Blogs

Join the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy at 1.30 p.m. BST (GMT+1) at the Church of St. Mary-le-Strand on Saturday June 21st for a special 3-D talk by photo historian Denis Pellerin. Just a few steps away from King’s College, London, where Charles Wheatstone was professor of experimental philosophy from 1834 to his death, discover the wonders of one of Wheatstone’s most ingenious inventions, the Stereoscope, on a large screen and in glorious 3-D.

Wheatstone presented his device to the Royal Society of London on 21 June 1838, which is why the date was chosen as International Stereoscopy Day. As it also happens to be World Music Day and since Wheatstone was also a musical instrument maker and an inventor of musical instruments, why not come and celebrate with us Charles Wheatstone, Music and Stereoscopy with Victorian – and more recent – images, most of which from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy.

The Victorians were very fond of music (bear in mind there were no radios, televisions, record players or smartphones then to enjoy your favourite tunes) and it transpires in the number of stereoscopic images featuring street performers, home concerts and large orchestras.

If you're looking for somewhere 'cool' to hang out tomorrow, please join us. Entrance is FREE and registration can be found here: https://stereoscopyday.wordpress.com/musicmusiciansinperson/

If you miss registration and still want to join us in London, please come to the church and say you're from the British Photographic History Blog, or ask for Rebecca.

If you're unable to join us in London, a similar talk will also take place online later the same day, starting at 6.30pm BST. Please see here for details and registration.

Great image caption/keywording detail in this collection! above shows: Romy Schneider and Harry Meyen strolling along Straße des 17. Juni in Berlin-Tiergarten, in front of the Victory Column and toward the Brandenburg Gate, in late April 1965. Both are elegantly dressed, Schneider wearing a coat and gloves, Meyen a suit and sunglasses. Schneider laughs heartily as they walk side by side across the sidewalk.

Just posting this from my daily photo licensing industry news site Photo Archive News for interest to researchers: 

German based photo library United Archives has acquired the Sven Simon Photo Archive which includes many unseen photographs of the Federal Republic era – commonly known as West Germany from 1949 to 1990.

Photographer Axel Springer Jr., better known as Sven Simon, was the most significant photographer of the Federal Republic of Germany and left behind an extraordinary photographic legacy despite his early death – one that captures the history of West Germany as vividly as few others.

United Archives is now making images accessible that have so far received little public attention: both iconic and previously unknown motifs, intimate insights into the lives of celebrities, quiet observations of historic events—a multifaceted and ambivalent view of the Federal Republic.

Details and link to images here on PAN

I absolutely adore these Peter Mitchell 1970s colour photographs made from Hasselblad two and a quarter square negatives. There is something so …. well, British about them.

The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.

The people, growing up during the Second World War the privations of which lasted well into the 1950s, now during a period of change in the 1970s standing behind the fish ‘n chip counter wondering where their lives had gone and how they had got there, but still with that British sense of spirit and grit.

Peter Mitchell, “a chaser of a disappearing world” pictures these “goners” – buildings, people (and a way of life) near the end of existence soon to be demolished – in an almost painterly manner.

His use of colour, perspective and form is very fine. Witness, the flow of the photograph ‘Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977’ (below) as, in the shot, the camera allows the eye to pan from one vanishing point at left to the other at right, with the patchwork of colours and panels of the building creating an almost Mondrian-like texture – blue to black to beige to white sign to pale blue to yellow to green to pale green, surmounted by the dark blue of the threatening sky highlighting the jagged form of the building. Superb.

My favourite photograph in the posting is The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978 (below). This photograph is from what I believe to be Mitchell’s strongest body of work on the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds. ‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’ (Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website)

A drab, beige, wallpapered room with double aspect window, an art deco chair with mirror reflecting nothing, an electrical socket, a ceiling light sprouting malignant plant and trapped in the window panes, little birds fluttering against their capture, trapped forever inside an abandoned flat, this abandoned life.

Yes, there’s a sense of nostalgia and melancholy in these photographs but their restrained, formal, representation of life does much to ennoble the people and buildings contained within them which, through osmosis, ennobles the mind of the viewer.

As I myself sense the great clock in the heavens signalling my life span, the pleasure and comfort I get from feeling the spirit of Peter Mitchell’s photographs is immeasurable.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 Main Image: 

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

SEE THE FULL POSTING AT https://artblart.com/2025/06/13/exhibition-peter-mitchell-nothing-lasts-forever-at-the-photographers-gallery-london/

The programme and registration for this student-led conference is now open. Photographs are mobile and malleable. They travel between people and places, change appearance and form, and traverse through different settings and environments. In image-led societies, photographs are often disrupted or removed from their original contexts to be repurposed by governments, institutions and researchers, as well as by artists, communities, campaigners, and many others.  How, and to what ends, are these photographs being repurposed, and by whom? How does repurposing photographic materials impact social, cultural, and political phenomena? This conference aims to facilitate discussions on the reuse, recirculation, and transformation of photographs, and explore the ways in which they have been re-employed in both the contemporary and historical contexts. 

‘Repurposing Photographic Materials’ is a student-led hybrid conference on photography and visual culture, funded by Midlands4Cities through the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It provides a platform for speakers and audience members to share their ideas, receive constructive feedback, and establish valuable networks. The event is open to anyone interested in the conference’s research topics, including students, academics, artists, and practitioners. Updates will be posted to the website and to the social media pages.

