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Oxford, 6 October 2014 – The Bodleian Libraries have secured the final funds needed to acquire the Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot.  The final funds come via a legacy donation to the Libraries.   

The Bodleian’s appeal to acquire the Fox Talbot Archive was launched two years ago in late 2012 with an aim to raise the £2.25 million needed to purchase the Archive.  A significant grant of £1.2 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) in December 2012 gave the appeal a vital boost with further gifts from the Art Fund along with donations from numerous other private individuals and charitable trusts helping to increase the tally to £1.9 million. The recent legacy donation has allowed the Bodleian Libraries to now reach its target of £2.25 million.  

The campaign to raise funds has been widely supported by many well-known names across a variety of disciplines for which the Talbot archive has particular significance. These include: photographers Martin Parr and Hiroshi Sugimoto, artist David Hockney; Director-General of the Royal Photographic Society, Michael Pritchard; scientists Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society; Sir Michael Berry, FRS, Melville Wills Professor of Physics, (Emeritus), University of Bristol; and historians Colin Ford, CBE, Founding Head, National Media Museum and Prof Martin Kemp, FBA former Prof of Art History, University of Oxford. 

Announcing the news on Sunday 5 October at the Photography Oxford Festival 2014, Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian said:  ‘We are so pleased to have reached our fundraising target and are at last able to secure the Fox Talbot archive. We are extremely grateful for all the donations we received, from the grants awarded by the Art Fund and the NHMF to all the individual donations and for the unwavering support we’ve had in our campaign. We look forward to making this fascinating and important resource available to scholars, students and the photographic community.’ 

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was one of the greatest polymaths of the Victorian age, and is most famous today for being the British ‘founder of photography’. The Archive contains enormous potential for greater understanding of the breadth of Talbot’s scholarly activities, and of the influences exerted by the women in his family, in particular their educative roles, their shared interests in botany, languages, art, travel and history which are so central to Talbot’s work, and their roles as practitioners, supporters, and collectors of the new art.    

The Talbot Archive also includes artefacts such as glassware and artworks that Talbot photographed for the ground-breaking publication The Pencil of Nature, the first book illustrated with photographs. There is a strong connection to Oxford as the Archive includes some of the first pictures of the city.

Alongside items related to his pioneering work in photography, the Archive also sheds valuable light on his personal life, his role managing his estate at Lacock, his life as a Member of Parliament, and his range of intellectual interests from science to ancient languages. 

About the Personal Archive of William Henry Fox Talbot

The Fox Talbot archive includes:

• original manuscripts by Talbot
• family diaries
• family drawing and watercolour albums and sketchbooks, including images made  by Talbot’s mother, his wife,  and by his sister
• correspondence
• early photographic images made by Talbot
• an image made by Talbot’s wife, c. 1839, which may be the earliest image made by a woman
• several hundred photographs received by Talbot - by other photographers from Britain and across the continent, contemporaries of Fox Talbot who shared their images and attempts at early photography
• portraits of Talbot and his family
• materials and artefacts related to the Lacock estate including estate plans, bills etc
• books from Talbot’s personal library
• musical scores from Talbot and his immediate family
• scientific instruments from Talbot’s own collection
• botanical specimen albums made by Talbot and members of his immediate family.

Having now acquired the Archive the Bodleian Libraries plan to run a series of public events to support access to the Archive, including a major exhibition in 2017. Highlights from the Archive will also feature in the opening exhibition for the Weston Library and in a number of smaller displays.

The Talbot Archive will also provide rich material for a related project based at the Bodleian Libraries, the development of a Catalogue Raisonné of Fox Talbot’s photographic work.  The Bodleian recently appointed Professor Larry J Schaaf as Project Director for the Catalogue. The goal is to make more than four decades of Schaaf’s research available to a wider public audience through an online resource, and to invite scholars from a range of fields to add to the catalogue by contributing their knowledge and research related to Talbot’s life and work. 

Schaaf is also the founder and Editor of the Online Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot which includes fully annotated transcriptions of more than 10,000 of Talbot’s letters at www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk.

At a public meeting held at Oxford’s Bodleian Library today, Head Librarian Richard Ovenden (right) made the first announcement of three initiatives that will support William Henry Fox Talbot studies in the United Kingdom and internationally. At the same time they will make the Bodleian central to Talbot studies and the lead of the world’s three principal Talbot archives held at the National Media Museum, Bradford, the British Library, London, and the Bodleian, Oxford.

