Blogs

Join Philippe Garner, former Christie's and Sotheby's auctioneer, and photography expert, and Alessandro Nasini, Senior Curator of Photographs and exhibition curator of Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography, as they discuss how photography became accepted as fine art.

The discussion will be followed by an opportunity for guests to view the exhibition and your ticket will also include a glass of wine or soft drink to enjoy while you explore the gallery.

Your ticket will also include a 1-Year Pass, allowing you to visit our current and future exhibitions at The King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace as many times as you like within the next year. See here for more information about the 1-Year Pass 

In conversation: Photography at Art with Philippe Garner and Alessandro Nasini
Thursday, 8 August 2024 at 1830-2000, followed by a private exhibition view until 2100
King's Gallery, London
£35
See: https://www.rct.uk/event/in-conversation-photography-as-art-08-2024

Image: Princess Alexandra by Cecil Beaton

The Bradford Telegraph and Argus newspaper has reported that the National Science and Media Museum will be re-opening to the public in January, in time for Bradford's 2025 year of culture. The museum closed in June 2023 and re-opening had been delayed until summer 2025 after some unforeseen major structural issues were uncovered. The museum will open with two major new £6 million galleries dealing with sound and vision, new lifts and a remodelled front entrance.

The galleries, accompanied by a programme of activities, will showcase key objects and stories from the museum's world-class collections of photography, film, television, animation, videogames and sound technologies.

Separately, museum director Jo Quintoch-Tulloch has been awarded an honorary degree by the University of Bradford. Jo started at the museum in 2013, and her focus has been to forge partnerships across the city, including the University of Bradford, making it a centre of excellence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. The awarde was given ‘In recognition of demonstrating significant impact on the City and beyond, and contribution to STEM in partnership with the University.’

See: https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/24458906.national-science-media-museum-reopen-january-2025/ and https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/about-us/sound-and-vision-project

Image: Jo Quinton-Tulloch / KM Images Ltd. 

The forthcoming Bristol Photo Festival features a number of exhibitions that use archival material in its own right or to inform contemporary practice. Of particular note is the exhibition: Herbert Shergold: Now Keep Quite Still. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Shergold operated a commercial photography studio in Bristol to create highly stylised portraits of actors as well as of his local community. In Shergold’s studio, Bristol’s working class residents were styled to appear as Hollywood film stars.

Little is known of Shergold, although he lectured to Bristol Camera Club in 1952 with a preentation titled 'Accent on Glamour'. After his death, his photographs largely disappeared from view, falling into the possession of private collectors in the US, The Netherlands, as well as Bristol. From the latter collection, curator and photo historian Hedy van Erp has curated the first exhibition of Shergold’s work. This exhibition takes place close to the site of his original studio and is supported by Marcel Brent (Vintage Photographs) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Herbert Shergold: Now Keep Quite Still
The Laundrette Gallery, 145 Cheltenham Rd, Cotham, Bristol BS6 5RR
16 October-17 November 2024

Details of the Bristol Photo Festival are here: https://bristolphotofestival.org/

Image: Herbert Shergold’s collection. © VintagePhotographs

Over six weeks, this practical course explores what it means to archive collections today – working with physical and/or digital material. Course leader Kathryn Tollervey starts by exploring the need for an archive and who it is for. Then we look at guidelines on cataloguing and metadata, as well as the processes of digitisation and preservation for both digital and physical material. We discuss what digital solutions are best for different types of collections. Throughout the course we focus on access and legacy of the archive.

Taking place weekly on Zoom, sessions include a blend of lectures, group discussions and presentations. Participants are provided with lecture slides and a list of resources for further study. The course is open  to all, especially photographers who are interested in starting the process of archiving their material, whether of personal value or historical public interest.

Starting an Archive
Online: 06:30pm, Mon 16 Sep 2024 - 08:00pm, Mon 21 Oct 2024
£185/£165 members and concessions
Details: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/course-starting-archive-online

Photography Database is a new implementation and major extension of work done by editors Andrew Eskind and Greg Drake while at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, beginning in the 1980s.  It provides basic factual information about more than 100,000 photographers, as well as public photographic collections, commercial galleries, photographic exhibitions, and citations to the many published sources used to compile the data. The scope is international, and the time frame runs from the beginnings of photography to contemporary. Data is continually updated -- actively tracking photographer obituaries, new and expanding collections, exhibitions, galleries, reviews, catalogs, and reference literature. At the time of writing it shows 11,500 exhibitions from 1840, 108,450 photographer obituaries. 

The database is both a useful reference too and provides an opportunity to analyse disparate data which it brings together to provide new insights in to how the work of photographers has been exhibited. It has been added to the resources at the bottom of the home page. 

