50 free eprints of my article "'Cyclo-Photographers', Visual Modernity and the Development of Camera Technologies, 1880s-1890s", recently published in the journal History of Photography (42:1), for anyone who may be interested but doesn't have access to a subscribing library: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/w2ZiVhX3mTNjcAaV2EYy/full
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We are delighted that the Hepworth Wakefield (Museum of the Year 2017) have curated an exhibition from photographs in the Hyman Collection.
Hepworth Wakefield Press Release:
'From the deep indigo and black scarlets of the industrial heart we sailed through the unimaginable beauty of unspoiled countryside. These conflicting landscapes really shaped, I think, my whole life.' - Barbara Hepworth on growing up in Wakefield.
For the first time in human history, more people are living in urban environments than in the countryside, yet the impulse to seek out nature remains as strong as ever. This new exhibition of photographs by leading British photographers such as Shirley Baker, Bill Brandt, Anna Fox, Chris Killip, Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones explores our evolving relationship with the natural world and how this shapes individuals and communities.
Drawn from the collection of Claire and James Hyman, which comprises more than 3,000 photographs ranging from conceptual compositions to documentary-style works, Modern Nature will include around 60 photographs taken since the end of the Second World War, through the beginnings of de-industrialisation to the present day. It will explore the merging of urban and rural landscapes, the rapid expansion of cities and the increasingly intrusive management of the countryside. Rather than present a Romantic dichotomy between the rural and the urban, the exhibition presents a more contemporary sensibility that is frequently situated in the edgelands, the often scruffy margins, in which town blurs with countryside.
A number of photographs on display, including The Caravan Gallery's quizzical views of urban centres and Chris Shaw's 'Weeds of Wallasey' series (2007-12), capture the ways in which nature infiltrates the city. Others, such as Mark Power's 'The Shipping Forecast' series (1993-96) and Marketa Luskacova's NE Seaside (1978) images document trips out to the coast and countryside, driven by the sometimes powerful need to escape urban life. They are by turns poetic and humorous, occasionally absurd.
A strand running through the exhibition will look at how children reclaim space for play and exploration, exemplified through works including Daniel Meadows's National Portrait (Three Boys and a Pigeon) (1974), Jo Spence's 'Gypsies' series (1974) and Paul Hill's Legs over High Tor (1975).
James Hyman said: "Claire and I were delighted when The Hepworth Wakefield approached us about staging an exhibition curated from works in our collection. The Hyman Collection seeks to support and promote British photography, and is especially committed to exhibitions and education, so we were excited to work with The Hepworth Wakefield on this exhibition and related events, and fascinated by the theme that they chose to present. As a young gallery The Hepworth Wakefield is fast developing a reputation for curating important exhibitions of photographs, as a part of their dynamic exhibition programme, and we hope that our partnership with The Hepworth Wakefield will encourage their ambitions in this area."
MEDIA ENQUIRIES
Ryan Johnson, Communications Officer, The Hepworth Wakefield
T: +44 (0)1924 247393
E: ryanjohnson@hepworthwakefield.org
High-resolution images with captions and credits from the Media Centre:
www.hepworthwakefield.org/press
NOTES TO EDITORS
The full list of artists in Modern Nature: Keith Arnatt, Shirley Baker, John Blakemore, Bill Brandt, John Davies, Anna Fox, Stephen Gill, Brian Griffin, Paul Hill, Colin Jones, Chris Killip, Marketa Luskacova, Daniel Meadows, Peter Mitchell, Martin Parr, Mark Power, Tony Ray-Jones, Paul Reas, Simon Roberts, Chris Shaw, Jo Spence, The Caravan Gallery.
ABOUT THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD
The Hepworth Wakefield is an award-winning art gallery in the heart of Yorkshire, set within Wakefield's historic waterfront, overlooking the River Calder. Designed by the acclaimed David Chipperfield Architects, the gallery opened in May 2011 and has already welcomed two million visitors. The gallery was awarded Art Fund Museum of the Year in July 2017. Named after Barbara Hepworth, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, who was born and brought up in Wakefield, the gallery presents major exhibitions of the best international modern and contemporary art. It also is home to Wakefield's art collection - an impressive compendium of modern British and contemporary art - and has dedicated galleries exploring Hepworth's art and working process. The Hepworth Wakefield is funded by Wakefield Council and Arts Council England.
