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To provide opportunities for early-career training for PhD students, the V&A has made available a range of doctoral placements based in collections departments, archives, the National Art Library, research, and collections care and access. Each placement is a discrete project designed by members of V&A staff (who will also act as the placement’s supervisor), involving collaborative as well as independent research.

The RPS Medical Group was founded in 1946. While the Group continues to exist, its collection of an estimated 4,000 photographs and archival papers, dating from the 1910 until the 1990s, now forms part of the V&A RPS collection.

The collection appears to have been formed as a resource for teaching and research, a record of technical advances, a platform for the recognition of photographers and hospital photography units, and as a visual record of surgical procedures, medical conditions and pathology.

The collection has a UK focus, with works by key practitioners such as the Group’s founder, Rosalind Maingot (1894-1947) and radiographer John Arthur Fairfax Fozzard (1905-93). It also contains the work of photographic departments including St Bartholomew's, Royal Free, St Thomas’ and Guy’s hospitals in London.
The collection contains some sensitive and graphic imagery. Ethical considerations will be a key factor in considering approaches to its cataloguing, research and dissemination. The student would be expected to seek advice from the V&A terminology group and experts outside of the museum sector.

The main tasks are to survey the material and its physical condition, categorization and organization, to organize and rehouse items in appropriate storage, research and write a summary and to catalogue a selection of the holdings.

This is an unpaid doctoral placement that is financially supported by the successful applicant’s PhD stipend in line with UKRI guidance.

See: https://vam.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3519937?cid=3279&rsid=24732&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

To provide opportunities for early-career training for PhD students, the V&A has made available a range of doctoral placements based in collections departments, archives, the National Art Library, research, and collections care and access. Each placement is a discrete project designed by members of V&A staff (who will also act as the placement’s supervisor), involving collaborative as well as independent research.

The project will investigate holdings related to Latin America in the V&A Photography Collection. It will focus on objects acquired between 1850 and 1950, to situate findings in the context of early global networks and institutional connections to Latin America that can be mapped through photography. Many relevant holdings feature in bound photographic albums from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are largely uncatalogued and undigitised. Other relevant holdings include topographical imagery, travel photographs and photographs of Latin American artefacts, as well as work by well-known photographers from the 20th century.

The placement will produce a survey of holdings related to Latin America in the Photography Collection, outlining historical context, scope and content. It will create a findings list for uncatalogued objects; and undertake more detailed provenance and object-level research for a defined group of material, resulting in new or enhanced catalogue records. The student will be encouraged and supported to write a blog post and lead a Print Room event relating to their work.

The project builds on momentum across the V&A to engage with Latin America. It will contribute new ways of thinking through institutional histories, and ripen collections for use in the Photography Section’s contemporary commissioning programme.

This is an unpaid doctoral placement that is financially supported by the successful applicant’s PhD stipend in line with UKRI guidance.

See: https://vam.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3515597?cid=3279&rsid=24732&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

To provide opportunities for early-career training for PhD students, the V&A has made available a range of doctoral placements based in collections departments, archives, the National Art Library, research, and collections care and access. Each placement is a discrete project designed by members of V&A staff (who will also act as the placement’s supervisor), involving collaborative as well as independent research.

The V&A has recently acquired a collection of over 2,000 photographs by Bert Hardy (1913-95). Hardy was chief photographer for Picture Post magazine from 1941 to 1957. His work represents a highpoint of 20th century British photography and international photojournalism. The photographs in the acquisition span his entire career and consists mostly of vintage prints and some Kodachrome slides. The V&A seeks a student to work with Photography Curators on cataloguing the collection on a database and to organise, number, sleeve and box the photographs. The student will also be expected research a specific aspect of the collection that links with their interests.

