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well I did my bit in Brisbane in 1989 to celebrate photography... and only had a dozen people show up at the studio. Sandy Barrie
Barry Lategan who has died after a long illness aged 89 years was one of Britain’s leading fashion, portrait and advertising photographers from the 1960s to the 2000s. He was best known for his portrait of Twiggy, for his Vogue covers, and his advertising work. Many of his photographs are immediately recognisable. He was awarded an RPS Honorary Fellowship in 2007.
Lategan was born in South Africa and came to Britain in 1955 to study at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. National service with the RAF intervened and it was during a tour in Germany that he joined the camp photographic society and photography took over his life. Lategan retuned to South Africa in 1959 and assisted Ginger Odes.
He returned to London in 1961, working in some of the leading studios, and photographing fashion. In 1966 he was introduced to Twiggy, then 16 years old, and created what became the face of the 60s. This helped propel Lategan’s career and he had his first Vogue cover in 1968 of a fur-clad Lesley Jones. He worked regularly for Vogue until 1981. He set up his own studio in 1967 in Chelsea. His photography was included in Bailey and Litchfield’s Ritz magazine, and he was the subject of a BBC2 Arena programme broadcast in 1975.
In 1977 he moved to New York to focus on commercial and advertising work, including directing television commercials, and personal projects.
On his return to London in 1989 he continued with his advertising work and TV commercials for companies such as Jaeger, Pirelli, Vodafone and Gordons, winning numerous awards in both mediums. During his career he photographed many well-known models, celebrities from fashion, film and music, and royalty.
In 2006 Lategan suffered a serious fall which caused a serious brain injury and affected his behaviour. He was diagnosed in 2016 with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) which he and his family discussed publicly to raise awareness of the condition.
Lategan was involved with AFAEP, now the Association of Photographers, and helped select the inaugural AFAEP Awards in 1984. He held his first exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 1975, and was widely exhibited during his career (including by the RPS). Along with many of his contemporaries he enjoyed a long association with Olympus Cameras.
His work is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and V&A Museum, London, and elsewhere.
The Barry Lategan Archive is now being managed by his son, Dylan.
Text: © Michael Pritchard
Image: Barry Lategan, c1950s. © Estate of Barry Lategan / Barry Lategan Archive
Featured in the Pre-Raphaelite Society Review, Summer 2024 issue is my research into a photograph of Jane Morris by Herbert Watkins I rediscovered in the St Bride Library. It was mistaken for another, well known version. Together with another renctly digitised version these three different versions are now published together for the first time. They are from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the William Morris Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery.The museums involved mention different dates (1858- 1860) and I have joined this community hoping to learn more about the details of this photography session (and any other photograph made of Jane Burden Morris).
Perhaps a long shot, but I’m trying to identify a North Yorkshire photographer who just put his initials on his postcards.
I recently purchased a couple of cards, with similar initials, one was of the Farndale Show, postally used from Kirkbymoorside in August 1910,. The other, seen here, I have now identified as having been taken outside St. Mary's Church, Church Houses, Farndale East; it looks like they are waiting for Godot!
I’ve also seen examples with the same initials on the Helmsby Archive, in their “Around and about” photo album, one of Farndale Band (HA09448) and one of Lastingham Church (HA09358). However, they don’t know the parochial photographers identity.
Any assistance in identifying the photographer would be gratefully received.
The Photographic Collections Network has issued the following notice... We regret to announce that after many years of sharing best practice and celebrating photo collections and photo archives across the UK, the Photographic Collections Network will close on 19 August 2024.
Photographic Collections Network (PCN) has worked significantly in the sector with many amazing people and photographic collections, supported by the PCN Steering Group and our network. We’ve advised on collections placement, copyright, orphaned works, collections care, digitisation, preservation and so much more. We are proud of our extensive events programme of talks, workshops, advice sessions and collection visits that engaged people across the sector.
