This really charming story was sent to me and I thought I would share it with you. If you are not familiar with Lomo / Diana F or Holga cameras then hopefully this will open up a new area for you.
http://www.lomography.com/magazine/lifestyle/2011/08/31/vintage-exposed-film-found-in-an-auction
A public meeting of the German Society for Photography (DGPh) and the Victoria & Albert Museum in Wolfen on the 28th and 29th October 2011 in the auditorium of the former Agfa/Orwo film factory, Bitterfeld-Wolfen.
2011 represents two cultural and technical-historical anniversaries: 150 years ago coloured photograph was projected in London by Professor James Clerk Maxwell and 75 years ago, the first colour-developed multilayer colour films - Kodachrome and the new Agfacolor - came on the market.
These landmark events in the photograph give rise, under the auspices of the Section history and archives, and in collaboration with the Industrial and Filmmuseum Wolfen Conference On the way to natural colors on the many aspects of colour photography from analog to digital-history discussed by well-known speakers.
Detailed information about the conference program, accommodation and cost can be found hereTo coincide with the Freer and Sackler exhibition POWER | PLAY China’s Empress Dowager (photographs of the Empress Dowager Cixi, dating from c.1903), the Japan Art History Forum will be holding a special conference focusing on the subject of imperial portraiture across Asia and the Middle East during the advent of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
While the exhibition itself addresses the unique circumstances and intention of the Cixi photographs, the conference will provide an opportunity for a broader comparative analysis of the engagement with photography in the context of portraiture in ruling courts across Asia.
Invited speakers include:
Ali Behdad, John Clark, Deepali Dewan, Holly Edwards, Maki Fukoka, Luke Gartlan, Yi Gu, Yuhang Li, Hyung Il Pai, Maurizio Peleggi, Claire Roberts, Mary Roberts, Roberta Wue and Peng Yingchen.
Details of the conference can be found here. A full conference program and other information will be available in late summer.
The life of China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) was anything but conventional. She rose in power from a low-ranking imperial concubine to Grand Empress Dowager of the Qing court, reigning as sovereign to more than 400 million people for more than 45 years.
On public display for the first time will be 19 stunning life-sized, photographic portraits of the Empress Dowager created from the Freer and Sackler Archives’ collection of original and unique glass negatives. The portraits reveal a ruler who, in an attempt to control her public persona, seized on the emerging technology of photography to shape her image on the world stage. The high-resolution images are printed on large aluminum panels, a format that enables visitors to see a fascinating level of detail previously imperceptible in conventional prints.
The photographs were taken in the years following China’s Boxer Rebellion, when Cixi (pronounced TSUH-see) was held in low regard throughout the world. In 1903, she commissioned a young aristocratic photographer named Xunling (pronounced SYOON-leeng) to take meticulously staged studio portraits of her and her court, melding modern photography with traditional conventions of imperial portraiture. Several of the photographs taken at the imperial Summer Palace outside of Beijing depict the Empress dressed as Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Others depict her with attendants and eunuchs boating on a lake in theatrical costumes.
Many of the portraits were created as gifts to diplomatic visitors or to other world leaders.
Among the highlights of the exhibition are a large, hand-tinted portrait sent to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 and a print presented to his daughter Alice on her visit to the court in 1905. Social occasions featuring Manchu princesses and women of the foreign diplomatic corps are also captured on film, illustrating the court’s carefully crafted diplomatic campaign to win the support of foreign powers.
Xunling’s original negatives were brought to the United States by his sister Deling, who used them to illustrate her best-selling books recounting her own experience as personal attendant to Cixi. Following her death in 1944, the negatives were purchased by the Freer and Sackler galleries. The collection of 36 original Xunling negatives is the largest outside the Palace Museum in Beijing and one of the most important holdings of early Chinese photographs by a Chinese photographer in North America.
Details of the exhibition can be found here, and the official press release here. A special seminar by David Hogge, curator of the exhibition, can also be found here too.
Photo: The Empress Dowager Cixi in sedan chair surrounded by eunuchs; China, Qing dynasty, 1903-1904; Glass plate negative; Image credit: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, SC-GR 261
Not gun shot wounds, but shots of of miners in the Rhondda Valley and men working at the Powell Duffryn Pit and Penallta Mine in Ystrad Mynach taken by an unsung Fleet Street photojournalist, James Jarché, in the 1930s.