Photography Database
Basic Biographical Information about Photographers, Public Photography Collections and Their Photographic Exhibitions
Access here: https://photographydatabase.org/

Take to the skies and discover the world from above the clouds through the remarkable work of Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer.  A trailblazer in his field, Alfred Buckham FRPS (1879-1956) soared above the realms of what was thought to be possible in 20th century photography and aviation. Meet the man behind some of the most iconic aerial photographs, marvel at the death-defying lengths he took to capture the perfect image and explore how his innovative techniques paved the way for modern technologies such as Photoshop and AI.

Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer
18 October 2025–19 April 2026
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Free admission
See more here

The British Library is seeking to recruit a permanent part-time Print Room Coordinator and Cataloguer to join the Visual Arts Team at St Pancras. This post is a three-day a week job-share and will be fully onsite.

Working with one of the most extensive collections of prints, drawings and photographs relating to South Asia, this is an exciting opportunity to support our users and these important materials available for research, creativity and enjoyment. The post holder will work independently to oversee the daily operations of the Print Room including scheduling appointments, retrieve, and issue and replace collection items, while closely invigilating readers on weekday mornings. The post holder will devote the remainder of their time to catalogue and research uncatalogued Visual Art collections relating to architecture and topographical views of South Asia.

Details: https://ce0752li.webitrent.com/ce0752li_webrecruitment/wrd/run/etrec179gf.open?WVID=5071482BMD&LANG=USA

Norway's Preus Museum has reported that it purchased the Richard Neuhauss self-portrait from auction in June. It sold for €7.560. The plate joins twelve other colour plates by Neuhauss, making a total of 20 Lippmann interference plates held by the museum. Neuhauss experimented with the so-called Lippmann process from 1895, and over time he produced over 2,500 Lippmann photographs, mainly of inanimate objects. It is the fact that this is a self-portrait that make it special. 

Dr Hanin Hannouch notes 'with photograph conservator Jens Gold, a couple of years ago I co-curated an exhibition at Preus Museum about Lippmann photography, mostly using the museum's own magnificent collection of interferential plates by Neuhauss and Hans Lehmann. On this basis, I can safely say that I am relieved Preus Museum acquired the plates at the auction because, in my experience, this institution genuinely stands for accessibility of collections, openness to research, and enthusiasm for all things photography. So congratulations to Preus Museum!!!'

Details of the auction are here: https://www.lempertz.com/en/catalogues/lot/1246-1/501-dr-richard-neuhauss.html
and the report from the museum: https://preusmuseum.no/neuhauss-selvportrett-i-farge

With thanks to Dr Hanin Hannouch. 

Possibly my favourite photo of a daylight studio in my collection, but where was this suburban, sylvan, setting? From the list of other branch studios plastered across the façade, we know where it wasn’t – 72 Princes Street, Edinburgh. London, Blackpool, [Shore Road] Aberdour, Rothsay, Largs, etc. etc. Many of these are seaside locations, so probably only seasonal studios.

The signage says Cabinet photos 1/- [shilling] each, No Extra Charge for groups. Also says Have Your Photo taken with the Pony and Trap, …….. & Motor Car. These were staged with backcloths (examples can be seen on the  Edinphoto website).

Peter Claude Low (1874 – 1935) was an Edinburgh photographer. He was the eldest son of Peter Low (1842 - ), a portrait painter turned photographer, and Georgina Low (nee Hill, 1850 - 1893), they married in 1871 and had two sons Claude and Philip. In the 1891 Census, aged 17, Claude was living with his parents at 19 Henderson Row, Edinburgh, his occupation was recorded as camera maker. By August 1893 he was a photographer with a studio at 127 Ferry Road, Leith. Claude married Mary Thomson Masson in 1895,  Edinphoto has a photo of them.

Five years later he had moved to 54 Cockburn Street, which is where he was living at the time of the 1901 Census. Judging by his advertisements in the local press, this appears to have been his principal address in the up to c. 1909. Edinphoto’s study of the local directories has him at 72 Princes Street 1906 – 11, they also list studios at Roslin and Dunoon.

Claude’s younger brother Philip Ernest Low (1876 – 1936) also followed the same profession. From c.1900 – 1910 his main studio was in Bath Street, Portabello, though he also ran studios on the Promenade, Broughty Ferry and the Bathing Station, Aberdeen.

Both Claude and Philip later emigrated, Claude to South Africa, though he subsequently returned to the UK. Philip emigrated to initially Dunedin, New Zealand,. He ran several hotels, but apparently went  bankrupt during the Great Depression and so moved to Australia, where he died in 1936.

If anyone has any further information on Claude and Peter, or knows where this or their other studios were, I’d be grateful to hear from you.

Many thanks!