Please continue to refer to our website for resources such as other organisations who provide help and support to the sector: https://www.photocollections.org.uk/advice
From the PCN Manager Debbie Cooper and the wider PCN Steering Group, we would like to thank everyone who has supported us over the years.
Current PCN Steering Group
- Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum
- Geoff Belknap, Keeper of Science and Technology, National Museums Scotland
- Brigitte Lardinois, Reader in the Understanding of Public Photography, London College of Communication, University of the Arts in London
- Leanne Manfredi, National Programmes Lead, Victoria and Albert Museum
- Michael Pritchard, Photo Historian, formerly Royal Photographic Society
- Tamsin Silvey, Cultural Programme Curator, Historic England
------------------------
The Network was launched in 2016. See: https://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-photographic-collections-network
My Pressphotoman blog has recently published a series of posts about celebrated photographers, who learned and/or refined their craft with W. & D. Downey of South Shields, Newcastle on Tyne and London.
The featured photographers are Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn (1847-1908); John Edwards (1813-1898), Downey's principal photographer in the 1860s/70s; James Herriott (1846-1931); and Richard Emerson Ruddock (1863-1931).
Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn (1847-1908)
Richard Emerson Ruddock (1863-1931)
If any British Photographic History subscribers have additional information or images that they wish to add to this resource, please use the 'comments box' at the foot of each post.
Two pioneering photographers will be commemorated with blue plaques by English Heritage today, Thursday, 8 August 2024. The first will mark the Fulham home of Christina Broom, believed to have been Britain’s first female press photographer, while in Brixton, the second plaque will honour John Thomson, a ground-breaking photojournalist working at the advent of the medium.
English Heritage Historian, Rebecca Preston, said: “These two very different photographers were both pioneers in their own right, both working at the forefront of photography at a time when it was not the accessible medium that it is now. I am delighted to celebrate them today, each at an address associated with the very pinnacles of their respective careers.”
Despite only making her first experiments in photography at the age of 40, with a borrowed quarter-plate box camera, Christina Broom went on to become the most prolific female publisher of picture postcards in Britain. She was a prominent photographer of the suffrage movement; the only woman photographer allowed into London barracks; and the only photographer permitted regularly into the Royal Mews. Her plaque at 92 Munster Road – a terraced house of 1896 – will be the very first blue plaque in Fulham, where she lived and worked for 26 years. From this house, without a public-facing studio or shop, Mrs Broom and her daughter Winifred ran her photographic business. At their busiest, mother and daughter produced 1,000 postcards per day. When she was interviewed in her drawing room in 1937, the reporter from Westminster and Chelsea News was ‘confronted with hundreds of prints from a selection of some of the thousands of negatives – many of them irreplaceable – that are stored elsewhere in the house’. Broom died at number 92 in 1939 and her daughter remained there until she died in 1973.
John Thomson was a leading photographer, geographer, travel writer and explorer. His seminal work, Illustrations of China and its People (1873–4), charted his travels through more than 4,000 miles from Hong Kong to the Yangtze-Kiang, via Canton and the Great Wall, creating a far broader panorama of Eastern culture than had ever been seen in the West. With the permission of King Mongkut of Siam, he took the first-known photographs of the ruins of Angkor Wat in 1866 and the reproduction of his photographs, particularly the innovative combination of text and image, was a landmark in the history of illustrated books. Thomson and his family moved to what is now 15 Effra Road in Brixton in the 1870s. It was while living in this terraced house of 1875–6 – formerly known as 12 Elgin Gardens – that Thomson published one of his best-known and influential works, Street Life in London (1877–8). With its cast of street characters, such as Covent Garden flower sellers, Italian musicians and ‘Hookey Alf of Whitechapel’, Street Life has been reprinted many times since. Thomson was convinced that photography was ‘absolutely trustworthy’ in its ability to convey accuracy and truth. ‘We are now making history’, he wrote in 1891, ‘and the sun picture supplies the means of passing down a record of what we are, and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century of our progress’.
