Blogs

Christie's is offering the Yann Maillet collection of daguerreotypes online until 26 June. The collection includes many important daguerreotypes from 1839 including images from such key figures as Samuel Morse, Robert Cornelius, John Ruskin, Platt D. Babbitt, Henry Fitz Jr., Plumbe, Moreau, Durand, Eynard, Plumier, Francis Grice, Bogardus, Helsby, and more than two dozen plates by Southworth & Hawes, representing the process across north and south America and Europe. 

Of particular note to BPH are several daguerreotypes from Beard patentees, three views of Florence by John Ruskin, c.1846, and two views of a half-timbered building which BPH has identified as the Market House, Ledbury, Herefordshire. 

See the auction here

Images: top: lot 82. Unknown photographer(s), Half-timbered building, [Market House, Ledbury, Herefordshire], c.1846;  right: lot 32. John Ruskin (1819-1900), San Miniato al Monte, Florence, c.1846

The V&A's Photography Centre rooms 100 and 101 reopened today, Saturday, 14 June, with a new survey display of American Photographs. It is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 publication American Photographs, which capture a country in flux and at times turmoil. The display uses Evans's title to examine how photography has documented and shaped the United States. The V&A's collection of photography from America is one of the largest outside of the North America and over 300 works are on display. These range from photographs to publications and cameras, spanning the period 1840 to today, including recent acquisitions. The display will remain in situ until 2027 and coincides with the 2026 American bisesquicentennial commemorations. 

American Photographs
Rooms 100 and 101, until 16 July 2027
V&A Museum, South Kensington, London
Admission free
See details and display highlights: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/american-photographs

V&A website image: Anne Collier, Le femme la photo et Pentax, 2013, C-type print. 

The V&A Touring Exhibition Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron explores the path-breaking career of photography’s first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815–1879) was born in Calcutta (modern day Kolkata) to a French mother and an English father; in 1848, with her husband and children, she moved to England, where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles in which they traveled. Residing on the Isle of Wight, where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48. In only eleven years she would create thousands of exposures and leave an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Cameron’s prodigious drive helped her become a probing portraitist of leading writers, artists, and scientists, such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin, while her absorption with fine art, notably Renaissance painting, led her to create staged tableaux in a mode that has been perpetually rediscovered by photographers down to the present. Most distinct of all was Cameron’s wholly personal handling of her medium. Heedless of  contemporary conventions of technique, alert to the happy effects of accident, and indifferent to critical scorn, she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. Motion blur, highly selective focus, and even fingerprints on the glass negatives (which required developing before their emulsions dried) are among the idiosyncrasies of her singular oeuvre.

Cameron was quick to exploit publishing and promotional opportunities: at London’s South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum) she secured not only an exhibition in 1865 but, a few years later, studio space, and she was the first photographic artist to be collected by the institution. Arresting Beauty features prints from its initial purchase and from subsequent additions to its holdings, which have grown to number nearly one thousand. The exhibition includes Cameron’s large camera lens (all that survives of her apparatus), pages from her unfinished memoir manuscript Annals of My Glass House, and portraits she made in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after Cameron and her husband moved there in 1875.

The exhibition was developed by the V&A's Lisa Springer, International Programmes Curator, and Curator Marta Weiss who acted as curatorial advisor; and for the Morgan Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, and Allison Pappas, Jane P. Watkins Assistant Curator of Photography.   

Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
Until 14 September 2025
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
See more and selected images here: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/arresting-beauty

Image: Julia Margaret Cameron, A Group of Kalutara Peasants, 1878, albumen print. The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund. Museum no. RPS.1093-2017

Photo Museum Ireland, baded in Dublin, is seeking a Collection Manager & Digital Archivist which is both a strategic and hands-on position. The postholder will manage the development of our collection, overseeing acquisition, cataloguing, digitisation, and public access, including registrar duties for temporary exhibitions. This role will also take the lead on our artist-focused archival initiatives and digitisation projects. These include collaborative archival residencies and projects building on our recent archival digitisation projects.

The role also involves managing major collaborative projects, working closely with institutional and international partners. At the intersection of archival practice, digital innovation, and artist collaboration, this role supports one of the museum’s core strategic priorities of developing the Museum’s Collection.