ABOUT THE HYMAN COLLECTION
The Hyman Collection is the private collection of Claire and James Hyman. It presently consists of over 3,000 artworks in all media, with an increasing emphasis on photography from its earliest days in the nineteent century through to contemporary conceptual practice. The Collection seeks to support and promote British photography through acquisitions, loans and education. In 2015 britishphotography.org was launched to provide online access to British photographs in the collection and as a learning resource to increase international awareness of British photography. As well as including forms of documentary photography, the collection focuses on artists working in photography who have pursued more subjective or conceptual strategies. The collection has historic as well as contemporary photographs and includes an equal number of works by male and female artists.
This new publication by Robin Ansell, Allan Collier and Phil Nichols is not just a dating guide to old photographs, but is also a celebration of Somerset’s photographic history, as seen through the lives and work of nearly 800 photographers. It will appeal to family, local, social and photographic historians, including collectors, as a reliable and indispensable reference source on the subject.
The accompanying DVD contains more than 1,500 images and mini-biographies of each of the photographers. All three authors have experience in local history research and are keen photography collectors.
Secure the Shadow. Somerset Photographers 1839-1939
Robin Ansell, Allan Collier and Phil Nichols
105 pages. soft covers (297 x 210 mm). DVD: 4,495 pages, of which 2,746 contain images.
Somerset and Dorset Family History Society, 2018
Available for £12 (plus p&p) from the Somerset & Dorset Family History Society, at its Yeovil offices at Broadway House, Peter Street, Yeovil BA20 1PN (tel: 01935-429609) or via its online shop at shop.sdfhs.org/publications/somerset-books
Photoworks seeks to appoint a Curator. This post is an exciting opportunity for an experienced individual to work with the new Director to help shape the curatorial programme. Within the first six months of taking up the post, the successful candidate will help deliver Brighton Photo Biennial and Photoworks Annual. An ambitious Curator will be able to use this opportunity to build on and develop their existing experience and skill-set.
Download/complete the application documents using the following links:
Photoworks is an equal opportunities employer and committed to encouraging applications from diverse candidates.
See more here: https://photoworks.org.uk/project-news/job-opportunity-curator-june-2018/
For the last year or so a group of volunteers have been doing a stock-take of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science (PSNS) library held in Perth Museum. This is prior to the closure of the museum and removal of its contents to a new collection store to be built as part of Perth and Kinross Council’s proposed cultural programme with the redevelopment of the City Hall.
Among the library’s collections volunteer David Perry has discovered a copy of Ackermann's Photogenic Drawing Apparatus: Directions for Use. This 8-page pamphlet was published in April 1839 and it was the first photographic instruction book to be printed. It accompanied a box of paper, a printing frame and chemicals for making ‘photogenic drawings’. The pamphlet explained how to use the apparatus to produce photographs according to Henry Talbot’s pioneering paper negative process. Talbot had been experimenting since 1834 and publicised his experiments in January 1839 to the Royal Society in London after hearing about Louis Daguerre’s parallel experiments in photography in France.
The discovery of the pamphlet in the library doubles the number of known copies in existence from one to two. The only other known copy is in the library of the Royal Photographic Society, now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from which a reprint was produced by the Society's Historical Group in 1977.
The pamphlet was unknown because it was bound together with another photographic pamphlet Photographic Printing, in Carbon and other Pigments, by Perth photographer, William Blair, published in 1869. The title in the binding referring only to Blair’s pamphlet. Both pamphlets and the bound book were presented by Thomas Bourke, a Perth photographer, to the Photographic Section of the PSNS shortly after its formation in 1889, although Ackermann’s pamphlet has the inscription that it was presented to the Photographic Section by James Jackson, presumably a relative of Magnus Jackson, the Perth photographer who was a member of the PSNS and its Vice-President.
A report of the discovery was in the PSNS newsletter for June 2018 which can be read here which is panning to exhibit the find in the near future.
With thanks to Paul Adair, Collections Officer, Culture Perth and Kinross, Perth Museum & Art Gallery for alerting BPH to this find and for the images.
With the support of Arts Council England and the Artist Information Company, a-n, Almudena Romero has made a step by step film explaining the chlorophyll printing process.
The process also features in the Photofusion exhibition Growing Concerns. This unique body of work focuses on the subject of migration, making the link between the deregulation of goods and capital and the increasing barriers for movement of people. The images in this series are printed directly onto plants from Asia and the Caribbean Islands by means of the organic process of chlorophyll printing.