Other photographers commemorated by the Blue Plaques Scheme include Bill Brandt, Lee Miller, Camille Silvy and Cecil Beaton.
The English Heritage London Blue Plaques scheme is generously supported by David Pearl and members of the public. The London-wide blue plaques scheme has been running for 150 years. The idea of erecting ‘memorial tablets’ was first proposed by William Ewart MP in the House of Commons in 1863. It had an immediate impact on the public imagination, and in 1866 the (Royal) Society of Arts founded an official plaques scheme. The Society erected its first plaque – to poet, Lord Byron – in 1867. The blue plaques scheme was subsequently administered by the London County Council (1901–65) and by the Greater London Council (1965–86), before being taken on by English Heritage in 1986. www.english-heritage.org.uk/discover/blue-plaques/
See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz9wpy787y1o
Main image: (l-r) Jamie Carstairs, David, Caroline and Jessica Thomas (Thomson descendents) and Betty Yao below the blue plaque for John Thomson. © Michael Pritchard
Hello - is anyone able to identify the studio name on this portrait please?
This autumn, Tate Britain will present The 80s: Photographing Britain, a landmark survey which will consider the decade as a pivotal moment for the medium of photography. Bringing together nearly 350 images and archive materials from the period, the exhibition will explore how photographers used the camera to respond to the seismic social, political, and economic shifts around them. Through their lenses, the show will consider how the medium became a tool for social representation, cultural celebration and artistic expression throughout this significant and highly creative period for photography.
This exhibition will be the largest to survey photography’s development in the UK in the 1980s to date. Featuring over 70 lens-based artists and collectives, it will spotlight a generation who engaged with new ideas of photographic practice, from well-known names to those whose work is increasingly being recognised, including Maud Sulter, Mumtaz Karimjee and Mitra Tabrizian. It will feature images taken across the UK, from John Davies’ post-industrial Welsh landscape to Tish Murtha’s portraits of youth unemployment in Newcastle. Important developments will be explored, from technical advancements in colour photography to the impact of cultural theory by scholars like Stuart Hall and Victor Burgin, and influential publications like Ten.8 and Camerawork in which new debates about photography emerged.
The 80s will introduce Thatcher’s Britain through documentary photography illustrating some of the tumultuous political events of the decade. History will be brought to life with powerful images of the miners’ strikes by John Harris and Brenda Prince; anti-racism demonstrations by Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor; images of Greenham Common by Format Photographers and projects responding to the conflict in Northern Ireland by Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright. Photography recording a changing Britain and its widening disparities will also be presented through Anna Fox’s images of corporate excess, Paul Graham’s observations of social security offices, and Martin Parr’s absurdist depictions of Middle England, displayed alongside Markéta Luskačová and Don McCullin’s portraits of London’s disappearing East End and Chris Killip’s transient ‘sea-coalers’ in Northumberland.
A series of thematic displays will explore how photography became a compelling tool for representation. For Roy Mehta and Vanley Burke, who portray their multicultural communities, photography offers a voice to the people around them, whilst John Reardon, Derek Bishton and Brian Homer’s Handsworth Self Portrait Project 1979, gives a community a joyous space to express themselves. Many Black and South Asian photographers use portraiture to overcome marginalisation against a backdrop of discrimination. The exhibition will spotlight lens-based artists including Roshini Kempadoo, Sutapa Biswas and Al-An deSouza who experiment with images to think about diasporic identities, and the likes of Joy Gregory and Maxine Walker who employ self-portraiture to celebrate ideas of Black beauty and femininity.
Against the backdrop of Section 28 and the AIDS epidemic, photographers also employ the camera to assert the presence and visibility of the LGBTQ+ community. Tessa Boffin subversively reimagines literary characters as lesbians, whilst Sunil Gupta’s ‘Pretended’ Family Relationships 1988, juxtaposes portraits of queer couples with the legislative wording of Section 28. For some, their work reclaims sex-positivity during a period of fear. The exhibition will spotlight photographers Ajamu X, Lyle Ashton Harris and Rotimi Fani-Kayode who each centre Black queer experiences and contest stereotypes through powerful nude studies and intimate portraits. It will also reveal how photographers from outside the queer community including Grace Lau were invited to portray them. Known for documenting fetishist sub-cultures, Lau’s series Him and Her at Home 1986 and Series Interiors 1986, tenderly records this underground community defiantly continuing to exist.
