, imagines the photograph as primarily a print, and underpins arguments about the predatory nature of photography and about the novelty of digital images. In her inaugural lecture, and through a close reading of aspects of Walter Benjamin’s Little History of Photography (1931) Michelle Henning will argue for a different understanding of photography as something that sets images loose. 

Benjamin, following the art historian Heinrich Schwarz, characterised the photographs of David Octavius Hill in terms that would shape his theory of 'aura' as an oscillation between distance and proximity. Drawing on her background in art history, cultural studies and artistic practice, Henning will discuss this oscillation, this slipperiness of the image, in relation to questions of academic and artistic freedom, as well as in relation to ideas of imagination, contemplation and attention.

This inaugural lecture coincides with the publication of Michelle Henning's new book Photography: The Unfettered Image (Routledge, 2018) which is available for pre-order now: https://www.routledge.com/Photography-The-Unfettered-Image/Henning/p/book/9781138782556

Michelle Henning is a Professor in the London School of Film, Media and Design, University of West London. She is the author of Photography, The Unfettered Image (2018), Museum Media (2015) and Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (2006) as well as of more than 25 book chapters and journal articles on photography history, new media, museums and aspects of modernism. This is her inaugural professorial lecture. 

Location: University of West London, St Mary’s Road, Ealing
Date: Wednesday 7 March 2018
Time: Registration 6pm. Lecture commences 6.30pm
Free Admission: All welcome.

Booking: photographysetstheimagefree.eventbrite.co.uk

Dominic Winter’s Photography: The First 150 Years spring auction takes place on Friday 9th March and features 19th and 20th century photography in all its many guises. 

The highlight of the auction is predicted to be an iconic albumen print portrait of Sir John Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron (Cox & Ford no. 674), which is not only has excellent tones but comes from the Herschel family by direct descent through Herschel’s daughter Amelia and her husband Sir Thomas Wade. Estimated at £30,000-50,000 it is by far the highest estimated of the five Cameron portraits in the sale and times neatly with the new exhibition, Victorian Giants, opening at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on 1st March. 

With the same provenance is a rare copy photograph made by John Werge in 1890 from Herschel’s own 1839 photograph of his father’s Forty-Foot Telescope at Slough, the original - now almost completely faded - being the oldest surviving photograph on glass.

Other early big-name photographers featured with individual photographs in the sale are Lewis Carroll, Hill & Adamson, Oscar Rejlander, Fox Talbot, Francis Frith, John Dillwyn Llewelyn and Hugh Owen. Also on offer will be a rare group of 12 wax paper negatives, mid 1850s, attributed to Thomas Keith.The negatives are just one of many highlights from the John Hannavy collection to be sold in the same sale. John also contributes to the Victorian photography section with an albumen print of Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Love’ and a collection of 31 salt prints of the Crimea by Roger Fenton.

The end of the 400-lot sale will be devoted to John’s extraordinary collection of cased images, ranging from stereo daguerreotypes by Claudet and others through good ambrotypes and other unusual rarities, culminating with the finest private collection of union cases in the UK. Highlight of the 100+ lots in this section will be one of three known whole plate designs, ‘The Landing of Columbus’ (Berg 1-1), in superb condition, it houses a fine hand-coloured ambrotype of a young woman, and is estimated at £1500-2000. This and many of the items in John’s collection were featured in his excellent book Case Histories: The Presentation of the Victorian Photographic Portrait, 1840-1875.

The sale has a number of good travel photograph albums including two privately compiled large albums of India photographs by Sache and others, an Imperial Russia archive compiled by a British dental surgeon serving on the Eastern Front, 1916; and Herbert Ponting is represented with a collection of 131 contact prints of Captain Scott’s Terra Nova expedition 1910-1913, and in an album of 200 of his Japanese photographs, acquired from Ponting’s estate following his death in 1935. On the modern photography front are over 50 lots made up from two interesting collections of Magnum press print photographs (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, etc.), circa 1950; and press/exhibition print photographs of major photographers from the Colin Osman archive, circa 1970s/1980s.

Rounding out the sale are plentiful lots of cartes de visite, stereoviews, lantern slides, assorted folders and groups of material themed by subject, to include an interesting, large Dutch archive of 19th and early 20th-century travel and genre subjects. The final 19th-century curiosity is a rare French photographer’s wooden handcart from the 1890s, painted black and emblazoned in gold with the name of the photographers Guilleminot.

Printed and online catalogues will be available from 19th February. Public viewing daily from 6th March, 9-6 and morning of sale from 9am; other times strictly by appointment.

For further information and enquiries please contact Chris Albury chris@dominicwinter.co.uk / 01285 860006

Dominic Winter Auctioneers, Mallard House, Broadway Lane, South Cerney, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 5UQ

www.dominicwinter.co.uk

The British Journal of Photography carries an interview with the founders of Fotografiska who are constructing a new gallery and meeting space, Fotografiska: London Museum of Photography, in London's Whitechapel. The space will open in November and 'the plans for London would make the world’s largest photography gallery'. Jan Broman is quoted “We are not in competition with The Photographers’ Gallery or Tate Modern, as we just want to do our own thing in the way we know best. The East End of London is a fantastic area, but for us it was essential we found the right building so that we can do what we want.” 

Details of the new space were reported on BPH in August 2017. 