Now, his grandson, David Suchet, best known for playing Agatha Christie’s iconic Belgian detective, is coming to Wales this October to film part of an ITV1 documentary which follows the footsteps of his photographer grandfather. Jarché’s long and successful career saw him produce some of the most famous images of the 20th century including snaps of the famous London gun siege in Sidney Street in 1911, and the first ever picture of the Prince of Wales with Mrs Simpson, which he took in secrecy in a London nightclub.
Director Harry Hook, of Testimony Film, is keen to make contact with some of the stars of Jarché’s pictures who depict the life of mining families and men going down the pit. Anyone who knows faces from the pictures or has any information can contact Rosie Bristowe of Testimony Films on 0117 925 8589 or email rosie.bristowe@testimonyfilms.com. Alternatively they can write to Testimony Films, 12 Great George Street, Bristol, BS1 5RH.
Suchet is a keen photographer himself after becoming interested when his grandfather gave him a Kodak camera as a present.
Photo: David Suchet as Agatha Christie's iconic Belgian detective.
Some years ago I bought a this little badge as an interesting item of photographic history. I'm posting the picture here to see what comments fellow members of this forum might make. There are many interesting details about a number of the conventions on the Edinburgh photo website including the 1892 Convention in Edinburgh.
This site shows a similar pin (but with all red enamelling)
I wonder which year this badge came from?
Ian
The BFI's £12 million Master Film Store in Gaydon, Warwickshire will open next month.
The new building has been designed to improve the conditions in which the archive is kept and prevent it from deteriorating - and deal with the risk of nitrate film catching fire.
The BFI's Head of Collections & Information, Ruth Kelly showed BBC News around the old and new storage facilities, as well as what happens to film when it is not stored correctly.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14665763
The Master Film Store, which is in addition to the BFI’s existing archive site in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, will house up to 450,000 cans of film ranging from the early works of Mitchell and Kenyon to The King’s Speech.
The £12m state of the art, environmentally sustainable facility has been built on a disused military installation and will use green technologies to keep the films at a temperature of minus 5 degrees and 35% relative humidity, the optimum conditions for preserving films which could deteriorate if not kept in the right storage conditions.
The fire resistant site consists of six large acetate film stores and 30 smaller nitrate stores in a building of just under 3,000 square metres. The building process, began last October.
The Trustees of the Royal Photographic Society today (22 August) announced the appointment of Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS, a former Christie's photographic specialist and director, as its new Director General to spearhead the Society's national and international profile.
Michael Pritchard takes up the post on 20 September and will be responsible for managing The Society’s headquarters operations, working with the Council to lead the future direction of the Society, and for further raising the profile of the Society nationally and internationally.
Michael Pritchard was with the auction house Christie’s between 1986 and 2007 where he was a director, responsible for photographic auctions as well as having wider international business responsibilities. He completed a PhD examining the British photographic industry in 2010. Most recently he has been teaching at De Montfort University, Leicester, and working for the British Library on the Kodak Historical Collection. He has had a passion for photography since he was 10 years old and worked as an assistant at a commercial and portrait photographic studio in Watford for many years. As an active photographer he has a particular interest in landscape photography. Michael joined The Society in 1979 as a junior member, achieving his Associateship in 1984 and Fellowship in 1986. He is deputy chair of the Research, Education and Application of Photography Distinction Panel and is active on the committee of the Society’s Historical Group.
The offical press release can be found here, and a news article here and here.
Photo: The new RPS Director General, Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS.
In Believing is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record.
During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton's intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago?
In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR's Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda? During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them?
With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception from one of America's most provocative observers.
The book is due out on 1st September 2011. A full review of the book can be found here, and if interested, you can purchase it using the Amazon link on your right.
Photo: Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Roger Fenton's famous Crimean War photograph. Did he deliberately arrange the cannonballs?
Founded in 1947 on the estate of Kodak founder George Eastman, the world’s oldest photography museum holds an unparalleled collection of over 400,000 images from 9,000 photographers. These significant photo archives span from daguerreotypes to digital photographs, including such unique artist collections such as Southworth & Hawes, Lewis Hine, and Edward Steichen.
Teaming with Clickworker, an innovator in the global crowdsourcing and workforce solutions space, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film is now bringing their archives into the digital age, making them easily accessible to the public -- in many instances, for the very first time. To meet the needs of this expansive project, Clickworker leverages its global crowd of more than 115,000 to efficiently tag and catalog the museum's vast collection of images from around the world.