See more about the exhibition here: https://www.photofusion.org/exhibitions/almudena-romero-growing-concerns/
Watch the film here: https://vimeo.com/277634133
The Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg and the Hasselblad Foundation have a long-term partnership for the purpose of supporting the development of critical study and research on photography. As part of this shared programme of work, we are now seeking applications from photo-based artists, photo historians, art historians and practioners in cognate disciplines, with doctoral degrees, to apply for a 2-year postdoctoral scholarship starting from January 2019.
This position is attached to a new joint project between the Hasselblad Foundation and the Academy Valand which seeks to create an experimental photo history centered on photographic practitioners in the interwar period (WWI-WWII), starting from (but not limited to) Sweden, in both art and vernacular photography, as well as advertising and scientific photography. The applications for this post may be focused on, for example: new perspectives on archival material; local and social history and photography as alternative historical source and mediation; and cultural parallels between the 20s and 30s and today.
More information about the Academy Valand is available at www.akademinvaland.gu.se. More information about the Hasselblads Foundation can be found at www.hasselbladfoundation.se.
Applications by 17 August 2018.
See more here: https://www.gu.se/english/about_the_university/job-opportunities/vacancies-details/?id=2445
With support from Art Fund, the Victoria and Albert Museum runs a programme to help the development of curatorial expertise in the art and culture of photography, working with regional museum partners. The programme has been in place since 2014, and has resulted in collaborations with Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery and Museums Sheffield. The curatorial training post provides practical training in photographs curatorship and equips a Curator with specialist knowledge of photography and the ability to care for and develop photography collections.
This is a 12 month fixed term contract. You will spend six months in the Photographs Section of the Word and Image Department at the V&A with a V&A Curator as mentor. This will be followed by a six months’ placement at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter working on an agreed project. The post-holder will report to the Curator, Photographs at the V&A.
Interviews will be held on 13 September 2018
More details here.
Over the last 4 years the National Library of Wales has worked with Wikimedia to provide open access to more than 10,000 public domain images. These include the Welsh Landscape Collection, photographs, maps and manuscripts. This partnership has led to more than 455 million views of Wikipedia articles containing National Library images to date.
Images Now the Library is pleased to announce that nearly 5000 portrait prints, photographs and paintings have been placed in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons. Along with the images, the Library’s National Wikimedian has also shared rich metedata for every image as linked open data on Wikidata.
The Library’s main goal in releasing such content is to increase access to our collections and to contribute to the creation and sharing of knowledge about Wales and its people. It is now hopped that the Wikimedia community will begin to use these images to illustrate Wikipedia articles.
The National Library also plans to run a project to increase engagement with this collection, and hopes that volunteers will be encouraged to create Wikipedia articles about the Welsh sitters, artists, printers and photographers involved in the collection. Because all these images are freely downloadable and in the public domain, we also encourage others to reuse them for any purpose they see fit, from education to the creative industries this is a free resource for everybody.
Read the full blog post here which also shows examples of data visualisation: https://blog.library.wales/?p=17811
BPH reported on two auctions which took place late last year.and included material relating to the early photographer and experimenter Alfred Swaine Taylor. A further, and final group of material is being offered by Lacy Scott & Knight on 5 October as the Alfred Swaine Taylor family collection. The auction is split in to three general areas: personal, science and medicine and photography.
The auction lots can be seen here: https://www.lskauctioncentre.co.uk/auction/search?au=612
London's Photofusion is running a four-day alternative process summer week where you can learn how to:
Day 1: Make Digital Negatives suitable for Alternative/Historical Processes.
Richard Wills – Tuesday August 21, 11:00 – 17:00.
Day 2: Make Salt Prints (and Gold toning).
Paul Ellis – Wednesday August 22, 12:00 – 18:00.
Day 3: Make Kallitypes (poor man’s Platinum) & Platinum Prints.
Paul Ellis – Thursday August 23, 12:00 – 18:00.
Day 4: Make Wet-Plate collodion positive images with Large Format Cameras.
Daniel Barter – Friday August 24, 10:30 – 17:30.
Photofusion provides all chemicals, paper, equipment ‘etc’. You need to bring images on hard-drive which will be made into Digital Negatives on Day 1.
Find out more and book: http://www.photofusion.org/course/alternative-processes-summer-week/
This event accompanies the Radical Visions exhibition at Four Corners Gallery, and the launch of its new digital archive. It will consider Camerawork's engagement, role and influence with community-practice, feminism and representation, and ask how its broader legacy can be understood within the context of today’s cultural politics.