Read the full interview in the BJP or online here: http://www.bjp-online.com/2018/01/fotografiskainterview/ read more about Fotografiska in Stockholm here: http://fotografiska.eu/en/

Rose Teanby tells the stories of five fascinating women who made their mark at the dawn of photography, she brings together new research in collaboration with Graham Harrison, creator of www.photohistories.com, Despite the social restrictions of Georgian and early Victorian England, these women contributed to the science and art of photography, wholeheartedly embracing its potential. All of these talented women contributed a photographic first, but one left an unparalleled legacy of ‘sun pictures’.  

See more and book tickets from 12 February 2018 here: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/event-root/may/lunchtime-lecture-03052018

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts presents the first Russian exhibition of works by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), one of the inventors of photography. The exhibition will display rare photographs which became iconic milestones in the history of visual arts: about 150 original prints and negatives from the collections of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (UK), as well as imaging devices: a camera obscura and camera lucida from the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. This display of early British photographs continues the series of museum projects aimed at acquainting the audience with masterpieces of photographic art.

Talbot, a British aristocrat and scholar, was a keen explorer of physics, chemistry, mathematics, archeology and politics. In his reports to the Royal Society of London, he spoke about the promotion of natural sciences. In the history of photography, Talbot is famous as the inventor of the negative-positive process for making photographic images. He began his experiments with making photographic prints on paper in 1834 in Lacock Abbey, his ancestral mansion. In 1835, he managed to produce a positive image from a paper negative on light-sensitive paper. Thus, it became possible to replicate images. Talbot designed a simple and inexpensive photographic process which was named calotype (from the Greek words kalos, “beautiful,” and tupos, “impression”) and patented in 1841. 

In the early 19th century, Talbot’s peers in the field of making photo images, the Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), were also successful in the field of commercial photography. Talbot’s method was not as popular as the daguerreotype. This can be partially explained by patents which restricted the use of the Talbot process, as well as the failure of calotype to clearly reproduce small details, which was an advantage of Daguerre’s invention. However, it was calotype, which made it possible to create negatives and many positive prints, that formed the basis of modern photographic processes.

Talbot’s scientific discovery was a breakthrough in image-making technology, and it determined the path of photographic art. Unlike the distinct and precise daguerreotypes, calotype images had a certain picturesque quality. This helped photography to no longer be perceived solely as a real-life record process. In 1844, Talbot published the album “The Pencil of Nature” with original prints accompanied by his comments, where he described his invention and the artistic potential of photography. The album depicted the entire range of photography styles: landscape, still life, portrait, and genre pictures. 

The exposition presents works created in 1840-1846, including prints from “The Pencil of Nature” (1844) and “Sun Pictures in Scotland” (1845).

Marina Loshak, Director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: “The name Talbot is just as important in the history of photography as Da Vinci is in the history of painting. Thanks to this man, photography became an art rather than just a tool to represent reality. This museum exhibition is critically important to the understanding of the progress and origins of the art. It was extremely difficult to set it up. We worked on this project for six years. Now we are very pleased to view and share the original works of the master.”

Jo Quinton-Tulloch, Director of the National Science and Media Museum: “The collection of Talbot works in our museum is both rich and deeply intellectual in its nature. Along with other exhibits displaying various photographic processes and technologies, this collection attracts constant worldwide attention from researchers and always raises the interest of visitors at galleries and exhibitions.”

Olga Averyanova, Exhibition Curator and Head of the Photographic Art Department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: “The perception of photography as an art was the result of a lengthy liberation process with its shift away from purely practical purposes. This was accompanied by the origination of a special view toward photography which affirmed its inherent value and made it possible to see it for its own sake. Essentially, this process began with Talbot’s invention of calotype and the determination of the aesthetic values ​​of photography as opposed to its practical functions, subject to logic, utility and profit. This was the time when “the territory of photographic art” began to form. Calotype photographers’ efforts were aimed at establishing this special kind of cultural institution as they formed communities and arranged exhibitions. Early photography did not cast doubts on the merits of painting, which for a long time would remain a kind of focus for its artistic evolution. The paradigm of art would lay the conceptual foundation: for non-commercial photography, the method of presentation would always be more important than the object. Calotype was more than a technology; like any technology, it formed a new artistic code, similar to what the daguerreotype had done earlier, and then brought in all subsequent innovative ideas of photography.”

See: http://www.arts-museum.ru/events/archive/2018/talbot/index.php?lang=en

It’s my pleasure to announce the publication of the book Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century. In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography’s vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise of the mass-circulation press, and the emergence of the railway dramatically changed the way people communicated and experienced time and space. Concurrently, photography developed as a medium that changed how images were produced and circulated. Yet, for the most part, photography of the era is studied outside the field of media history. The contributors to this volume challenge those established disciplinary boundaries as they programmatically explore the intersections of photography and “new media” during a period of fast-paced change. Their essays look at the emergence and early history of photography in the context of broader changes in the history of communications; the role of the nascent photographic press in photography’s infancy; and the development of photographic techniques as part of a broader media culture that included the mass-consumed novel, sound recording, and cinema.

Featuring essays by noteworthy historians in photography and media history, this discipline-shifting examination of the communication revolution of the nineteenth century is an essential addition to the field of media studies.

In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Geoffrey Batchen, Geoffrey Belknap, Lynn Berger, Jan von Brevern, Anthony Enns, André Gaudreault, Lisa Gitelman, David Henkin, Erkki Huhtamo, Philippe Marion, Peppino Ortoleva, Steffen Siegel, Richard Taws, and Kim Timby.

You can find Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century on the Penn State University Press web site at this URL: http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-07916-5.html

Take 30% off with code NLSN18 when you order through psupress.org