Included among the newly-tagged photo collections are original daguerreotypes from 19th century America (Southworth & Hawes); images of Lincoln assassination conspirators (Alexander Gardner); photographs of new immigrants to American soil and construction and labor-themed images, including the evolution of the Empire State Building (Lewis Wickes Hines); and celebrity portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Frida Kahlo (Nickolas Muray, a former lover of Kahlo's).
You can read the rest of the report here.
Photo: George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, USA.
The London Street Photography Festival 2011 was drawn to an official close last night at an operatic evening of celebration, music, drinks, food, fun, laughter (not necessary in that order!) and a charity auction of exhibition prints to help fund next year's event.
Held at the magnificent German Gymnasium in Kings Cross, the venue was packed to the brim with well-wishers, supporters, partners, contributors and artists of the Festival.
The evening kicked off with Brett Stott, the organiser, presenting the Festival's inaugural Student Street Photography Awards 2011 to a well deserved Tom Archer. The 21-year old Sheffield graduate had his work exhibited at Orange Dot Gallery in London, and has just recently published his first photo book.
The remaining of the evening was then handed over to Michael Pritchard who presided over the fund-raising auction. Or should I say, 'fun'-raising, as the crowd roared with laughter on occasions as the former Christie's auctioneer managed to ease the crowd and got them to dig deep into their wallets. A raffle, with some stunning prizes including an Eurostar return trip to Paris, was the grand finale.
I, for one, will be looking forward to next year's Festival with great anticipation. It is to the organiser's great credit to have put this Festival together which included ten free exhibitions and a number of free events, talks and workshops. If you have enjoyed the Festival this year please help them to make it happen again next year by visiting their site here.
May it long continue as London's photographic community does welcome such a great event ... Where 'dehydrated' guests were well hydrated...
... and fed.
Music flowed to the rhythmn of the jazz trio...
The amazing German Gymnasium where the event and auction took place.
Some of the lots for sale included Allison Ball's iconic hand burnished lino print of the festival logo.
... not sure how this Lot got in! But it did get the ladies in the crowd 'excited'.
Alas, all good things have to come to an end ....., but a splendid time was guaranteed for all!
I have been busy photographing historic faded adverts for just over a year now. It has been great to record these important symbols of our culture in a creative way. I donate all the work to The History of Advertising Trust who are compiling an archive.
Ghost Signs of London is the link to see the latest work. I am trying to build up some historical information about each of the signs as they will disappear before to long. There was one on Oxford Street which is now demolished and sadly I did not get to photograph.
Got to be quick.....
I'm trying to get some biographical material on Harold Burdekin and John Morrison who jointly published a book on night photography of London circa 1930 and on the photography of Alfred Howarth Blake, founder of The Society of Night Photographers of England and London Correspondent of American Photographer, member of the Linked Ring, nickname "Cockney" active around the turn of the 20th century. Any help, pointers etc., will be appreciated.
Donald Stewart
If you happen to be visiting New York City this autumn, do drop into 962 Park Avenue at 82nd Street where you can view a fine display of more than 20 albumen prints from 1864 to 1874 taken by 19th century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Although a late starter in photography at the age of 48, she is considered one of 19th century’s greatest portraitist.
The majority of these photographs were gifted to her niece, Adeline Maria Jackson, and have remained in the family and not been exhibited before. One of the highlights of the display is a carbon print of A Beautiful Vision, Julia Duckworth, 1872, Cameron’s cherished niece and goddaughter who was a frequent sitter and provided inspiration for her aunt’s photographs. Julia later became the mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.
Other notable 'celebrities' caught on image by Cameron include Sir John Herschel, a strong support of her, whose 1867 portrait is considered one of the most iconic images of the distinguished astronomer. The following year while working on The Descent of Man, his second landmark book on evolution, illness forced Charles Darwin to take a break in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, an island in the English Channel where Cameron created the majority of her work. “I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me,” wrote Charles Darwin about one of the portraits that Cameron made of him.
Details of this exhibition hosted by Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs can be found here. A fully illustrated catalogue, Sun Pictures Twenty, Julia Margaret Cameron, with text by Larry J. Schaaf, accompanies the exhibition.
Photo: Julia Margaret Cameron (English, born in India, 1815-1879) A Beautiful Vision, Julia Duckworth. Carbon print, June 1872, 33.5 x 25.4 cm. (Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs ).