Thursday 28 June, 2:00-6:00pm
Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury. Room to be confirmed.
Radical Visions: the cultural politics of Camerawork 1972-1985
A Collaborative Symposium
Four Corners with History and Theory of Photography Research Centre, Birkbeck
Speakers include:
Mathilde Bertrand, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
Patrizia Di Bello, Birkbeck, University of London
Steve Edwards, Birkbeck, University of London
David Evans, writer & photo-montage artist
Carla Mitchell, Four Corners
Don Slater, London School of Economics
Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge
The event is free, but we ask you to register:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-visions-symposium-tickets-47057084005
Image: Claire Schwob, from Women exhibition, Half Moon Gallery 1974
Canada in the Frame explores a photographic collection held at the British Library that offers a unique view of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Canada. The collection, which contains more than 4,500 images, taken between 1895 and 1923, covers a dynamic period in Canada’s national history and provides a variety of views of its landscapes, developing urban areas and peoples. Colonial Copyright Law was the driver by which these photographs were acquired; unmediated by curators, but rather by the eye of the photographer who created the image, they showcase a grass-roots view of Canada during its early history as a Confederation.
Canada in the Frame describes this little-known collection and includes over 100 images from the collection. The author asks key questions about what it shows contemporary viewers of Canada and its photographic history, and about the peculiar view these photographs offer of a former part of the British Empire in a post-colonial age, viewed from the old ‘Heart of Empire’. Case studies are included on subjects such as urban centres, railroads and migration, which analyse the complex ways in which photographers approached their subjects, in the context of the relationship between Canada, the British Empire and photography.
Canada in the Frame
Philip J. Hatfield
June 2018
Open Access PDF
ISBN: 978‑1‑78735‑299‑5
FREE
Hardback
ISBN: 978‑1‑78735‑301‑5
£40.00
Paperback
ISBN: 978‑1‑78735‑300‑8
£22.99
Pages: 260
UCL Press
Download free: https://goo.gl/HxSBrW
The Photographers' Gallery is the UK’s leading centre for the presentation and exploration of photography in all its forms and a dedicated home for an international photographic community. Established in London in 1971, the Gallery has been instrumental in reflecting photography’s pivotal role in culture and society and championing its position as a leading art form through a rich programme of exhibitions, talks, events, workshops, courses and other activities
Team
The Development Team is primarily responsible for fundraising for the annual revenue needs of the Gallery’s programme of activities, beyond what is already generated by the Gallery’s enterprises (Print Sales, Bookshop and Café). The funding relationship with our major stakeholder, Arts Council England (ACE) is primarily handled by the Director and Deputy Director
Role Summary:
This is an exciting opportunity to join a small, resourceful and dynamic team at The Photographers’ Gallery. The Development Coordinator will have the opportunity to learn about arts fundraising working across all income sources: Individuals, Corporates and Trusts and Foundations. All team members are offered external and internal training for fundraising skill development. The Development Co-ordinator will play a central role in the team, assisting with the day to day administration, patronage fulfilment and administration, coordination of departmental mailings for upcoming events and communications and research projects as instructed by other members of the team.
To apply please download an application form from https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/about-us/vacancies and email completed applications to development@tpg.org.uk
Deadline for applications 5 July 2018
A new exhibitions which examines pictorialism has opened at the museée Nicéphore Niépce and runs until 16 September 2018. Curated by Dr Julien Faure-Conorton Artists' Visions offers a new, broader, view of European pictorialist photography. The exhibition presents recent research and discoveries and is the first exhibition dedicated to pictorial photography in France for over a decade.
Sourced in the collections of the musée Nicéphore Niépce that preserves works by Robert Demachy and Charles Lhermitte, as well as prints by Constant Puyo, José Ortiz-Echagüe and Alfred Fauvarque-Omez, the exhibition brings together over two-hundred vintage prints. They are the work of various authors, some well-known, others less so. Most of the prints are being shown for the very first time. They were created over a seventy-year period, from the early 1890s to the late 1950s, showing that pictorial photography did not disappear after the First World War, contrary to the established histories of photography would lead us to believe.
Offering an updated, broader vision of the pictorialist endeavour on a European scale, Artists’ Visions results from recent research and discoveries and is the first exhibition dedicated to pictorial photography for over a decade in France. This exhibition challenges the established narrative and offers a new history acknowledging the permanence of the pictorialist ideals. These ideals were built on a shared ambition: to create photographs that wanted to do more than simply reproduce the real, photographs that truly interpreted it, like an artist’s vision.
