Blogs

In recent years scholars both in Japan and Australia have become increasingly concerned with the close ties between these two emerging nation-states in the nineteenth century. Whereas much of the scholarship on Japan’s international relations of the period has focused on the Euro-American ‘treaty port’ powers, this talk asserts the significance of merchants as transcultural mediators in the Asia-Pacific region. To do so, the analysis will focus on vernacular, often marginalised forms of visual culture such as family photograph albums, postcards, private art collections, and company adverts. Specifically, this talk will examine as case studies two business partners in Meiji Japan who shared strong personal ties to the Australian colony of Victoria: Samuel Cocking and Theophilus Alexander Singleton. Through their long-term careers spanning their entire adult lives in Japan, this talk aims to highlight the direct cultural ties between nineteenth-century Japan and Australia, and in so doing, to challenge those twentieth-century historical narratives that understood the two nations’ ties as mediated through the Euro-American metropolitan centres.

Luke Gartlan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews and serves as editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed quarterly journal History of Photography.

Venue:Room: KLT

Organiser: Centres & Programmes Office & SOAS Japan Research Centre

Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk

See more here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/jrc/events/seminar-and-events/25oct2017-trading-places-photography-and-anglo-australian-merchants-in-meiji-japan-.html

A new temporary exhibition featuring Victorian and Edwardian cartes-de-visite and cabinet card portraits opens at the College of Optometrists in London on Sunday 17 September. The distinctive feature about this small exhibition is that all the portraits are of people wearing spectacles or vision aids, or they relate to blind or visually impaired people. We Called to See You: Visual Aspects of Victorian Cartes-de-Visite Portrait Photographs features items from the internationally renowned British Optical Association Museum, supplemented by extensive loans from the Ron Cosens Collection in association with the website www.cartedevisite.co.uk.

Victorian cartes-de-visite, first patented in 1854, were a novel way of sharing a photographic studio portrait... and many surviving examples feature spectacles, providing us with an interesting social record of the eyewear of the time and the manner in which the sitters cultivated their self-image. They were the first photographs to be published en masse and, hence, form a particularly useful early record of real people wearing glasses.

The launch of the exhibition coincides with the College's annual participation in the Open House London event, and the College will be open to visitors that afternoon between 1pm-5pm, free of charge, with no booking required. Normally, however, the exhibition will only be open on Mondays-Fridays during office hours, by prior appointment.

The College of Optometrists
42 Craven Street
London
WC2N 5NG

Exhibition Website

Hello, I am looking for information on this Julia Margaret Cameron photo 'The Neapolitan' by JMC, 1866, depicting her cousin, May Princep. This is a CDV sized print, 8.5 x 6 cm, pasted to a paper mount, 21 x 16 cm. This image is not on a Cameron CDV mount, so apparently pasted into a private album.

Ford and Cox's "Complete Photographs" notes that Cameron made private albums of her "Miniature" Photos for friends and family. I am wondering if anyone would have a guess as to where this image originated.

Are there private albums that included only a few Cameron photos? Was this image sold to the general public?

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

David McGreevy

The International Journal on Stereo & Immersive Media is a new open access and peer-reviewed journal that aims to reflect on the emergence of our progressively immersive media culture with a historical, critical and contemporary perspective. This immersive media culture depends both on state of the art technologies and on historical and archaeological media that once sought to expand our sensory experiences.

This Journal welcomes papers addressing the redesign of our sensory mediation, focusing on one or more of the following themes:

1. Stereoscopic and Panoramic Photography (historical and contemporary)
2. Optical and Otological Media Archaeologies
3. Media Arts and Immersion
4. Architecture, Games and Augmented Realities
5. Urban behaviour and the Influence of Sound devices
6. Sonic Art and New Technologies

Please find registration and submission informations at http://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/stereo/information/authors

Submissions deadline: 16 October

Image caption: Sir Charles Wheatstone and his family by Antoine Claudet,
Stereoscopic daguerreotype, circa 1851-1852 © National Portrait Gallery, London

An exhibition of 14 portraits by Andrew Paterson are on display at the Inverness College UHI until 30 September, as part of the 2017 FLOW Photography Festival. They can be seen in the second floor library/art gallery. 