The British Science Festival is one of Europe's largest science festivals, taking place each September. Each year the Festival travels to a different UK location, bringing you the latest in science, technology and engineering. For 2011, it will take place in the historic city of Bradford from Saturday 10th September - Thursday 15th September, hosted by University of Bradford and Bradford College.
A special one-day 'hands-on' Workshop focussing on the insights into recent product developments, the history of photography, and explorations into the works of black and white darkroom printers will be hosted by Ilford Photo, in conjunction with Bradford College Photographic Department. Entitled 'Faster than the Speed of Light', visitors to this Workshop will also get the first look at the Harman TiTAN 4x5 pinhole camera.
The afternoon includes a photographic studio workshop and darkroom workshop. One of the UK’s master printers will demonstrate the making of a black and white print, and give participants the opportunity to work alongside them in producing pictures through this conventional process.
Admission is free, but booking is required. Details of the Workshop can be found here, and the full agenda here.
As part of their lunchtime talks, the Nottinghamshire Archives will this year be exploring the fascinating world of photographs. Talks include archivist Chris Weir delving into the archives to highlight a selection of fascinating photos, local historian Peter Hammond looking at the history of family portraiture in Nottinghamshire, archivist Peter Lester exploring different photographic techniques over the years and Nick Tomlinson investigating a range of photos which can be explored on the innovative web site.
Details of some of the lectures can be found in the Events section here and here, as well as in the archives own website here.
A special exhibition dedicated to the photographic techniques used in the age of Louis Daguerre has been organised by the museums of Bry-sur-Marne and Lagny-sur-Marne. One of the highlights of the exhibit will be the display of part of a collection of about 50 prints by Louis Adolphe Humbert de Molard, never shown before to the general public.
From a rich Parisian family, Baron Louis Adolphe Humbert de Molard was one of those wealthy amateurs who brought their talent and passion to early photography. He took up photography in 1843 using, as here, the daguerreotype. Later, in the mid 1850s, he became one of the first French photographers to use the calotype, a technique on paper developed in England by Fox Talbot, and introducing the principle of positive and negative.
His images were sometimes taken spontaneously, but more often they were composed like genuine genre scenes. This choice can be explained in part by the long exposure time, but equally by the heritage of the pictorial tradition
A conference will also be organised at the same time, including the publication of a catalogue. Details of the exhibition can be found here and here.
Photo: Louis Dodier as a prisoner 1847 Daguerreotype
H. 11.5; W. 15.5 cm © RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
As Princeton's first professor of the history of photography, from 1972 to 2002, Peter C. Bunnell mentored a generation of scholar-curators while building one of the great North American teaching collections. In celebration of the endowment of the Peter C. Bunnell Curatorship of Photography, this exhibition presents a “timeline” of works representing the major photography exhibitions mounted at the Museum during Bunnell's years. Showcasing the great range of his scholarly interests, from the daguerreotype to Pictorialism to contemporary color photography, the exhibition chronicles the collection’s evolution from its beginnings to the turn of this century, by which time it numbered over 20,000 objects.
In 1972, Peter C. Bunnell was appointed as the David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. Over the following three decades, he combined a busy teaching schedule with service as curator of photography at the Museum, where he also served twice as director (1973–78 and 1998–2000).
Bunnell built a collection at the Museum that helped him to teach hundreds of undergraduates and fourteen doctoral students, who in turn have brought photography to a wider audience as curators at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. This year, Bunnell’s remarkable legacy at Princeton has been secured with the endowment of the Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography.
The works in The Bunnell Decades illustrate a selective chronology of the principal exhibitions of photography mounted during Bunnell’s years at Princeton. The Steerage was the first photograph to enter the Museum’s collection, in 1949, and it appeared twenty-three years later in Bunnell’s first exhibition, on the work of Alfred Stieglitz and the members of his group, the Photo-Secession of New York.
In the year preceding Bunnell’s appointment, David Hunter McAlpin, Class of 1920, gave the Museum over 450 photographs as well as funds for further acquisitions. Building on these resources, Bunnell crafted one of the country’s leading teaching collections, all the while organizing exhibitions to reflect its diversifying strengths. Some of his scholarly interests, showcased here, include Pictorialism; photographs from nineteenth-century France and Britain, postwar Japan, and the American West; and that ever-shifting field, the “contemporary.”