The exhibition will close with a series of works that celebrate countercultural movements throughout the 80s, such as Ingrid Pollard and Franklyn Rodgers’s energetic documentation of underground performances and club culture. The show will spotlight the emergence of i-D magazine and its impact on a new generation of photographers like Wolfgang Tillmans and Jason Evans, who with stylist Simon Foxton pioneer a cutting-edge style of fashion photography inspired by this alternative and exciting wave of youth culture, reflective of a new vision of Britain at the dawn of the 1990s
The 80s: Photographing Britain
21 November 2024 – 5 May 2025
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
Open daily 10.00–18.00
Tickets available at tate.org.uk and +44(0)20 7887 8888
In celebration of International Women’s Day, 8 March, 2025, we invite scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts to submit abstracts for participation in a free, online, global, 24-hour symposium dedicated to celebrating the contributions of women to the medium of photography from photography's announcement in 1839 to contemporary artists in 2024. This unique event aims to highlight the diverse and impactful work of women photographers, and those working with photography, across all cultures and time zones.
We seek 15-minute papers that explore a broad range of topics related to women’s contributions to photography. These may include but are not limited to:
- Historical and contemporary profiles of influential and underappreciated women photographers.
- The impact of gender on photographic practice and representation.
- The role of women in shaping the photographic medium or its exhibition.
- Cross-cultural perspectives on women’s contributions to photography.
- Challenges and achievements of women photographers in various global contexts.
Our goal is to foster a rich, international dialogue that underscores the significant yet often overlooked achievements of women in the field. Presentations will be scheduled to accommodate various time zones, ensuring a truly global exchange of ideas.
To participate:
Please submit a 300-word abstract outlining your proposed paper by 1 October 2024. Abstracts should be submitted to celebratingwomeninphotography@gmail.com. Please also include your name, affiliation, time zone of anticipated residence on International Women’s Day, and a brief (100-word) biography. Selected papers will be notified by 1 November 2024, and detailed guidelines for presentations will be provided.
We encourage contributions from diverse perspectives and regions to create a comprehensive and inclusive representation of women in photography.
Join us in celebrating the vibrant and transformative work of women photographers worldwide!
Women of Photography: A 24-Hour Conference-a-thon Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025
Convenors: Kris Belden-Adams, PhD, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Mississippi and Dr Rose Teanby, Independent Scholar, UK
Call for papers - close 1 October 2024
Notification of acceptance - 1 November 2024
Conference-a-thon - 8 March 2025
Website coming shortly
Sefton Samuels who has died aged 93 years was a documentary photographer and photojournalist who documented the city of Manchester from the 1960s. Samuels' work is held in the National Portrait Gallery and V&A Museum collections. Some of his Manchester work was gathered in his book Northerners (2011)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefton_Samuels and https://www.seftonphoto.co.uk/
Obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/aug/08/sefton-samuels-obituary
A launch event of the AHRC Research Network, The Ethics of Medical Photography: Past, Present and Future, has just been announced. The first in a series of online seminars brings together Beatriz Pichel (De Montfort University, project PI), Katherine Rawling (University of Leeds, project Co-I), Toni Hardy (Wellcome Collection) and Andreas Pantazatos (University of Cambridge) to introduce the network and its aims, as well as discuss some of the main ethical dilemmas that historians, heritage specialists and collections managers are facing in relation to medical photography.