Andrew Paterson (1877-1948) was an internationally renowned, multi-award winning artist-photographer, whose studio was based in Inverness from 1897 until his death in 1948 (then taken over by his son Hector until 1980). Paterson’s services were sought over several decades by many leading political and commercial figures of the day. The Glasgow Daily Record noted that “his portraits have been regarded as setting new standards of excellence in the expression of character.” His portrait photography was exhibited widely at home and abroad during his life-time, and there was a day in the 1920s when Andrew’s son Hector answered a knock at the studio door to be confronted by a tall lean man with a long grey bushy beard. He asked if Mr Paterson was in “because I want to be photographed.” It was George Bernard Shaw.

The restoration of Robert Howlett's grave is complete.  Restorers lifted the memorial plinth on Tuesday 1st August and, after some remedial work beneath, installed a new bespoke concrete base.  The plinth was then lowered onto this solid base which replaced crumbling, unstable brickwork, and will support his Yorkstone memorial indefinitely.

On 3rd August the obscured text inscription was re engraved using skills authentic to 1858, bringing the grave back to its original condition.

This crowdfunded project has only been made possible by the generosity of people from all corners of the world, photographers, distant relatives and anonymous well wishers.  Howlett's grave will be re dedicated on 14th October in a unique ceremony celebrating this young man's short life.  

Details here: http://www.rps.org/events/2017/october/14/re-dedication-of-pioneer-photographer-robert-howletts-memorial-norfolk

A JustGiving page is available for donations towards the on going care of his grave to preserve this wonderful restoration here: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/howlett-grave

From 500,000 photographs and 2,000 films in the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection held at Bristol Archives, 27 people were asked to choose just one. This exhibition reveals their choices and the reasons for that choice explained in their own words.

The former British Empire & Commonwealth Museum collected photographs and film from people who worked in the Empire, their families, and companies and government departments working with the colonies. Some are from well-known people, such as the writer Elspeth Huxley, others from anonymous photographers. Some record great historical events, but many document the everyday lives of families living and working abroad. It is a fascinating collection, giving a broad view of the Empire and the early years of independence.

The selectors include artists, photographers, film makers, colonial workers and their families, development workers and local communities. Each brings a different perspective to how they ‘read’ the image and the legacy of Empire.

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
30 September-31 August 2018
See more here: https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/empire-through-lens/

Does anybody know of any institutions who have Adolphe Braun photographs of the vault of the Sistine Chapel? Here in the History of Art Department at the University of Oxford we have a full set of 125 carbon prints that measure aprox 49x63cm. I have tried to find other institutions who may have a full series or part of it in any size but particularly in this larger scale. I see that the Getty have a set of 7 or 8.

http://ox.libguides.com/visualresourcescentre/braun

Any help would be much appreciated.

Francesca

Visual Resources Assistant

Here is an article written by an Indiana (USA) Anglophile - it includes his visit to Lacock Abbey. Fun read. "I squealed with geeky joy as I stood in front of the famous window. It’s a rather unremarkable photo of a window, but it’s the most important photo of a window ever taken."

https://www.anglotopia.net/british-history/winston-churchill/after-the-dreaming-spires-oxford-trip-diaries-day-nine-castle-combe-lacock-abbey-and-chartwell/

Lee

Shadows of War. Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 is a new publication to accompany the exhibition of the same name currently on show at The Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse until 26 November 2017. It will be shown in London at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace in 2018.

The book provides a description and context for the Crimean War and Fenton's photographs of the conflict, reproducing the photographs shown in the exhibition. The Royal Collection Trust holds one of the best collections of Fenton's work including 350 of his photographs of the Crimean conflict. Appendices, reproduce useful source material including original handwritten catalogue recording the photographs from 1855, thumbnails of the Fenton Crimean images in the Royal Collections and the Agnew and Co catalogue of 1855.

The book further extends the knowledge of Fenton and his photography we have from Roger Taylor and others. 