Details of the exhibition can be found here.
Photo: Lewis W. Hine, American, 1874–1940: An Industrial Design, 1920, Gelatin silver print, 34.1 x 24.6 cm. Anonymous gift (x1973-34).
Continuing in the Royal Academy's Sackler Wing is the highly acclaimed Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi until 2 October 2011. The exhibition is dedicated to the birth of modern photography, featuring the work of Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy Nagy and Martin Munkácsi. The juxtaposition of photographers suggests a reappraisal of individuals is overdue.
Each of the key photographers left their homeland of Hungary to make their names in Europe and the USA, profoundly influencing the course of modern photography. Many other talented photographers who remained in Hungary, such as Rudolf Balogh and Károly Escher, are also represented in the exhibition. Over 200 photographs from 1914 to 1989 show how these world renowned photographers were at the forefront of stylistic developments and reveal their achievements in the context of the rich photographic tradition of Hungary. Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy and Munkácsi are each known for the important changes they brought about in photojournalism, documentary, art and fashion photography. By following their paths through Germany, France and the USA, the exhibition explores their distinct approaches, signalling key aspects of modern photography.
André Kertész (1894–1985) showed an intuitive talent for photography which blossomed when he moved to Paris in 1925. Using a hand-held camera, he captured lyrical impressions of the ephemeral moments of everyday urban life. Proud of being self-taught, Kertész considered himself an ‘eternal amateur’ whose vision remained fresh; his highly personal style paved the way for a subjective, humanist approach to photography.
A painter and designer as well as a photographer, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became an instructor at the Bauhaus in 1922. He was a pioneer of photograms, photomontage and visual theory, using unconventional perspectives and bold tonal contrasts to manifest his radical approach. His camera-less images and experimental techniques reflect on the centrality of light to the medium.
Martin Munkácsi (1896–1963) was a highly successful photographer first in Budapest, then Berlin, covering everything from Greta Garbo to the Day of Potsdam. He moved to the US in 1934, securing a lucrative position with Harper’s Bazaar, revolutionising fashion photography by liberating it from the studio. Taking photographs of models and celebrities outdoors, he invested his photographs with a dynamism and vitality that became his hallmark.
The image of modern Paris was defined by Brassaï (1899–1984). Introduced to photography by Kertész, who was then at the heart of an energetic émigré community of artists, Brassaï is known for his classic portraits of Picasso. His stunning photographs of sights, streets and people bring vividly to life the nocturnal characters and potent atmosphere of the city at night.
Robert Capa (1913–1954) left Hungary aged seventeen, first for Berlin where he took up photography, then on to Paris. He is often called the ‘greatest war photographer’ documenting the Spanish Civil War, the D-Day landings and other events of World War II. In 1947, he cofounded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger.
The exhibition also celebrates the diversity of the photographic milieu in Hungary, from the early 20th century professional and club photography of Rudolf Balogh, Károly Escher and József Pécsi, to the more recent documentary and art photography of Péter Korniss and Gábor Kerekes. Key works by over forty photographers show how major changes in modern photography have been interpreted through a particularly Hungarian sensibility. Varied subject matter includes ‘Magyar style’ rural images; urbanite ‘New Objectivity’ photography in Budapest and Berlin; vivacious fashion photographs; powerful photojournalism of war; and emotive social documentary in post-war Hungary. Highlights include images from Brassaï’s Paris by Night series, and such iconic photographs as Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, 1936; Munkácsi’s Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika, c.1930 and Kertész’s Satiric Dancer, 1926. The exhibition features works from the Hungarian National Museum of Photography in Kecskemét together with the National Museum, Budapest and public and private collections in Hungary and the UK.
The exhibition has been curated by Colin Ford, founding director of the National Media Museum, with Péter Baki, Director of the Hungarian National Museum of Photography together with Sarah Lea, Royal Academy of Arts.
Open to public: until Sunday 2 October 2011 between 10am – 6pm daily (last admission 5.30 pm) and Fridays until 10pm (last admission 9.30 pm) Admission is £9 full price; £8 registered disabled and 60 + years; £7 NUS / ISIC cardholders; £4 12–18 years and Income Support; £3 8–11 years; 7 and under free. RA Friends go free.
Tickets are available daily at the RA. Advance bookings: Telephone 0844 209 0051 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk. The Royal Academy of Arts is at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J OBD.