This is an unpaid doctoral placement that is financially supported by the successful applicant’s PhD stipend in line with UKRI guidance. full time

Details: https://vam.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3519915?cid=3279&rsid=24732&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

Side Gallery which had temporarily closed last year and was under threat of permanent closure (see here) having lost its Arts Council National Portfolio status and funding has provided an update of its position. In 2023 is secured over £50,000 as part of a Crowdfunding exercsie and it has just been awarded a £236,000 grant by The heritage Fund which 'secures our building for the next year, which will allow us to host pop-up exhibitions and do comprehensive cataloguing.'

Side's statement sent to those who had supported its Crowdfunder says: 

When we last emailed you in March we had several exciting updates to share about the collection, however, the future of Side Gallery was still uncertain… 
We had one final funding application under review, which if not won would mean the permanent closure of the Side Gallery. 
I am pleased to announce that we have been awarded a £236,000 grant by The Heritage Fund thanks to National Lottery players. 
This grant secures our building for the next year, which will allow us to host pop-up exhibitions and do comprehensive cataloguing.
But this grant isn’t just about the gallery, it’s much bigger.
This means exploring new partnerships and ensuring we are more connected to working photographers and the North East arts community. 

This grant will enable us to run a 12-month project that includes:

• Expanding our team (new roles to be announced soon)
• Business & Resilience Development
• Creating new exhibitions representing many viewpoints, nurturing an inclusive culture
• Exploring new ways to collaborate with new artists, audiences and lifelong supporters. 
• A comprehensive, publicly accessible catalogue of the AmberSide Collection

The grant puts us on the path to reopening the gallery, but we not going back to business as usual; instead, we are forging a new direction that is mindful of our original principles.

We have a long way to go, but we would not have made it this far without you
Your donation to #SaveSide allowed us to protect the collection and gallery space and spend time creating the highest-quality funding applications. 
Thanks to you and the 2,000 others who care deeply about telling North Eash stories we #SavedSide. 

We’ll share updates and stories from the project along the way, and can’t wait to see what this next chapter brings for the collection and photography in the North East. 

All the best, 

Laura Laffler

Amber Film & Photography Collective

See: https://www.amber-online.com/side-gallery/

If you are a cartomaniac like me, you will definitely be interested in a new book on the subject by renowned collector, Paul Frecker, which is scheduled for release next week, and can be pre-ordered now. 

Paul is also giving an online talk about the carte-de-visit on 18 July. 

Cartomania: Celebrity, Deception and Identity
Online, free, at 1800 (BST) | 1900 (CET)
Register here

Acclaimed British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014) was famous for his evocative documentary images of young people growing-up in Britain in the mid-1950s and 1960s. This exhibition, of around sixty almost exclusively vintage photographs, includes many of his iconic street images of children and teenagers, alongside an almost entirely unknown selection of intimate and moving later images of his own family at home in Dorset, as well as those taken on his honeymoon in Spain in 1962.

Self-taught and influential in the acceptance of photography as an art form, Mayne was passionate about photographing human life as he found it. This is the first exhibition of his work since 2017.

Roger Mayne: Youth
14 June-1 September 2024
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
London, The Courtauld
See: https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-roger-mayne-youth/

The photographs in this exhibition do not depict rare or special things. They show toothpaste, tombstones, and hats. But these familiar trappings of everyday life will be, at times, unrecognizable—so altered by the camera as to constitute something entirely new. Enticing consumers with increasingly experimental approaches to the still life genre, the photographs featured transform everyday objects into covetable commodities. The camera abstracts them from functional use, at times distorting them through dizzying perspectives and modulations of scale. Spanning the first century of photographic advertising, the exhibition will illustrate how commercial camerawork contributed to the visual language of modernism, suggesting new links between the promotional strategies of vernacular studios and the tactics of the interwar avant-garde. Corporate commissions by celebrated innovators, including Paul Outerbridge, August Sander, and Piet Zwart, will appear alongside obscure catalogues and trade publications, united by a common cause: to snatch the ordinary out of context, and sell it back at full price.

The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography
until 4 August 2024
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
See: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-real-thing-unpackaging-product-photography

Image: Anton Bruehl (American (born Australia), Hawker 1900–1982 San Francisco, California)