Shadows of War. Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855
Sophie Gordon
Royal Collection Trust, 2017
£35, 256 pages

No Man’s Land offers rarely-seen female perspectives on the First World War, featuring images taken by women who worked as nurses, ambulance drivers, and official photographers, as well as contemporary artists directly inspired by the conflict. Commemorating the First World War Centenary, No Man’s Land features photographs by three women of the epoch, alongside three women making work a century later.

Highlights include photographs never-before-exhibited frontline images by nurses Mairi Chisholm and Florence Farmborough; photographs by Olive Edis, the UK’s first female official war photographer; and new work by contemporary photographer and former soldier Alison Baskerville. This is the premiere of the nationally-touring exhibition before it travels to Bristol Cathedral, The Turnpike in Leigh, and Bishop Auckland Town Hall.

Unconventional motorcyclist-turned-ambulance driver Mairi Chisholm (1886–1981) set up a First Aid post on the Western Front with her friend Elsie Knocker. Using snapshot cameras, they recorded their intense life under fire at Pervyse in Belgium, just yards from the trenches. The images on display in the exhibition, drawn from Chisholm’s personal photo-albums, record her vitality and humour in the midst of great suffering.

Pioneering Olive Edis (1876–1955) is thought to be the UK’s first female official war photographer, and one of the first anywhere in the world. A successful businesswoman, inventor, and high-profile portraitist, Edis photographed erveyone from Prime Ministers to Suffragettes. During the Armistice, she was commissioned by the Women’s Work Subcommittee of the Imperial War Museum to photograph the British Army’s auxiliary services in France and Flanders. Edis took her large studio camera on the road, often developing plates in makeshift darkrooms in hospital x-ray units. Her skilfully-composed images show the invaluable contributions of female engineers, telegraphists, commanders and surgeons.

On the Eastern Front, nurse and amateur photographer Florence Farmborough (1887–1978) documented her incredible experiences with the Russian Red Cross on the border of Galicia (present-day Ukraine and Poland). At a time when the British press avoided explicit images, Farmborough depicted the horrific consequences of war, including corpses lying in battlefields. Her images of Cossack soldiers, makeshift field tents, and Christmas in an old dug-out, offer rarely-seen views of the Eastern Front before Farmborough fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.  

Contemporary photographer Alison Baskerville is a former soldier with an insider’s perspective on women’s experiences in the armed forces. With Soldier ,  a new commission made specially for No Man’s Land , Baskerville has been directly inspired by Olive Edis to make a series of portraits of present-day women in the British Army. Working in collaboration with Ishan Sadiq, Baskerville has produced a series of digital autochromes — a contemporary version of the early twentieth-century colour technology pioneered by Olive Edis. Presented as lightboxes, the portraits have a distinctive hazy appearance, made up of thousands of tiny coloured dots that glow.

Contemporary artist Dawn Cole was inspired by the chance find of a suitcase in the attic of a family house, discovering the photographs and diary of her great-aunt Clarice Spratling, a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in Northern France. Cole uses a many-layered technique incorporating photo-etching, digital manipulation and lace-making. She ‘weaves’ words from Clarice’s diary entries into images of lace-edged handkerchiefs and collars, creating photographic prints with hidden messages that explore the gulf between public face and private feelings.

Shot at Dawn by contemporary artist Chloe Dewe Mathews focuses on the ‘secret history’ of British, French and Belgian troops who were executed for cowardice and desertion between 1914 and 1918. Her large-scale colour photographs depict the sites at which the soldiers were shot or held in the period leading up to their execution. All are seasonally accurate and were taken as close as possible to the precise time of day at which the executions occurred. Made a hundred years later, her images show places forever altered by traumatic events.

Dr. Pippa Oldfield, Head of Programme at Impressions Gallery and curator of the exhibition , says, “Most people think of war photography as images of male soldiers, made by photojournalists in the combat zone. However, the work in No Man’s Land shows many other ways to photograph war, offering different viewpoints by women who have historically been excluded. I hope visitors will be moved and surprised by what they see”.

Alison Baskerville, exhibiting photographer, says “It’s a privilege to be exhibiting alongside such inspiring and fascinating women. Despite the distance of a hundred years, their images are still so raw and powerful. As someone who has served in Afghanistan, I recognise the challenges of being a women in a war zone, and the importance of sharing that story”.
 