Pictorial photographers, in their quest to free photography from the simple function of documentary reproduction to which it had been reduced since its invention, strove to create images where personal feelings took precedence, images that expressed something poetic or dreamlike, that suggested more than they showed, producing, above all, an impression, aiming to provoke a feeling, an emotion in the viewer. To do so, pictorial photographers resorted to interpretation, meaning the intervention of the artist in the photographic process using various technical tools aimed at transforming the aesthetics of the image so that the original photograph (the negative) gave birth to an artistic picture (the exhibition print). At the turn of the 20th century, pictorial photography was extremely popular worldwide with thousands of followers who spread their works in ambitious international exhibitions and luxurious publications.
The exhibition is curated by photography historian Dr Julien Faure-Conorton in connection with Sylvain Besson at the musée Nicéphore Niépce.
A catalogue is available and can be had by emailing: jfc.photohistory@gmail.com
Musée Nicéphore Niépce
28 quai des messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
+33 [0]3 85 48 41 98
The DGPh History of Photography Research Award 2018 will be open for all elements of research into photography's many aspects. Besides aspects of traditional history and theory of photography, topics will be considered that deal with photography's social meaning, or the impact that the medium has had on society. The applicant's work should represent an autonomous, innovative, and original contribution to these areas. The award is particularly aimed at young scholars.
The award is open to researchers from all fields. Applications and manuscripts for the DGPh History of Photography Research Award may be submitted in either English or German. Applications should consist of a published or unpublished manuscript produced during the last two years before the deadline. Project outlines, or yet unfinished manuscripts etc. will not be accepted. Allocation will be the decision of an expert jury. The award is endowed with a total of 3,000 Euro. The jury holds the right to split the prize between two applicants in equal parts. The award will be handed over at a public event organized by the DGPh.
Submission requirements are the following pdf-files:
- A complete manuscript as electronic file form
- An abstract of the submitted work (approx. 300-500 words)
- A curriculum vitae
- A list of publications
The final date for submissions is the 30 September, 2018.
Submissions should be send online under: https://www.dgph.de/sektionen/geschichte_archive/ausschreibung-dgph-forschungspreis-photographiegeschichte-2018
More information about the German Photographic Society: www.dgph.de
The National Portrait Gallery has acquired eleven portraits, including one self portrait, shown right) by Philippe Garner. Garner will be known to many as an auctioneer who started the first auctions of photography in the United Kingdom in 1971 at Sotheby's before he moved to Christie's, where he is remains a consultant.
Garner had kept his interest as a phootgrapher discretely hidden during his auction career but his subjects reflect his involvement with photography, and include curators, photographers and critics. He felt the time was now right to make his own photography public.
Read an interview with Garner here where he talks about his own photography.
See his 11 images here: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp124605/philippe-garner?search=sas&sText=garner&role=art
We are recruiting for a full time Curatorial Project Manager, a key role in our newly expanded curatorial and archive team of four.
You will provide the project management and logistical support necessary to develop and deliver our dynamic curatorial programme of exhibitions on and off site, publications, artist commissions, residencies, special projects & associated archive, collection and editions related activity.
You will also have the opportunity to make curatorial proposals for possible inclusion our programme.
Application deadline: Monday 9 July 2018 by 5pm.
Download the job pack and application form below. If you have any questions about the role or application process, please contact info@autograph-abp.co.uk or phone 020 7729 9200.
Read more here: http://autograph-abp.co.uk/news/curatorial-project-manager?mc_cid=e6e0483bcb&mc_eid=dee88b2478
Exhibiting historic photography is no easy task. To start with, it’s a conservator’s nightmare: nineteenth-century prints are physically fragile and chemically unstable and any prolonged exposure to light causes irremediable damage. Add to this the fact that they are usually quite small black and white objects that show blurred scenery and unsmiling faces and you are forced to compose with a rather dark exhibition space in which you ask visitors to squint at little images that will inevitably remind them of history textbooks. Naturally, this runs the risk of being—well—boring.