This is a unique opportunity to shape Ireland’s most ambitious contemporary photography archive, to work directly with artists and estates, and to contribute meaningfully to a dynamic cultural institution that values creativity, inclusivity, and innovation.

Photo Museum Ireland is the national centre for contemporary photography, dedicated to advancing the development, appreciation and understanding of photography and visual culture across Ireland. We connect diverse audiences with inspirational and exciting photography and visual culture. 

Our mission is to support, curate and promote great photography while supporting both established and emerging artists to develop their practices. 

See: https://photomuseumireland.ie/collection-manager-digital-archivist/
To apply, submit your CV and a cover letter detailing your suitability for the role to recruitment@photomuseumireland.ie by 18th July 2025.

Nick Hedges, best known for his powerful campaigning photography of poor housing undertaken for Shelter in the late 1960s and 1970s has died.  Born in Bromsgrove in 1943, Hedges was one of the UK’s most compassionate documentarian photographers for almost 50 years, as well as a long-time campaigner for social justice. In the 1970s Hedges worked with organisations such as Half Moon Gallery in London, Newcastle’s Side Gallery, Camerawork and Ten.8 magazines, and from 1980 to 2003 he was head of photography at West Midlands College of Higher Education and the University of Wolverhampton. 

Between 1968 and 1972, he worked for Shelter, National Campaign for the Homeless, highlighting the UK’s dire housing crisis, work that was shown at London’s Science Museum and in 2021 was published by Bluecoat Press as Home, alongside another book, Street. His images transformed how the urban poor were visualised in the UK. He also produced series on religious beliefs in Wolverhampton, the fishing industry in Tyneside, factory workers in the West Midlands, rural life in Worcestershire and more. 

His work is in the collections of the National Science and Media Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is archived at the Library of Birmingham.

Hedges spoke about his work in conversation with Martin Parr at BOP, Bristol, in 2021. 

See:  nickhedgesphotography.co.uk and thanks to bluecoatpress.co.uk which published two of Hedges's books: Street and Home.

An exhibition of Nick's Shelter work was shown as Make Life Worth Living: Nick Hedges’ Photographs for Shelter, 1968-72 in the Virgin Media Studio at Media Space at the Science Museum from 2014-2015. See: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/make-life-worth-living-nick-hedges-photographs-for-shelter-1968-72/

Images: top: Nick Hedges and Martin Parr in conversation at BOP 2021; right: Nick Hedges; below: photographers David Hurn (seated left), Daniel Meadows (standing), Nick Hedges and Martin Parr. All © Michael Pritchard. 

A new exhibition of previously unseen works by Magnum photographer Werner Bischof has opened at Lacock’s Fox Talbot Museum, in collaboration with Magnum Photos. An early adopter of colour photography through his use of the Devin Tri-Color camera, Unseen Colour brings the photojournalist’s re-discovered colour work to UK audiences for the first time. Bischof became an associate member of Magnum in 1948 and a full-member from 1949. Lacock, which is cared for by the National Trust, is hosting the exhibition for a full year in the gallery space of the museum.

Largely considered one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Werner Bischof’s iconic images explored what it is to be human. Famed for his black and white photojournalism of the post-war world, Bischof used the Devin Tri-Color camera  from 1939 onwards for fashion, still life and documentary work. In 2016, decades after Werner’s death (he died in 1954, aged 38), his son Marco discovered the glass negatives taken by the camera, carefully stored in triplicate. ‘They were always treated with special reverence.’ he says, ‘In their steel cabinets, they formed a kind of ‘mysterious room’. Composed of one identical image captured three times through different colour filters: red, green and blue, the resulting photos have an incredible resolution and unmistakable colour intensity.

Working with scanning specialists, Marco Bischof and Tania Kuhn of the Werner Bischof Estate worked over several years to bring the Devin Tri-Color  negatives back to light. The images in Unseen Colour, all taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, present a treasure trove of previously unknown colour photographs.  

‘Werner Bischof wanted to become a painter, contrary to the ideas of his father, a factory director,’ says Marco, ‘he became a photographer, his love of colour has always accompanied him. In many situations, he would first sketch before he began to take photographs. Today we are amazed by these pictures. But anyone who takes a closer look at Bischof's work knows that he used colour from the very beginning.’