No Man’s Land
Impressions Gallery, Bradford
From 6 October to 30 December 2017
http://www.impressions-gallery.com

No Man’s Land is curated by Dr. Pippa Oldfield and is a co-production by Impressions Gallery, The Turnpike, Bristol Cathedral, and Bishop Auckland Town Hall, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

The exhibition is supported by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Peter E. Palmquist Fund for Historical Research. Historical images are kindly provided by National Library of Scotland; Imperial War Museums, and Norfolk Museums Service. Soldier by Alison Baskerville is commisioned by Impressions Gallery.  Shot at Dawn by Chloe Dewe Mathews is commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford as part of 14–18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions. No Man’s Land is a member of the First World War Centenary Partnership led by IWM (Imperial War Museums). 

I am looking for information on the German born industrial photographer Adolf (sometimes Adolph) Morath who worked extensively for British Petroleum and the Kuwaiti Oil Company in the mid-20th century, photographing oil workers, their daily life and the company facilities in Kuwait and other places. Despite his huge portfolio, there seems to be hardly any information on Morath. I would be very thankful for any information, material or recommendation where to look.

Information Request :   Can anyone fill in detail about this Portrait worker and Photo Magazine author who seems to be connected with Norman Lewis, possibly through the Camera Club London. I understand he suffered a Motor Accident early in the War.

The second edition of the St Andrews Photography Festival opens on 1 September. The full programme is available here.

Of particular note to photo-historians are: 

• 40th anniversary of Stills Gallery. Stills is presenting a display of exhibition posters from its archive. Dating from 1977 to the present day, these chart the organisation’s rich and diverse programmes of exhibitions over the last 40 years. In that time, Stills has brought work by many of the world’s most celebrated and historically important photographers to Edinburgh for the first time for Scottish audiences to discover and enjoy at home.
• Calotype views of St Andrews / Robert Douglas. Using the methods and Chemistry described by Dr John Adamson combined with Victorian lenses, Robert Douglas the “21st century Calotypist” brings you Calotype Views of St Andrews harking back to the infancy of photography before the art became industrialised. These were produced during the course of several visits to St Andrews each image taking many hours to produce. They are the result of much research, effort and passion.
• Valentines Scottish Islands. This exhibition gives a flavour of how the postcard firm of Valentine & Sons depicted the Hebridean Islands of Scotland during the period 1890 to 1960. Valentine’s postcards and photographs of any place was driven by what they thought would sell to the public and this lead to a different depiction of the country to the tourist view we have today. Many of the images taken and made into postcards are of the towns and villages of the islands and transport as well as the more recognisable tourist attractions of the countryside, castles and ancient monuments. The images in this exhibition thus reflect the commercial and social values of the times and the purpose the images served in being a souvenir to send home, or a photograph to show on returning home in a time when few people had cameras.
• The Kinnairds of Rossie Priory.  Rossie Priory is a country house and estate to the north of Inchture. An early calotype photographic studio was established here for George Kinnaird, 9th Lord Kinnaird with the assistance of Thomas Rodger around 1850. These images represent a wonderful array of early photographic practitioners posing at Rossie Priory with their apparatus, portraits of gentlemen and ladies in period attire, key figures from Scotland’s early photographic circle, and the darkrooms at Rossie Priory.
• plus a range of talks, demonstrations and events

The National Portrait Gallery is to stage an exhibition of photographs by four of the most celebrated figures in art photography, including previously unseen works and a notorious photomontage, it was announced today, Tuesday 22 August 2017.

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography (1 March – 20 May 2018), will combine for the first time ever portraits by Lewis Carroll (1832–98), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), Oscar Rejlander (1813–75) and Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65).

The exhibition will be the first to examine the relationship between the four ground-breaking artists. Drawn from public and private collections internationally, it will feature some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history, including many which have not been seen in Britain since they were made. 

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will be the first exhibition in London to feature the work of Swedish born ‘Father of Photoshop’ Oscar Rejlander since the artist’s death. it will include the finest surviving print of his famous picture Two Ways of Life of 1856-7, which used his pioneering technique combining several different negatives to create a single final image. Constructed from over 30 separate negatives, Two Ways of Life was so large it had to be printed on two sheets of paper joined together.