The programme: 

Day 1: Monday 7th July 2025

Panel 1: Repurposing Historical Photographic Practices and Processes (Chair: Jo Gane)

09:30 - 09:35 Panel 1 Opening (Jo Gane)
09:35 - 09:50 Jo Gane (Birmingham City University) Repurposing historical photographic processes: Re-creation
09:50 - 10:05 Martin Jürgens (De Montfort University) Repurposing in the 1840s? The case of multiplying the unique daguerreotype
10:05 - 10:20 Aindreas Scholz (Technical University Dublin) Reactivating Cyanotype: Repurposing 19th-Century Photographic Practices for Ecological Resistance
10:20 - 10:50 Panel 1 Q&A
10:50 - 11:05 Break

Panel 2: Photographic Interventions in Political Struggles and Transformations (Chair: Javed Sultan)

11:05 - 11:10 Panel 2 Opening (Javed Sultan)
11:10 - 11:25 V. Emmanuel Leon Bobadilla (University of Oxford) The affordances of photographic annotations: thinking through 'The Class' by Marcelo Brodsky
11:25 - 11:40 Emma Colombi (University for Foreigners of Perugia) Recovering the Past. The Contemporary Reuse and Re-signification of Italy’s 1968–1977 Protest Photography
11:40 - 11:55 Vincent Hasselbach (University College London) আওয়াজ উডা – কথা ক/ awaaz utha – kotha ko: potential histories and anticipated futures in the visual and material cultures of the 2024 monsoon revolution
11:55 - 12:10 Kateryna Volochniuk (University of St Andrews) Operational Images and Industrial Discipline: The Case of Soviet Photo-Accusations
12:10 - 12:40 Panel 2 Q&A

Panel 3: Reimagining Archival Photography in Contemporary Practice (Chair: Emma Hyde)

13:40 - 13:45 Panel 3 Opening (Emma Hyde)
13:45 - 14:00 Kamal Badhey (University of Brighton) Building Regional and Transnational Contexts with the Family Albums of the Apna Heritage Archive
14:00 - 14:15 Emma Hyde (De Montfort University) Digitisation as Repurposing: Photographs in the Age of a “Digital Revolution”
14:15 - 14:30 Daniel Rathbone (University of Warwick) Remembering Places: The People’s Parks Archive Project and Photographic Histories in South Africa
14:30 - 15:00 Panel 3 Q&A

Day 2: Tuesday 8th July 2025

Panel 4: Participatory Photography and Constructing Identity (Chair: Victoria Shaw)

09:30 - 09:35 Panel 4 Opening (Victoria Shaw)
09:35 - 09:50 Huw Alden Davies (University of West England Bristol) Collective Identity Through Community Portraiture
09:50 - 10:05 Molly Caenwyn Warren (University of Westminster) Repurposing the (Queer) Home in the (Home) Darkroom
10:05 - 10:20 Philip Waterworth (Sheffield Hallam University) The disabled flaneur: Using a method of collage to map and negotiate disability and assemble memories of place
10:20 - 10:50 Panel 4 Q&A
10:50 - 11:05 Break

Panel 5: Photographic Transformations in Social and Cultural Heritage (Chair: Daniel Rathbone)

11:05 - 11:10 Panel 5 Opening (Daniel Rathbone)
11:10 - 11:25 Madeleine Bonham Jones (Birkbeck, University of London) The Golden Age of the Ocean Liner: Postcards of RMS Aquitania and the Corporate Image
11:25 - 11:40 Devon McCulloch (University of Brighton) Alien Registration: The Passport Photo, Bureaucratic Procedures Past and Present
11:40 - 11:55 Alfisha Sabri (University of Warwick) Framing Imperial Fantasies: A Historical Study of Mussoorie’s Photographs and their Nostalgic Present
11:55 - 12:10 So Yin Tam (University of Oxford) Co-authorship in Focus: Contractual Metafiction in Conceptual Photography, 1970s–1980s
12:10 - 12:40 Panel 5 Q&A
12:40 - 13:40 Lunch

Panel 6: Photographic Representations and Re-presentations of Community Memories (Chair: Caroline Fucci)

13:40 - 13:45 Panel 6 Opening (Caroline Fucci)
13:45 - 14:00 Caroline Fucci (University of Leicester) Looking at the Big Picture: Archive, Narrative, and History in Biennial Exhibitions
14:00 - 14:15 Isabel Collazos Gottret (University of Leicester) Repurposing from within, weaving logic and purpose into the Artecampo Museum Archive
14:15 - 14:30 Emily Patten (University for the Creative Arts) A Lesbian Narrative: The Impact of Dissemination Methods on Tessa Boffin’s Photographic Tableau, The Knight’s Move (1990)
14:30 - 15:00 Panel 6 Q&A

Closing
15:00 - 15:05 Closing talk (Javed Sultan)

Repurposing Photographic Materials
Hybrid, 7-8 July 2025
Regisration is free
Leicester, De Montfort University
Full programme and abstracts here: https://studentphotocon2025.wordpress.com/

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. 

He received the Royal Photographic Society's Hood medal 'for a body of photographic work produced to promote or raise awareness of an aspect of public benefit or service.' in 2016. 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