Curator Andy Cochrane says ‘it’s perfect that the UK premiere of Bischof’s Unseen Colour is at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock. Henry Fox Talbot developed photography at Lacock as he couldn’t paint or draw. Constance Talbot is one of the world’s earliest women photographers, and unlike her husband Henry, preferred painting to photography. Werner Bischof’s exhibition at Lacock combines the ambitions and artistry of both Constance and Henry Fox Talbot.’    

The Fox Talbot Museum explores Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative at Lacock Abbey in 1835, with exhibitions celebrating both historic and contemporary photographic techniques from photographers around the world. Unseen Colour is the first in a three-year programme of exhibitions curated in collaboration with Magnum Photos.

‘We are particularly pleased to show the exhibition at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, the place where the first negative - also on glass – first had a home.’ Marco adds. 

Unseen Colour
 until 31 May 2026.
The Gallery, Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock
See: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/wiltshire/lacock/discover-photography-at-the-fox-talbot-museum#rt-the-fox-talbot-museum-at-lacock

 Images: top: Model with rose for beauty advertisement, Studio Photography, Zurich, Switzerland, 1939 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos; left: Model with rose, colour filtered light, beauty advertisement, Studio Photography, Zurich, Switzerland, 1939 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos

Finebooksmagazine has reported on the first display of a previously unseen photograph of the last lot on the final day at the sale of Charles Dickens' effects in 1870. The photograph by Edward Banes of Brompton, London, shows the auctioneer Franklin Homan selling the last last, a table which he had used as a rostrum during the sale. The lot was purchased by a Mr Ball who had requested the photograph. The taking of the photograph was described in the Photographic News on 19 August 1870. 

The photograph was purchased by the Museum in December 2024 from Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, for £2,800, thanks to funding from The Dickens Fellowship. It is now on display one hundred years after the Charles Dickens Museum opened. 

BPH has also discovered that the photograph The Last Lot at Charles Dickens's Sale was registered by Edward Banes, Brompton, for copyright (See: British Journal of Photography, 26 August 1870, 406, and the registration should be available at the National Archives under COPY1 although does not appear online)

Read the original article here: https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/previouly-unseen-photograph-sale-charles-dickenss-belongings-display

The Dickens Museum is open Wednesday to Sunday from 1000 to 1700 at 48 Doughty Street, London. See: https://dickensmuseum.com/

Thanks to Steven Joseph for the Finebooksmagazine link.

The recently published book  Genève en photographies anciennes (Geneva in old photographs) is both a tribute to Geneva's pioneering photographers and a history of the city's urban development. Through some 200 photographs, most of them previously unpublished, drawn from their rich collection, Viviane and Christophe Blatt document the changing face of the city, from the walled city to the city of wide thoroughfares. The 210 photographs presented here show a face of Geneva that has now almost entirely disappeared. Most have never been published before, and the oldest photo in the book dates from 1850.  At that time, the city had changed very little since the eighteenth century. We can see the Place du Molard, still closed off from the lake, or the Île and its lower streets surrounded by a network of small houses and alleyways. As soon as the fortifications were demolished in 1849, the face of the city began to change: Latin-sailed barges unloaded the stones brought from Meillerie at the port of Eaux-Vives, to be used in the construction of ‘modern’ buildings. On the plateau des Tranchées, the Russian church stands out in the middle of a vast wasteland.

The beautiful preface by prof. Olivier Fatio underlines the contrast between Geneva's long medieval appearance and the dynamism of the Fazist revolution.

Geneva was home to a large number of photographers, pioneers of a nascent art form whose names are rarely known to the general public. These craftsmen were often painters or draughtsmen; there were also chemists, opticians and watchmakers. To succeed in their new profession, they had to have a sound knowledge of mechanics, optics and chemistry. This book is a tribute to our predecessors,’ explain Viviane and Christophe Blatt. Their work was long and complicated at the time, and 150 years on, their photographs still inspire us.