Seldom-seen original negatives by Lewis Carroll and Rejlander will both be shown, allowing visitors to see ‘behind the scenes’ as they made their pictures.

An album of photographs by Rejlander purchased by the National Portrait Gallery following an export bar in 2015 will also go on display together with other treasures from the Gallery’s world-famous holdings of Rejlander, Cameron and Carroll, which for conservation reasons are rarely on view. The exhibition will also include works by cult hero Clementina Hawarden, a closely associated photographer. This will be the first major showing of her work since the exhibition Lady Hawarden at the V&A in London and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1990.

Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, his muse for Alice in Wonderland, are among the most beloved photographs of the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. Less well known are the photographs made of Alice years later, showing her a fully grown woman. The exhibition will bring together these works for the first time, as well as Alice Liddell as Beggar Maid on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Visitors will be able to see how each photographer approached the same subject, as when Cameron and Rejlander both photographed the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the scientist Charles Darwin, or when Carroll and Cameron both photographed the actress, Ellen Terry. The exhibition will also include the legendary studies of human emotion Rejlander made for Darwin, on loan from the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University.

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography celebrates four key nineteenth-century figures, exploring their experimental approach to picture-making. Their radical attitudes towards photography have informed artistic practice ever since.

The four created an unlikely alliance. Rejlander was a Swedish émigré with a mysterious past; Cameron was a middle-aged expatriate from colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); Carroll was an Oxford academic and writer of fantasy literature; and Hawarden was landed genty, the child of a Scottish naval hero and a Spanish beauty, 26 years younger. Yet, Carroll, Cameron and Hawarden all studied under Rejlander briefly, and maintained lasting associations, exchanging ideas about portraiture and narrative. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, they formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.

Lenders to the exhibition include The Royal Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Munich Stadtsmuseum; Tate and V & A.

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will include portraits of sitters such as Charles Darwin, Alice Liddell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle, George Frederick Watts, Ellen Terry and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘The National Portrait Gallery has one of the finest holdings of Victorian photographs in the world. As well as some of the Gallery’s rarely seen treasures, such as the original negative of Lewis Carroll’s portrait of Alice Liddell and images of Alice and her siblings being displayed for the first time, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity to see the works of all four of these highly innovative and influential artists.’

Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Curator of Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography, says: ‘When people think of Victorian photography, they sometimes think of stiff, fusty portraits of women in crinoline dresses, and men in bowler hats. Victorian Giants is anything but. Here visitors can see the birth of an idea – raw, edgy, experimental — the Victorian avant-garde, not just in photography, but in art writ large. The works of Cameron, Carroll, Hawarden and Rejlander forever changed thinking about photography and its expressive power. These are pictures that inspire and delight. And this is a show that lays bare the unrivalled creative energy, and optimism, that came with the birth of new ways of seeing.’

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is curated by Phillip Prodger Ph.D, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London. He is author and editor of eighteen books and catalogues, including the acclaimed Eggleston Portraits (2016). A recognised expert in Victorian photography, he is the author of the award-winning Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (2003) and Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution (2009), named by New York Times as one of the best art books of the year.

VICTORIAN GIANTS: THE BIRTH OF ART PHOTOGRAPHY

1 March -20 May 2018, at the National Portrait Gallery, London www.npg.org.uk

Tickets with donation: Full price £12 / Concessions £10.50

Tickets without donation Full price £10 / Concessions £8.50 (Free for Members and Patrons)

www.npg.org.uk/victoriangiants or 020 7321 6600 #VictorianGiants

Press View: Wednesday 28 February 2018 10.00-12.00 (with a curators’ tour at 10.30).

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated book by curator Phillip Prodger which will be available to purchase from the National Portrait Gallery shops priced £29.95 (hardback).

The exhibition will tour to Millennium Galleries, Sheffield June – Sept 2018

Images: Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll, 1858 (c) National Portrait Gallery, London; Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty ) by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866 © Wilson Centre for Photography, Photographic Study (Clementina Maude) by Clementina Hawarden, early 1860s © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Two ways of Life by Oscar Rejlander, 1856-7 (c) Moderna Museet, Stockholm

I have discovered yet another 19thC photographer in my family, this time on my Father's side and operating from the Old Kent Road area. I have found one of two examples of his CDV's but would welcome any further information?