About the Network:
This multidisciplinary network brings together historians, ethicists, archivists, heritage scholars, artists, photographers, social scientists, and the public to generate theoretical and practical resources to research, curate, and disseminate historical medical photographs in an ethical way. To balance the ethical needs of heritage institutions, researchers and the public, this network will move beyond the looking/ not looking dilemma [Moeller, 2009] to ask:
- how does our understanding of the ethics of medical photography, and of medical photography itself, change when we focus on race, disability, gender, class and age rather than consent, privacy and anonymity?
- how can we widen access to early medical photographs while respecting the dignity of both historical subjects and present viewers?
For any questions about the seminar please contact empnetwork24@gmail.com
You can join the Network mailing list here
The Developing Room, a photography working group at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis, in collaboration with the Essen Center for Photography (Essen Germany) announces the DR’s ninth graduate colloquium. The future once buzzed with the excitement of potential, or at least the idea of destiny once did. Today, however, the prospects of what is to come rattle with doom in a way that modernist Henri Bergson may not have anticipated given his words of charm and hope. Climate change, brutal wars and reactionary politics gather pace in what strikes many today as a doom spiral into the future. Photography has not been spared these imaginings as digital imaging technologies from thirty-five years ago and now artificial intelligence seemingly foretell the medium’s death. Or is this too pessimistic a forecast?
In the past two centuries, photography was characterized by an endless series of radiant futures that the technology afforded over its lesser imaging procedures. Daguerre and Talbot gushed that chateaus and manor homes could now depict themselves, while François Arago imagined the mass recording of Egyptian hieroglyphs with this new, far more accurate artificial eye. The charm of the future ultimately served as photography’s historical locomotive, even when many visions for the technology (imaging spirits) never came to pass, or only did so many decades after being dreamed (color photography).
In turn, photography became not only part of cultural modernity, but also one of its driving forces forward. Thinking and writing about the medium has therefore always meant looking at what it will bring, as well as the historical significance of such innovations, making for a simultaneous futurity and historiography. Almost exactly a century ago, for example, László Moholy-Nagy asked a question that has not lost any of its relevance since: Where is photography developing?
With his query, the famous Bauhaus master addressed not only novel technological developments, but a whole spectrum of possible futures dealing with aesthetics, displays, usages, and social functions, each of which unfolded in direct relation to photography’s past. Do today’s innovations in photography offer the same charmed future, and can historical precedents help foretell their destiny?
With photography’s closely linked futures and pasts as a frame, the Developing Room and the Essen Center for Photography invite presenters to reflect on the complex temporal positions of photography. We wish to discuss the medium’s past and present in order to establish a more reasoned basis for thinking about possible futures.
The graduate student colloquium therefore welcomes papers that investigate the history of photography’s futures, both of the welcome and the menacing sort. It also invites students to inquire into our current dreams and nightmares of our photographic futures to come, particularly within a broader and global historical frame.
Examples of paper topics could include:
• utopian and dystopian projects, prospects, and outlines on photography’s future, both fruitful and failed, from the medium’s past two centuries,
• the unfolding of such dreams and menace in colonial contexts, or as instituted by indigenous and migrant communities,
• theoretical frameworks dealing with photography’s implicit tendencies towards progress and progressions, be they in the West or in struggles and cultural tendencies in the global South and East,
• photography’s past and current futures within the broader realm of modern media technologies
• photography’s relation to image production by means of artificial intelligence in diverse contexts,
• critical considerations on how to employ new thinking around the temporal to reconsider and reshape the field of photography studies in academia, curatorship and beyond.
The Developing Room, a working group at the Center for Cultural Analysis (Rutgers University) will run “The Futures of Photography” as its ninth graduate student colloquium, this time in collaboration with the Essen Center for Photography, Essen, Germany.
The event is for Ph.D. students from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography—its histories and theories—plays a central role. Students selected to present will have the opportunity to share their work with their peers and an official respondent who is a leader in the field. Students may be at any stage of dissertation research, but ideally presentations will consist of a dissertation chapter or a section, along with an account of how that chapter/section fits within the larger project.