Just in time for Alice’s Day, the Bodleian Libraries is pleased to announce the acquisition of two photographic portraits of Alice Liddell by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll) as part of the library’s growing photography collection. The acquisition comprises one original albumen of Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’ (1858) and one original glass wet-plate collodion negative of ‘Alice Liddell Wearing a Garland’ (1860).

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898) was a mathematician and photographer, best known for his work as an author and poet under the pseudonym ‘Lewis Carroll’. His most notable works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are both global sensations, widely acknowledged to have been inspired by the daughter of Henry Liddell (the Dean of Christ Church), Alice Liddell (1852–1934), who is the model in both portraits.

These photographs were donated by a private individual, who had previously acquired the pieces from the Sotheby’s London sale of Lewis Carroll’s Alice: The Photographs, Books, Papers and Personal Effects of Alice Liddell and Her Family, on Wednesday, 6 June, 2001 (Lot 00022 and Lot 00037). Before this time, they were with the family of Alice Liddell.

The third networking event of Museum Dialogues considers matters of curatorial interpretation and visitor experience, alongside ways of increasing access and representation of and for diverse communities.

In the first part of this online workshop, speakers and participants will discuss various institutional initiatives for active public engagement and ways to value everyone’s experience by levelling equity with equality. The session will explore non-traditional exhibition spaces, engaging with audiences outside the museum, and collaborations between artists, curators, and communities as effective means of addressing access challenges and expanding the reach of photography. In the second part, presentations focus on the diversity of representation in exhibitions and collections, and strategies of decolonisation.

Overarching questions for presentations and group discussion include:

• How can photography serve as an accessible medium to address broader social and political issues and processes relevant to diverse communities?
• What presentation and storytelling methods can provide more inclusive cross-cultural narratives and audience experiences?
• How can museum practices facilitate two-way interactions with audiences, enabling them to influence the museum’s role as a social site?
• What decolonial methods can museums and galleries use to allow for multiple interpretative frameworks?
• How can museums and galleries advance decolonising processes through photography and commissioning?
• How may commissioning open an institution’s discursive space?

Speakers include:

• Matteo Balduzzi, Senior Curator, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo, Italy
• Dr Sandra Križić Roban, Senior Advisor, Institute of Art History and Associate Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Croatia
• Dr Emily Pugh, Principal Research Specialist, Getty Research Institute, USA
• Dr Tracy Stuber, Digital Humanities Specialist, Harvard University Art Museum, USA
• Dr Alexander Supartono, Edinburgh Napier University, UK

Rethinking Programming: Interpretation and Experience, Inclusion and Equity
Friday 12 July 2024, 9:45 – 16:00 BST, on zoom.
Free
Register HERE

We look forward to seeing you then!

Source magazine is seeking new writers and offering a £500 prize for the winning entry. All short listed entries will also be considered for publication or for paid future commissions.

Most of the writing in Source takes a specific form: book reviews, exhibition reviews or texts introducing sets of pictures, so these would be good models to follow. But we are also interested in others forms of writing so if you want to submit something in a different form then please do. Our interest in photography is not only about the photographs that appear in books and exhibitions; it touches most aspects of life and we like to read about those encounters too. This could be an article about a particular photograph of historical, aesthetic or biographical interest to you. It could be about some cultural or philosophical aspect of photography. It could be something we've not thought about. We enjoy writing that is thoughtful, funny, well researched and surprising. It could be personal or dispassionate. It could be fun, or deadly serious. It might shed new light on something we thought we knew or introduce us to something we've never heard of before.

Details here: https://www.source.ie/writingprize2024/

The limited number of complete runs of photography periodicals in libraries and special collections, as well as the absence of digitised and easily searchable runs of these journals acts as a constraint on research.  Initiatives such the 1970s microfilming of photography publications, to the RPS journal digitisation in the mid-2010s have shown the value of increasing their availability to students, academics, and the public. 

There is now a proposal to undertake a digitisation programme of some of the more significant photography journals to support a growing level of research in the field.  

This three-minute survey seeks your views as to what would be most useful. The results will be published in an anonymised form and will determine whether the initiative moves forward, or is trialled, pending a full rollout.

To participate click here: https://forms.office.com/r/LVcNZNESMn

Edinburgh's Stills Gallery is seeking a director, to further develop the work of Stills so that it meets strategic objectives agreed with the Board, and that the organisation retains and advances a high national and international reputation achieved through quality programming, excellent stakeholder relationships, optimum income generation and effective management. The Director will be expected to work across the following areas:

A bold new study of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Victorian photographs charts the legacy of colonialism following the 1857 Indian Uprising. Julia Margaret Cameron, the celebrated Victorian photographer, was a child of the colonies. Born in 1815 in Calcutta, she was the daughter of a governing official of the East India Company. After relocating to London in 1848, Cameron was embraced by other British expatriates and a celebrated cultural network. This circle included literary personalities like Thackeray and Tennyson, painters and critics associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and political figures like Thomas Babington Macaulay and Lord Lansdowne.
 