The book includes an introduction by Nicolas Crispini, photographer, photography historian and exhibition curator, who paints a vivid portrait of the history of photography and its great Genevan names. A detailed index also provides at-a-glance details of all the photographs on display: author, location, date, process and dimensions.

About the authors, Viviane and Christophe Blatt : Brought together by a shared passion for photography - they met at the Société Genevoise de Photographie over fifty years ago - Viviane and Christophe Blatt founded their company, Lightmotif, in 1977. Over the years, the photography workshop has been joined by an image bank representing 17 Swiss photographers, an iconography service, and a postcard and book publishing business. Passionate image seekers, their collection totals some 20,000 images, including around 3,000 from Geneva. The collection is marketed through the lightmotif-vintage.com website.

This new exhibition An English Eye, James Ravilious, is currently showing at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, Devon. I've taken two farmer friends to see it in the last month, and they have loved it.

Details here: https://www.thelmahulbert.com/whats-on

It's on until the 28th June.

And if you haven't read James Ravilious - A Life by Robin Ravilious, I can highly recommend it. ISBN 9781908524942 (Hardback).

The book is for sale in the gallery shop.

James Ravilious: An English Eye
10 May 2025 - 28 June 2025
Thelma Hulbert Gallery
Tuesday– Saturday 10am – 5pm
Free Admission

Image: Archie Parkhouse reminising in a wood, Addisford, Dolton, Devon, 1974. Photography by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts-1360x691

I came across some negatives on early Eastman Transparent Film (I can't say anything more about that) which show some kind of sports day at a school or similar institution/organisation. Most of them are fun things like this tug of war (there is also a sack race etc.), rather than serious competition. The images were shot somewhere in the UK, around 1890, probably in the south of England (London, Bath or Bristol being likely options). The children have a distinctive uniform and cap, supervised by a top-hatted gent. There are buildings visible in the background, which may be connected, and one looks like a church/chapel tower. Possibly this is a private or charity school - or maybe an organisation of another kind. This is just a rough snap from curling film, reversed to be positive, but there's a reasonable amount of detail. If anything about this rings any bells or you have a thought about who might know, please do share your thoughts. Thanks!

The Paul Mellon Centre has announced its spring 2025 grants. The Centre received a total of 377 applications across ten awards, with a total of forty-four successful applications. You can view the full list of awards here. A number were given for phootgraphy research and to photography institutions: 

• Caroline Bressey (University College London) for the project Ordinary Lives: Photographic Encounters with Black Victorians (Mid-Career Fellowship)

and the following Event Support Grants: 

• AmberSide Trust to support the symposium Co-Authored Narratives: Socially Engaged Artistic Practices from the North East of England
• Ffotogallery to support the Feminist Library Series
• The Photographers’ Gallery to support the conference Visualising the Histories of Black Britain

The next round of funding opportunities will open for applications on Monday 4 August, closing 30 September 2025. The Autumn 2025 round will include all of the Centre's grants for organisations, as well as Author Grants, Research Support Grants and Andrew Wyld Research Support Grants for individuals.

Canaletto’s Camera explores the ways in which the great Venetian artist Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768) made use of the camera obscura – the forerunner of the photographic camera – as an aid to drawing and painting. It surveys Canaletto’s contacts with contemporary Venetian and Paduan scientists, in particular Francesco Algarotti who wrote on Newton’s philosophy and the camera obscura. Canaletto also relied on many measured drawings of Venetian buildings by his colleague Antonio Visentini, a debt that has not previously been recognised.

Steadman proposes that Canaletto used the camera for two purposes: tracing from real scenes, and copying and collaging drawings and engravings by other artists. By analysing camera sketches made by Canaletto in a notebook, he shows how the artist traced views in Venice and then altered the real scenes in his finished drawings and paintings. By using a reconstructed eighteenth-century design of camera obscura, the author and his colleagues have made drawings of views that Canaletto painted in London. Steadman has recreated both a veduta (a real view) and a capriccio (a fantasy) using Canaletto’s processes of ‘photomontage’. The experiments are detailed in the book, shedding new light on the artist’s procedures, and emphasising how weak and permeable the boundary is between the two types of picture.