In recent years, curators have sought various solutions to these challenges. Betty Yao and Narisa Chakrabongse, the two behind China and Siam Through the Lens of John Thomson, currently on display at the Brunei Gallery in London until June 23rd, have gone the route of making large canvas-sized prints from scans of original glass negatives. John Thomson was a Scottish photographer who, from 1862 to 1872, travelled through Siam, Cambodia and China and is credited with some of the earliest photographic records of these countries. Seven hundred of his negatives are now housed in the Wellcome Library’s collection and were recently the subject of a major digitization project. Despite their impressive resolution, the modern inkjet reproductions featured in the exhibition are vastly different from Thomson’s original prints in scale and, in most instances, in colour (though some have been printed in a sepia that emulates the tone of albumen).
What this exhibition provides is the photograph as artwork; something perhaps more familiar to today’s gallery-goer than the travel books in which Thomson’s photographs originally appeared. We are told to look for detail, to marvel at the photographer’s sensitive portraits and his mastery of the medium. This is standard museum language and seems to justify the radical enlargement of the images. There are indeed many advantages to displaying reproductions of these dimensions: conservation concerns are drastically lessened and these big prints are far easier to exhibit and to appreciate than illustrations bound into volumes or glass negatives. But at this size, a format which would have been simply impossible for Thomson to achieve, it becomes difficult for the viewer to assess the photographs as anything other than aesthetic objects, making a critical eye harder to muster. For that, you need to look beyond the gorgeously framed piece to the material context in which the original prints were imbricated. “Photographs are always embedded,” visual geographer Gillian Rose has said about the use or misuse of historic photographs, and it is this embedded-ness to which we must turn for the underlying intent of an image. [1]
No doubt sensing this need for contextualization, the curators chose to display copies of both Thomson’s The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China and a volume of his Illustrations of China and its People. However, they appear to have missed an opportunity to inform their viewers of the content of these publications and how Thomson’s photographs were mobilized as proof of the imperialist views expressed within their pages. James R. Ryan has remarked that Thomson’s work in China in particular was motivated by a desire to showcase the country’s commercial potential as a British colony. [2] Like many of his contemporaries, he perceived China as a rather primitive nation which was in dire need of the civilizing influence of Europe and this, he believed, could be achieved through trade, urban development and the adoption of Western lifestyle. Thomson’s opinions, then, expressed as much through his writing as his photography, is not exactly what we would call PC nowadays. Further, Illustrations of China and Its People, in which many of the Chinese photographs included in the exhibition first appeared, made use of the ethnographic convention of classifying people into racial and occupational categories—a practice which reaffirmed harmful Orientalist stereotypes. [3] The exhibition text, however, prefers to frame these images as “vivid tableaux of street scenes [that] bring to life activities now vanished forever,” [4] painting Thomson as a conscientious and curious documenter rather than an advocate of Empire. This is not to say that either of these descriptions of Thomson’s character is more accurate than the other, but a more nuanced and perhaps less celebratory presentation of the photographer might have been more appropriate.
All this being said, Yao and Chakrabongse’s show is remarkable in that it has overcome the practical challenges many exhibitions of historical photography face. It is definitely far from dull and the state-of-the-art technology employed to digitize Thomson’s negatives has yielded truly impressive results. Moreover, despite the modernity of the prints, a discussion of early photographic processes is dutifully taken up in the display of an old wooden camera, a short video explaining the wet collodion process and by a photograph of one of Thomson’s actual negatives. The selection of images, a mix of pleasant scenery and moving portraits, provides an interesting overview of the photographer’s work in Asia. But above all, the curators must be congratulated for bringing these archival objects, which might otherwise have remained unnoticed, to the attention of the public, even if this meant transforming them in significant ways. Though this strategy certainly has its drawbacks, there’s no arguing with the exhibition’s excellent track record: the show has been running in various iterations since 2009. And the Brunei Gallery is far from its last port of call. Following London, you can find China and Siam Through the Lens of John Thomson at the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth from November to March and at the New Walk Museum in Leicester from February to March.
[1] Gillian Rose, “Practising Photography: An Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher,” Journal of Historical Geography 26. 4 (2000): 556.
[2] James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 62-64.
[3] Ibid., 163.
[4] Exhibition label from China and Siam Through the Lens of John Thomson, Brunei Gallery, 13 April - 23 June 2018.
Kent Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is a not-for-profit museum that explores the deep history of the moving image — from the days of candle-lit magic lantern performances and hand-painted slides, through Victorian visual experimentation, to the advent and heyday of the cinema.
The museum is situated in the heart of the picturesque Kent seaside town of Deal, two minutes' walk from Deal Railway Station and Deal Pier and Seafront.
The Kent MOMI website is live at kentmomi.org.
Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/28/museum-film-moving-image-deal-kent-cinema