In 1857, Indians rebelled against British rule, and in London, Cameron became absorbed by news of the Uprising. In the aftermath of the revolt, national and imperial politics transfixed England, some seven years before Cameron took up photography. The impact of those forces, and the inspiration of the literary, artistic, and political works produced by her circle, influenced her earliest imagery. Through close readings of these photographs, which she assembled in photographic albums, this book exposes how Cameron embedded in her work a visual rhetoric of imperial power.

Jeff Rosen is a former academic dean at Loyola University Chicago and professor of art history at Columbia College Chicago. He is now a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Julia Margaret Cameron. The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography
Jeff Rosen
Paul Mellon Centre
£45, 292 Pages, 215 x 269 mm, 101 colour + b-w illus.
https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9781913107420/julia-margaret-cameron/

Photographers, particularly those in the North, will be sad to learn that after 26 years of supporting photographers and championing photography throughout the UK, Redeye, the Photography Network will wind down on 31 July 2024 due to a number of factors, including lack of funding.

Very sad - Redeye did some wonderful work over many years and I was so pleased to be involved with Paul Herrmann and the team over that time. With the Centre for British Photography on ice at the moment it is a worrying time for our independent photography community. 

From the Redeye Board:

Redeye was set up to advocate for photographers at every level and build networks across photography, delivering an innovative and vital programme. We are actively continuing to explore potential options for new provision of this service and hope to make a further announcement in the near future.

Over the next few weeks, we will celebrate our proud history of giving a voice to photographers, helping with professional development, and providing a platform to share photography events, photographers’ work and relevant opportunities. We will mark the many achievements the network has made through the hard work and dedication of Redeye staff and its board of directors. We would like to thank all our members, supporters and the photographers who have helped shape us, particularly in the North of England.

Please continue to check this social channel and our website (link in bio) for further announcements in the coming weeks.

Lindsay Taylor, on behalf of the Board of Directors:
Geoff Crossley
Asif Salam
Liz Wewiora
Suzanne St Clare
Verity Adriana
Simon Hyde

Redeye was created in 1998 by a group of photographers who met in Manchester to discuss research into what the region's practitioners needed in regard to North West Arts.With many facilities in demand such as darkrooms, exhibition spaces and help with legal matters, they decided that most photographers needed an environment in which they could network and learn from each other. By the beginning of 1999 these meetings had become regular. Some of the group, chaired by Len Grant, volunteered to help run the organisation. The award-winning British photographer Paul Hill gave the first of six talks that launched Redeye events in October 1999. The first paid member of staff was appointed in 2001, and a co-ordinator was selected the next year.

Image: Redeye, The Photography Network’s logo

Anderson & Graland, the Newvastle-based auction house is auctioning an extensive collection of press photographs from the South Sheilds Gazette. The eighty-six lots cover a range of subjects from royalty, football, sports, actors and popular music, bands, film, as well as pictures of local subjects, and come from the Press Association and elsewhere.

The Collectors' Auction
Anderson & Garland
4 July 2024
Details:  https://www.andersonandgarland.com/auction/search/?st=Gazette&sto=0&au=718&sf=%5B%5D&w=False&pn=1

Join Nick Wright all the way from America on a journey back in time to experience ultra-high-resolution views of Gold Rush San Francisco. Nick Wright has painstakingly recreated Muybridge's early panorama of the city by assembling multi-plate photographs. This will truly be an amazing chance to see old San Francisco, like never before.

Nick Wright is the founder of the History Alliance, with 2-million members, including San Francisco History and US History. He has given lectures at many institutions. His speciality is early San Francisco panoramic photography by Watkins, Muybridge, and W. H. Jackson. He grew up in Palo Alto near the Stanford Farm that sparked his interest in Muybridge.

Online Talk with Nick Wright
Thursday, 11 July 11 · 1900-2000 (BST)
Details: https://www.kingstonheritage.org.uk/homepage/126/san-francisco-in-kingston-muybridge-and-panoramas-inspired-events

I have just posted a new Blog Post: THE RAMBLINGS of a Darkroom Dinosaur...Inspired by the current edition of PhotoResearcher Journal No 41, 'The Darkroom: Chemical, Cultural, Industrial', published by European Society for the History of Photography.

Dr Katayoun Dowlatshahi / Silverwood Art Studio & Darkroom

Rachel Segal Hamilton, a journalist who specialsies in photography, has written an extended essay for the Birmingham Despatch on the photography collections at the Library of Birmingham and the legacy of Pete James (pictured right). It looks at the history of Birmingham's photography collections and the current situation. 

Read the full piece here: https://www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/p/the-library-of-birmingham-hosts-a

Images: Michael Pritchard