Regards, Peter

The FLOW Photofest is presenting a series of talks on the work of Inverness salon photographer Andrew Paterson (1877-1948), the use of archives in contemporary art, and the results of a community curation project on a set of photographs of Francis Grant, an Inverness solicitor in the 1930s.

This day is sponsored by the Scottish Society for the History of Photography (SSHOP). All workshops and talks are being held in Eden Court Theatre in Inverness and admission is free.

For more details please check out the full programme at https://flowphotofest.co.uk/

Drawn by Light is the title of a two-part podcast, totalling nearly two hours, looking at the move of the RPS Collection from Bradford to the V&A Museum, London.  It looks at the reasons behind the move and the processes which underpinned it through interviews with some of those involved and others with an interest in the move. It uses the move of the RPS Collection as a prism to examine some of the wider issues around the centralisation and the funding of the arts in the United Kingdom.

Part one opens with Colin Ford CBE, the founding Head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT), reprising his story of how a national museum of photography came to Bradford culminating in its opening in 1983.  ‘Colin’s gift’ of the museum, as the interviewer Callum Barton puts it, was the natural home of the RPS Collection both of which embraced the art, science and technology of photography. The Collection was acquired in 2003 by his successor Amanda Nevill. When the move from Bradford to London was announced in 2016 Ford described himself as angry and upset and the move as wrong for photography, politically and geographically.

The broader context for the move has been an increasing centralisation of the arts in London and disproportionate funding cuts in the regions associated with the government's austerity programme since 2010. In to that mix the Science Museum Group’s (SMG) move to a STEM agenda, in support of government policies, spelt the end of an holistic approach to photography in Bradford. ‘Cultural asset stripping’ and more emotive phrases were used at the time.

For the National Media Museum (NMeM), the root of this lay with the near closure of the museum in 2013 and a proposed 30 per cent cut in funding. The public outcry in Bradford and from the wider photography world led to Ian Blatchford the SMG’s director being questioned by a parliamentary select committee. He defended the proposal highlighting declining visitor numbers and the impact of a poorly considered rebrand from NMPFT to NMeM in 2006. The subtext was that there was not enough science at the NMeM which had become a priority for the SMG and its constituent museums. The NMeM was ultimately saved and a process of review was set in train. In late 2012 Jo Quinton-Tulloch, was tasked with a brief to focus on science and technology and to realign the museum within the SMG. The holistic approach to photography, taking on both its art and science, was dropped in 2013 and a new mission statement published which concentrated on science and culture.

The RPS Collection with its primary focus on art and a user based concentrated on its artistic holdings became increasingly untenable.  In 2015 259 visitors used the Collection; the cost of maintaining it and making it available did not sit easily in a climate of declining funding.

Part 2 examines the transfer in more detail. In March 2015 Quinton-Tulloch proposed that the Collection be moved to a new SMG research centre. This proved unviable and the decision was ultimately taken to transfer the Collection to the V&A which offered to open it more widely physically and digitally. V&A curator Martin Barnes describes this in detail.

The wider discussion of centralisation in London of culture, a dramatic funding imbalance and an inequitable relationship between the centre and the regions occupies much of this part. Local authority cuts of 17 per cent since 2010, the stronger ability of the London institutions to raise private funding, all impact adversely on the regions. Barnes confirms that the first £1 million of the £7 million costs of the photographic research centre has already been secured in the space of a few months, something the SMG could only imagine. In 2012 80 per cent of private sector support for the arts went to London.

The RPS Collection transfer is cited as an example of London-centric trustees making decisions without any democratic or local accountability. Public consultation was absent, there was a lack of sensitivity to Bradford and the region and there had been no input from the wider photography sector. The poor handling of public criticism of the transfer by the SMG only compounded the controversy.