Canaletto’s Camera
Philip Steadman
UCL Press, 5 June 2025
https://uclpress.co.uk/book/canalettos-camera/

The renowned American photographer Shane Balkowitsch will be talking about his career as an ambrotypist in Bismarck, North Dakota, and his extraordinary project to create 1000 portraits of Native American people using this 170-year old photographic technique. There will also be an opportunity to view many of Shane's original collodion photographs on glass which have been donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as his publications about the project.

In 2023-4, Shane's work was highlighted in the exhibition Collaborating With The Past at Pitt Rivers Museum.

Talk by Shane Balkowitsch
Tuesday 5 August, 14.00 - 15.30 
Westwood Room, Oxford University Museum of Natural History 
In person, free event. All welcome. No booking required.
See: https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/talk-by-shane-balkowitsch

Shane will also be attending the Wet Plate Collodion Weekend at Guy’s Cliffe House in Warwick, on 8-9 August 2025

In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce successfully captured a view from his window in the French hamlet Le Gras, using physical and chemical means to produce a permanent image. Even though Niépce’s earliest results predate this “Vue de la fenêtre” by several years, and despite the well-known fact that the Frenchman was not the only one who felt a “desire” at that time to embark on such novel forms of image making, the forthcoming year will initiate an extended period of commemorations. Beginning in 2026 and proceeding for almost a decade and a half, we will meet manifold occasions to celebrate the bicentenary of the “invention of photography.”

Such dates, dictated by a somewhat questionable calendar of media history, can easily obscure the true complexity of photography. A remarkably broad spectrum of technologies, materialities, applications, and practices has emerged. The anniversary invites us to consider photography as an ever-evolving concept. Since the beginning of public interest in the medium, there have been widespread discussions on how to “develop” and “improve” such technologies. Thus, the idea of photography has been wedded to discourses that establish and guide our thinking about the future.

Raising the question “What Will Photography Be?”, the third Essen Symposium for Photography in February 2026 aims at newly addressing interest in the medium’s prospective forms and uses. We invite speculations that critically engage with recent developments in the open and much-diversified field of visual media and try to position photography’s future role within such a realm. How will photographic media participate in the dynamics of current technological advancements? Furthermore, how can photography impact and promote such developments with respect to social, artistic, scientific, and everyday practices?

Some decades ago, the advent of digitally processed media stimulated widespread predictions of an “end” or even “death” of photography. In the meantime, such eschatology has proven to be misleading in understanding what photography is and will be. However, current debates on the impact of artificial intelligence, machine vision, and generative technologies revitalize such dire phantasies. In today’s context of ubiquitous imaging technologies—from smartphone cameras to radiology, micro- and telescopes, via satellites, drones, CCTV, and missiles to the perceptual infrastructures of autonomous systems—photography continuously emerges as an operative function of planetary media ecologies. It spans techno-political systems and participates in the reconfiguration of perceptual and epistemic conditions.

Competing perspectives on the future are inevitable, but every prediction ultimately implies a statement about the present. From where we stand now, we can only look ahead—or “speculate” in the word’s literal sense. We invite speculations that overcome ideas of an ending. Instead, we privilege dynamic models for reckoning with visual media’s evolution as complex remediation processes. They can help emphasize how the ecosystem of media has evolved as an ongoing process of recombining, merging, and integrating technologies and practices. How can we apply such an understanding to future forms of photographic media?

We are interested in ideas about photography’s future roles in social, artistic, scientific, and everyday realms. At the same time, we must return to the basic assumption driving such interests: What will we mean when we say “photography”? Will we discuss specific techniques, aesthetics, or practices bound to visual images? Keeping the lessons taught by “operational images” in mind, will we leave the idea of the visual behind us? In short, what will be our point of reference when we address something as “photography”?

We invite critical speculations that refer to three strands of interests:

1. Technologies and Aesthetics

• How will quantum computers change the status of the photographic through new (visually representable) causality?
• How will further nanofication of optical and computational technology extend, undermine, or change modes of perception?
• Nostalgia resurfaces in AI images that revive past aesthetics to legitimize their extractive modes of production. What role will photographic aesthetics play in relation to future image spheres?
• What metaphors do we use to describe current technological transformations, and what functions do they serve aesthetically, conceptually, and economically?