The format involves a formal 25-minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of discussion. Beyond those five presentations, given at each colloquium meeting, the Developing Room always invites a large audience of students to ensure a rich conversation and to build a constituency from which papers can be drawn in subsequent colloquia. Our preference will be for students who can present in person at Rutgers. In previous years, the event brought together an international group of researchers working across a wide range of topics related to photography.
This year’s respondent will be Professor Steffen Siegel, professor for the theory and history of photography at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, and the chairman of the Essen Center for Photography.
Please email the following materials as one document (PDF please) to developingroom@gmail.com by September 20, 2024, with the subject line “Ninth Annual Graduate Student Colloquium Application”:
The Developing Room at the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University
In collaboration with the Essen Center for Photography, Essen, Germany
The DR’s Ninth Graduate Student Colloquium
Submission deadline: September 20, 2024
Event date and venue: Friday, November 8, 2024, 10:00am–5:00pm
Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, 15 Seminar Place, New Brunswick, NJ
Image: Robert Häusser, Relative Orientierung, 1972. © Robert Häusser – Robert-Häusser-Archiv/Curt-Engelhorn-Stiftung, Mannheim
At the Photography show in Birmingham earlier this year a roll of film was left in the donations box of the Disabled Photographers' Society. When developed and scanned it was found to be shot at the 1948 Olympic games in London. They are seeking clues as to the photographer and as many of the subjects as they can. They look as if they were taken from the trackside, so access was granted to areas probably not available to the general public.
English Heritage, with the support of the John Thomson steering group and the Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group will be unveiling an English Heritage Blue plaque to John Thomson (1837-1921). The ceremony will take place at 12 noon at 15 Effra Road, Brixton, where he worked on Street Life in London. It will be followed by several short presentations and light refreshments, just a few hundred metres away in the new premises of Photofusion at Unit 2, 2 Beehive Pl, London SW9 7QR. Photofusion has supported photographers since 1990.
Places are limited and prior registration is required here.
As a Bristol PhD student Rosemary Fowler (then Rosemary Brown) made a significant contribution to the use of photographic materials in particle physics. She married a fellow PhD student Peter Fowler (grandson of Ernest Rutherford) and left Physics to raise a family.
Her 3 papers in Nature and Phil Mag are well recognised for their contribution. As a 22-year-old doctoral researcher discovered the kaon (or K meson particle). While studying photographic plates that had been left exposed to cosmic rays, she identified a new configuration of tracks within the photographic emulsion that she recognised as being the decay of an unknown charged particle. Her discovery contributed to the introduction into particle physics of the property of strangeness, and to physicists' understanding that parity is not conserved in weak interations – features that now form an integral part of the standard model of particle physics (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Fowler)
In July 2024, 75 years on at age 98 she has just received an Honorary DSc for her work.
This year marks 110 years since Britain declared war on Germany and the start of the First World War. To mark the anniversary, Blenheim Palace has revealed it has a special album of letters, photographs and entries from when the UNESCO World Heritage Site was used as a hospital, between autumn 1914 and May 1915.
The 9th Duke of Marlborough opened up his home for use as a convalescence hospital in the early months of World War One; it was run by Sister Amy Munn. In the hospital album, she noted: ‘Blenheim Palace was closed as a hospital on May 31st, 1915 and the numerous letters received from the trenches since then are eloquent of the affection of the men for their ‘Home’ and to the Duke of Marlborough for his unfailing kindness and sympathy to them.’
The album lists the name, rank and age of each patient as well as his regiment and ailment or complaint. There is also a column in which the patient could make his remarks upon discharge - the date of which is also noted. The complaints of the teenagers and young men vary greatly, from gunshot wounds, gas poisoning and shrapnel to haemorrhoids, influenza, rheumatism and even frostbite.
Photographs and letters of thanks are also included in the album, and it becomes apparent that Sister Munn wrote a postcard to each of the men who had been under her care to find out how they had fared once they left Blenheim. The responses are many and varied - some write from the trenches, others who were sent to recover elsewhere compare their present treatment to the care they had received at Blenheim.