While due process between the SMG and V&A had been followed, the original purchase of the RPS Collection in 2003 through HLF and other sources, described in the podcast as ‘public money’, should have required a different approach. The SMG did not seek any compensation for the loss of the £4.5 million collection and Barton argues that such an approach potentially compromises future funding bids from HLF.  A policy fix is needed for such acquisitions. There are 13 further collections at the NMeM (now the National Science and Media Museum) including Tony Ray-Jones, the Herschel album, Talbot material and NMPFT/NMeM acquired material that have been earmarked for removal. Most telling, Burton suggests, is that the opportunity was missed to consolidate in Bradford at the NMeM, around one of  the greatest photography collections in the world.

So, what does the podcast tell us? Austerity and funding cuts disproportionately affect the UK regions; people do not want to lose cultural assets even if they rarely use them; that the decentralisation that saw the NMPFT move to Bradford in 1983 has been reversed; and, there is a growing centralisation of objects and funding in London. Ultimately, arts policy needs a serious and thorough review to deal with these issues.

What the podcast doesn’t do is provide the full story of the move of the RPS Collection to the V&A. There is much more that could be said around many aspects, including the original transfer from the RPS to the NMPFT and there are valid counter arguments as to why the move from Bradford to London, might have been the right one which should also be explored. These deserve an equal airing.

In the end, the debate about the RPS Collection transfer is academic. The V&A must now deliver on making the RPS Collection accessible and central to its new photography centre as it promised; the handling of any future disposals from the NMeM’s successor, the National Science and Media Museum, must be done more openly; and the photography world needs to do more to make its presence felt; although it may have been overtaken by events the absence of a national museum of photography is still up for discussion, but, most importantly, there needs to be a harder look at national arts policy, and the UK regions need to work to get the government and Arts Council England to allocate limited resources in a more equitable way.

Drawn by Light is a non-profit production for Saccadence
  it features interviews with Colin Ford, Michael Terwey, Martin Barnes, Francis Hodgson, Jo Booth and others. 
Written, edited and produced by Callum Barton
Listen to both parts here: https://www.drawnbylightpodcast.org/

The studio BYRNE & Co of Richmond - are any facts available ? I mean how long in the photographic business, who was owner/founder etc. Please take a look at the letter cover.

The photograph as a byproduct of intention does not begin with its publication. Although photographs are uniquely powerful because of their reproducibility, the specific camera equipment and its use also needs to be considered for a fuller understanding of the image. Research that focuses on camera technology will help us understand how and in what ways imaging technology impacts and forms the representation out of which we make knowledge, base our judgments, and ultimately act.

Before Representation: The Camera as Actor is an edited collection that aims to lead this conversation by bringing together scholars from various backgrounds and fields who study photographic technology in different time periods. By focusing on the camera, this edited volume builds on current literature to demonstrate the ways in which various types of imaging technology informs, elicits, and produces specific ways of seeing. Considering the photograph as a materialization resulting from a type of technology is often overlooked when thinking about the power of a photograph’s meaning. But photographs are the result of specific instruments that create powerful image extractions. A critical examination of camera technology will demonstrate the ways in which intention and imaginaries are married into facts through the potent inscription device called the camera.

Of particular interest are papers that take the camera as the object of inquiry with specific case studies about how photography has been, or is being, variously implemented and the impact it has on both social and scientific knowledge. From missile tracking to disease mapping, developing camera technology is being applied widely and variously to produce and render new and varied forms of photographic representations. Examining the types of changes that have occurred between older analogue forms and newer digital ones offers a comparative analysis about the ways in which camera choice does not simply influence the way a photograph looks, but determines which views and ideas are desired and potentially made possible.

Some questions authors might address include:

1. How have the camera and scientific research been related? Can the instrument be separated from its evidence?
2. Are affective qualities of the image created or enhanced through specific technologies?
3. What knowledge has been realized specifically through camera technology? What has been foreclosed?
4. What information has been asked from the photographic instrument?
5. What emerging photographic technologies exist and how are they being utilized?
6. Have changes in photographic technology ushered in new possibilities for the social?
7. Does new photographic technology impact identity, representation or sociality in ways that vary from earlier photographic technology? If so, in what ways?

Please email Amy Cox Hall (acoxhall@amherst.edu) by October 1, 2017 with an extended abstract and brief bio for consideration.