2. Theories and Methods

• What theoretical tools will we need to approach the expanding cosmos of visual media? How can established theories of photography make a meaningful contribution to discussions of novel forms of image-making?
• How will we learn from the ongoing migration of concepts from lens-based to virtual media?
• What will addressing an image as “photographic” mean and imply?
• How will we incorporate the lessons that “operational images” have taught us? Will concepts of the visual still be central to our understanding of photography?
• How will new forms of image production reshape how we conceive, address, and interpret the manifold histories of photography?

3. Politics and Agencies

• What will the impact of future forms of photography be on tomorrow’s societies and politics? When addressing this question, can we escape an exclusively dystopian frame
• What forms of labor will future forms of photography enable?
• Will photography contribute to creating a public sphere where critical discourse is increasingly shaped and controlled by algorithms and corporate interests?
• Will photography serve as a critical tool of political resistance—and how?
• How do we tackle the ambivalent potential between enhanced surveillance and democratic participation?

We welcome proposals from an interdisciplinary field of research. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Please send a title, 500-word abstract of the proposed presentation, and a brief CV. Please email your proposal in one PDF by July 31, 2025, at the latest, to:zentrumfuerfotografie@folkwang-uni.de

The Essen Center for Photography will provide lodging and reimburse the incurred expenses for economy-class travel.

Film Atlas has been released. It is a collaborative project from FIAF and the George Eastman Museum and seeks to provide an international visual guide to every motion picture film format, sound track and colour process - more than 600. As an encyclopedic online resource it pairs pair high resolution imagery with scholarly essays to document the history of film as a physical medium from the dawn of cinema to the present.

Facilitated by collaboration between international archives, this dynamic reference, research and teaching tool offers a comprehensive visual guide to every motion picture film format, soundtrack, 3-D and color process ever invented.

See: https://www.filmatlas.com/

This special issue of PhotoResearcher aims to inspire scholars, curators, and artists to reflect on photography festivals in an academic context and to investigate them as a phenomenon; a particular mode of presentation, circulation, and production of images.

Although photography festivals are not yet an established field of research in the history or theory of photography, readers of PhotoResearcher No. 43 will encounter a combination of international voices positioning festivals in a variety of socio-cultural settings: As engines of collaboration with local museums, as contributors to the visibility of the climate crisis, as engines of artistic production, etc. The inspiration behind this publication stems from the desire to honour the legacy of Belfast Photo Festival, which was founded back in 2009, and to take stock of how it changed the ecosystem which gave rise to it. Also, this collaborative publication expands BPF’s experiences through the journal’s authors and their unique perspectives in order to learn from them and to keep this unique form of experiencing photography alive and thriving.

PhotoResearcher No. 43
"Photography & Festivals: 15 Years Belfast Photo Festival"
Guest-editor: Michael Weir, CEO Belfast Photo Festival
Editor-in-chief: Dr. Hanin Hannouch, President of the European Society for the History of Photography 
Graphic Design: Bernhard Schorner
Image Editing: Robert Vanis

The journal’s editorial is open-access and can be downloaded here.

To order this special issue of PhotoResearcher: 
UK Residents order here or you can also visit Belfast Photo Festival's Photobook library in Botanic Gardens, Belfast from 5-30th June to buy a copy.
EU + Rest of the World Residents order here

Hannah Crowdy
New Resonances in Museum Collections: The Ulster Museum and Belfast Photo Festival

Vivienne Gamble
Vital Exchanges and Encounters: Photography Festivals and the City

Michael Weir in Conversation with Pål Otnes
Elective Affinities

Mafalda Ruão & Krzysztof Candrowicz
A Photography Festival Cosmology: On Social and Environmental Responsibility and Visual Activism

Toby Smith
Festivals as Climate Protest: An Opportunity?

Tom Seymour
The Future of Photography Festivals: A British-Irish Perspective

Founder Michael Weir in Conversation with Sebah Chaudhry
Looking Forward and Looking Back: 15 Years of Belfast Photo Festival

Louise Fedotov-Clements
Afterword

The Hong Kong History Centre's Historical Photographs of Hong Kong project is conducting a survey of potential interest and users.  As part of this we would be really interested to know what types of photographs you would look for if you had the possibility to look for old photographs of Hong Kong (buildings, streets etc), this will really help us to design something that has the right search tools. 