Some of the letters are from distressed and grieving relatives who, having seen photographs of the patients in a newspaper article of the time, write in the hope that the familiar looking man in the image will turn out to be a son, husband or father who has been reported as missing in action. There are also letters notifying Sister Munn of the death of someone who had previously been in her care.
It also becomes apparent that the Duke presented Sister Munn with a diamond brooch in recognition of all her care and hard work.
Antonia Keaney, Social Historian at Blenheim Palace, said, “The album is an absolute goldmine and is an amazing snapshot of the early days of the First World War when the men and their families couldn’t have begun to imagine the horrors that lay ahead or how long it would drag on for. The letters all contain expressions of gratitude to the Duke and Sister Munn, so it is incredible to be able to share this fascinating piece of history which is very important to us here at Blenheim Palace.”
The album is going to be displayed at Blenheim Palace in the Long Library for the weekend of the 3rd-4th August.
For more information and to book tickets visit, https://www.blenheimpalace.com/whats-on/events/hospital-albums-ww1/ and www.blenheimpalace.com
Kenneth Grange who has died just a few days after his 95th birthday was one of Britain's most significant postwar industrial designers. For thirty years he was design consultant for Kodak Limited developing cameras and a range of other products during the 1950s-1980s. These included the Kodak Instamatic 33, the Brownie Vecta, and Kodak Brownie 44A and 44B, Pocket Instamatic cameras, and the Kodascope 40 projector. The Brownie 44A, Kodaslide 40 and Vecta won Design Centre Awards in 1960, 1961 and 1964 respectively.
He told The Guardian in 2011 about his work for Kodak. "I couldn't yet make a living from product design, so I was working doing the displays for the Kodak pavilion at the World Trade Fair. I was arranging the products on the stand and someone overheard me say, 'It's a shame these are so ugly; I could make this really good if they weren't.' The next day, the phone rang. It was the head of development at Kodak, and he said, 'I understand you're going to design a camera for us.' It was thrilling, but I was scared, too, because I didn't know cameras. But again, there was an element of luck involved. I just happened to be in the right place at the moment when Kodak decided to start selling cameras for profit. Up until this point, their cameras were sold at a loss in order to shift film."
Away from photography Grange was responsible for a range of product designs including the Kenwood Chef food processor, the Manganese Bronze London taxi and the HST 125 train.
An exhibition about Grange and his work - Kenneth Grange - Designing Modern Britain - was held at the Design Museum in 2011 and reported on in BPH.
His archive is now housed at the V&A Museum, London, gifted by Grange in 2022. In an interview at the time of its acquisition Grange noted 'Another favourite commission and one of my most successful designs was the Kodak Instamatic camera 55x. The basic invention was brilliant and was a breakthrough which made loading film into a personal camera much simpler and more straightforward. My role was to decide what visual characteristic this new camera would have, and I felt it should owe something to the long history of photography. The most expensive camera at the time was the Leica Camera – it had a particular shape to it that had become the definitive shape and way of using a camera. This new camera I was designing for Kodak owed its lineage to the Leica and is how the shape came about.'
See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Grange and https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1194586/kodaslide-40-slide-projector-slide-projector-grange-kenneth/ and https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/17/kenneth-grange-british-design-exhibition
Main image: Michael Pritchard / Kodak Instamatic 33. Left: Brownie Vecta camera
Ben Harman, formerly Director of Edinburgh's Stills Gallery has been appointed to the role of Senior Curator (Photography) at National Galleries Scotland, based in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. The role was was advertised in March. He takes over from Anne Lyden who took up the role of National Galleries Scotland's Director-General on 1 January 2024. She had been Senior Curator since 2013.
Harman who started in his new role last Monday joined Stills Gallery as Director and CEO in January 2014.
Stills Gallery is curently advertising for a Director and that remains open for applications until 16 August.
Image: Ben Harman / LinkedIn
