Does anyone know the whereabouts of the attached Claudet stereograph? I’m finishing a book with a major focus on experiments with photographic motion in early stereographs. If possible, I would like to publish a clearer version of this important image.
The image was published in the 1960s in the Photographic Journal when it was described as being with the Claudet family.
I would appreciate any help on this.
Robert
The publication of Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization has been announced by The MIT Press. Billed by the publishers as 'an intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s', the book traces a history of the modern pictorial economy that foregrounds the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography: picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists.
Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet.
Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, as well as interviews with professionals in the UK picture industry, the book reveals the research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that have been needed to make pictures available to a public, both before and after (or rather, under) digitization.
In short, Picture Research makes visible and explicit the invisible labour that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.
Nina Lager Vestberg is Professor of Visual Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is a member of the editorial board of History of Photography, and her work has been published in journals ranging from Journal of Visual Culture to Museum Management and Curatorship.
Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization
Nina Lager Vestberg
272 pp., 6 x 9 in, 12 color illus., 21 b&w illus, paperback
ISBN 9780262045315
MIT Press, 2022
£38
Details: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045315/picture-research/.
Open access version: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5595/Picture-ResearchThe-Work-of-Intermediation-from
In Search of the Blue Flower celebrates the life and work of photographer Alexander Hamilton. It presents his early formative years, sharing the way his engagement with the cyanotype process has informed his art practice, from his time at Edinburgh College of Art, to his program of exhibitions and residencies, through to his work within the field of public arts. This personal history is combined with essays by academics, scholars and curators who engage with the intellectual roots of his work and practice. A comprehensive selection of Hamilton’s photography, including his unique plant-based cyanotypes, completes this beautiful book.
The book includes essays by Vanessa Sellars, Julie Lawson, Christian Weikop and Jaromir Jedlinski.
In Search of the Blue Flower. Alexander Hamilton and the Art of Cyanotype
Alexander Hamilton
Edinburgh University Press, 2023
£30. order: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-in-search-of-the-blue-flower.html
Hear artist Garry Fabian Miller in conversation with Martin Barnes (Senior Curator of Photography, V&A) and Bronwen Colquhoun (Senior Curator of Photography, Amgueddfa Cymru) about his life, practice and collaborations. This event has been programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Môrwelion/The Sea Horizon which is currently on display at National Museum Cardiff until 10 September 2023.
Môrwelion/The Sea Horizon will be open for those that would like to view the exhibition before the event. Attendees are invited to enjoy music performed by Composition students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in the gallery from 1-1:45pm. These new works have been composed in response to The Sea Horizon exhibition.
The talk will be followed by a screening of five short films made by the artist in collaboration with Sam Fabian Miller. The films invite you to explore Garry Fabian Miller’s ‘camera-less’ practice that experiments with darkness and light, and weaves in work by the artists, writers and thinkers that have inspired him over the years, including Alice Oswald, Oliver Coates and Kathleen Francis.
In Conversation: The Sea Horizon
National Museum Cardiff
17 June 2023 at 1400
See: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/11914/In-Conversation-The-Sea-Horizon/
Art Monthly Australasia carries a review by Elisa deCourcy of the Bodleian Libraries' exhibitions A New Power and Bright Sparks. The latter remains on view until 18 June 2023.
See: Art Monthly Australasia, Winter 2023, Issue 336. https://www.artmonthly.org.au/current
for details of Bright Sparks see: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/events-exhibitions
A couple of recent articles are worth sharing. In the May Apollo magazine Diane Smyth poses the question 'Do photography collections in the UK need more focus?' and compares the opening of the new V&A Photography Centre with the closure of Newcastle's Side Gallery and takes in the Bodleian Libraries and changes - openings and closures - to other collections in recent years.
The Architects Journal gives a technical summary of the V&A Photography Centre which cost £3 million (base build) and £1.25 million (fit-out).
See: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photography-uk-collections-va-james-hyman-bodleian-npg/
The programmes are printed and we're looking forward to another exciting conference, Photography in its Environment!. Recent challenges such as the climate crisis have pushed the field to consider how photography shapes and is shaped by the environment. From the mining of natural resources to the effects of mass digital storage, the environmental impact of photography is at the forefront of discussions in photography research, education and practice.
In this annual conference of the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University Leicester (UK), speakers will reconsider the history of photography using the environment, broadly understood, as a departing point. What kind of histories can be written about photography in its environment? Would it be useful to understand photography as an environment? Papers will not only examine photography from the point of view of current environmental concerns, but also, how photographic practices, images and archives have developed in relation to natural, industrial and other environments. By centering the environment as an analytical category, we hope to discuss the ways in which natural, colonial, personal, digital and other types of environments have shaped photography as well as how photographic histories can help to understand environmental histories.
Talks will consider topics that address themes and questions like:
Keynote speakers: Estelle Blaschke (University of Basel) Conohar Scott (University of Lincoln)
Photography in its Environment
Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK / Hybrid (in person and online),
12-13 June 2023. Registration deadline: Jun 8, 2023
You can still register to join online or in person.