We sincerely invite you to fill out this survey form. Make your answers as specific and detailed as you like, but please don't include any sensitive or personal information. We may use AI (e.g. ChatGPT) to process the responses so they could be shared with a third party. Thanks.

Hong Kong History Centre

香港史研究中心正在籌辦一個名為「香港歷史照片」的數碼平台項目。為此，如您有可能尋找香港舊照片（建築物、街道等），我們非常希望了解您會尋找哪些類型的照片，這將有助我們設計出合適的搜索工具。

我們誠邀你協助填寫此問卷。請盡可能具體和詳細填寫您的答案，但請勿包含任何敏感或個人信息，因我們可能會使用人工智慧（例如ChatGPT）來處理回應，有機會倏將這些回應與第三方分享。謝謝。

香港史研究中心

In addition to the survey, details of Centre's call for photographs are here: https://www.hkhistory.net/hphk-call/

Bonhams has an exceptional album of early photography mainly taken by Dudley Charles Fitzgerald de Ros and Alfred Suzanne. The 244 photographs date to the early 1860s and show the family and social circles of de Ros and include the royal family at Windsor where de Ros was an equerry to Prince Albert and then Queen Victoria.It is estimated at £15,000-20,000. The album was discovered recently by the vendor is a small provincial auction house.

The lot lots notes state: 

An exceptional album, newly discovered, of early 1860s photographs taken by or relating to the family and social circle of Dudley Charles Fitzgerald de Ros, 24th Baron de Ros, and including many by Alfred Suzanne, the chef of Fitzgerald de Ros' father-in-law Thomas Grosvenor Egerton, 2nd Earl of Wilton. The album sheds new light on these two photographers, both members of the Amateur Photographic Society, and the use of photography in the recording of English society life.

THE MAIN PHOTOGRAPHERS:

Dudley Charles Fitzgerald de Ros, 24th Baron de Ros (1827-1907), son of William FitzGerald de Ros and Lady Georgiana Lennox, was an army officer (who in 1859 was appointed Major in the 1st Regiment of the Life Guards), and Royal courtier serving as equerry to Prince Albert from 1853 to 1861, and subsequently to Queen Victoria, from 1861 to 1874. He was also a noted amateur photographer, elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1857, and the Amateur Photographic Association of which he was elected Vice President in 1862. The Royal Collection Trust owns a fine series of photographs (mostly of members of the Royal family, including Albert and Victoria) taken by Fitzgerald de Ros in 1858-1859, and also a portrait of him taken by Camille Silvy in about 1860. In 1853 he married Lady Elizabeth Egerton, daughter of Thomas Grosvenor Egerton, 2nd Earl of Wilton (1799-1882), whose children Arthur (1833–1885), Katherine (1835–1920), and Alice (1842–1925) all feature in the album, as do his son-in-law, the celebrated cricketer Henry des Voeux, and other family members and friends.

There are 65 photographs attributed to Fitzgerald de Ros, who is identifiable in several of Suzanne's "genre" photographs - see below, and in two cases with photographic equipment, once with camera and stand identified as "Our Artist", and once holding a camera lens. His subjects include 2 views of the chapel at Windsor Castle; the boathouse and dock at Strangford Lough, County Down in Ireland where the Fitzgerald de Ros family had an estate; several regimental and family groups (some with horse and carriage), a good cricket group, and many portrait roundels.

Alfred Suzanne, born in 1829, entered into the service of the Earl of Wilton in the mid-1850s serving as his cook (or "chef de cuisine") until the Earl's death in 1882. As well as ministering "to the delights of the table at his lordship's generous board", Suzanne also "was a musician and an artist, whilst his work as an amateur photographer is worthy of the most unqualified praise. He has indeed gained something like notoriety in this department... It was Suzanne who took the portrait of Fred Archer in his hunting-dress, upon the occasion of the visit of the celebrated jockey to Melton Mowbray, where the Wilton family have their seat" (Charles H. Senn, Practical Gastronomy and Culinary Dictionary, 1892, pp.500-501). Like Fitzgerald de Ros he was a member of the Amateur Photographic Association, exhibiting with them from at least 1862 to 1868, and is also known to have practised in some commercial capacity as a photographer, as carte-de-visite portraits with his name "Suzanne" and location "Melton Mowbray" are known (see V. & A. Museum, website).

There are approximately 105 photographs attributable to Suzanne (including 6 signed in the negative, 2 of which are of the Egerton family home Heaton Hall, Lancashire), in addition to approximately 30 photographs of artworks by him (these signed "S" in pencil). The Suzanne images include fine larger photographs of "genre" (or "living tableaux") images in which Fitzgerald de Ros, his sisters, family and staff are identifiable as "actors". These include women fencing (2), a gypsy encampment (featuring Fitzgerald de Ros with a fiddle), a magician's show (with Fitzgerald de Ros as the magician in front of a table of tricks), a drowned man pulled from the river by two women, apple pickers (2, featuring Fitzgerald de Ros on a ladder, and three female relatives), a travelling medicine man/salesman (Fitzgerald de Ros, standing on a cart surrounded by an audience), boys playing dominoes, and three women gardening.

Other notable images include "The Servants" (playing draughts), "The Grooms" (with carriage and horses), Grey and his sisters with a caged parrot, Earl Wilton and family with dog seated on cobbled pavement, two maids (one writing), an elaborate still life with game and fruit arranged on an outdoor table, landscape with a wooden footbridge over a river, views of Melton (3, including a fine image of a cricket match on the green in front of the church), family or friend groups with some against a cloth backdrop, large portrait of Earl Wilton seated, and his son Arthur standing with top hat and umbrella. Other notable sitters, who recur in groups or as portraits include members of the Craven family (Lady Elizabeth Charlotte Craven having married Arthur Egerton, 3rd Earl of Wilton, in 1858 - includes an unusual close-cropped image of William Craven, Cecil Boothby and Grey all smiling), and the noted cricketer Henry des Voeux (who was married to Earl of Wilton's daughter Alice, including his portrait, but also seated in a good group image against an outdoor cloth backdrop.

OTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS INCLUDE:

H. Lennox (possibly Lord Henry Lennox, elected a member of the Photographic Society of London, or a Lennox related to Fitzgerald de Ros' mother Georgina Lennox, 20 images, mostly portraits taken outside, one sitter identified as Viscount Grey de Wilton, another the Duke of Manchester); O. Forester (6 images, including a view of Melton Mowbray), Sir George Wombwell (1 image, a parrot in a cage placed on a table beside a dog on a chair), André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (2 small portraits), G. Vivian (1, portrait), Caldesi (probably Leonida Caldesi who was employed by Prince Albert as a photographer in the late 1850s, coinciding with the period Fitzgerald de Ros also took photos of the Royal family, images of both men now held by the Royal Collection Trust, 2 images, a woman on a horse with studio backdrop), Lake (1 image, portrait of a man, possibly Fitzgerald de Ros, holding a camera lens), Heber (1 image, group portrait of 3 young women identified as "Miss Coventrys", one possibly the "Miss Coventry" photographed by Camille Silvy, see NPG website), Tutor (4, portraits).

Fine Books, Maps & Manuscripts
Bonhams, London
Online, ending 19 June 2025
lot 80. See the full lot description here

The only known photographs of Ada Lovelace - two daguerreotypes by Antoine Claudet and a third by an unknown photographer - the three were previous exhibited at the Bodleian Library in 2015. The two daguerreotypes date to c.1843. Lovelace (18145-1852) is considered a pioneer of computing. They passed through the family to the present owner G M Bond. The lot is estimated at £80,000-100,000. 

The lot following (lot 82) comprises two portraits of Lovelace's children and a female member of the Lovelace/Byron family by Kilburn and a Beard patentee. 

Fine Books, Maps & Manuscripts
Bonhams, London
Online, ending 19 June 2025
lot 81. See: https://www.bonhams.com/auction/30730/lot/81/lovelace-ada-the-only-known-photographs-of-ada-lovelace-3/

Read the Bodleian description here