Ovenden was able to announce, firstly, the completion of the acquisition of the Talbot family archive for the Bodleian which completes the £2.2 million purchase, saving the archive for the nation. (Click here for the previous BPH report on the archive appeal).  

Secondly, he introduced Dr Mirjam Brusius (left) as an Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Bodleian. Brusius will lead a renewed focus on the history of photography in Oxford, centred on the Bodleian and will lead work on cataloguing, digitising and interpreting the Talbot archive.

Thirdly, he announced that Professor Larry Schaaf’s long mooted project of preparing a catalogue raisonné of Talbot’s photography had secured funding and would be housed at the University of Oxford and Bodleian Library. He described this as a ‘major scholarly venture’. Schaaf, who is the world’s foremost Talbot scholar, had long had hopes of preparing such a catalogue.

The catalogue raisonné, along with the recent cataloguing of the British Library, Bodleian and National Media Museum Talbot holdings, and the availability of Talbot’s online letters, has the potential to radically inform and revise Talbot’s role in the development of negative/positive photography and will help support a new chronology of his work.

Schaaf, speaking to the audience, (right) said the catalogue raisonné would allow researchers to ‘associate things we’ve never seen before…[and] reveal variations  never studied before’. Schaaf, who has been researching Talbot for more than forty years, has produced a series of landmark books, catalogues essays and papers on Talbot, his circle and his photography. He is project director for the Talbot letters project at now hosted by De Montfort University. He paid tribute to past Talbot historians including Harold White who’s work had prepared the ground for his own and to Matilda Talbot, who did much to ensure his legacy was preserved.

Schaaf currently has some 25,000 Talbot negatives and positives recorded in a DOS-based database and one of the new project’s tasks will be to migrate this data to a new platform that can also support images.

He concluded his presentation by saying, partly tongue-in-cheek, that ‘Digital photography is Talbot’s invention’.

More information will be made available by the Bodleian Library shortly. 

Oxford today saw William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography launched at a reception at the Bodleian Library. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age—a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies.

Drawing on Talbot’s fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, including historians of science, art, and photography, broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science.

Edited by Mirjam Brusius (shown right), Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam; With essays by Katrina Dean, Eleanor Robson, Mirjam Brusius, Graham Smith, Larry J. Schaaf, Simon Schaffer, Herta Wolf, Vered Maimon, Anne Secord, Chitra Ramalingam, and June Barrow-Green.

See: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300179347

Mirjam Brusius is postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Harvard University.Katrina Dean is a university archivist at Melbourne University. Chitra Ramalingam is postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

The Canal & River Trust has published online over 37,000 archive records and over 22,000 historic images from its archives for the first time ever.  The £50,000 project is the first phase of a major project to open up public access to the national waterways collection.

The Waterways Archive is housed at the National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port and is the largest archive of waterway-related materials in the country.  This important collection, which holds a wide range of primary material relating to the history of Britain’s canals and inland waterways, will be available for the public to access online from canalrivertrust.org.uk/archive 

Margaret Harrison, collections manager, Canal & River Trust said: “We’re so excited to be able give the public online access to these images for the first time.  The website includes over 20,000 archive images many of which help show the often hidden social history of the canals; the navigators who built them; the boating families that traded on them; and more recently the volunteers who campaigned to save them. These images sit alongside engineering plans, toll tickets, songs and maps amongst others.”

The archive images will be available for the public to purchase later in the year and the Trust is already putting in place plans to digitise a further 15,000 images.

Wendy Capelle, head of museums and attractions, Canal & River Trust said: “The Canal & River Trust cares for an extraordinary treasure-trove of historic images, documents and artefacts that trace the story of the nation’s inland waterways as far back as the 17^th century.  This project starts to throw some light on our wonderful collection and make it more accessible for students, historians and enthusiasts.”

The Canal & River Trust is working with specialist teams at UK Archiving and SSL Limited to complete this digitisation project.

Image: Mr Charles Burdett gauging a coal boat at Hawkesbury Junction, 1950s

The J. Paul Getty Museum announced today the acquisition of 49 photographs by documentary photographer Chris Killip (British, born 1946). Combined with one photograph already in the collection, the Museum now owns the complete set of 50 images found in Killip’s landmark book In Flagrante (Secker & Warburg, 1988). This gives the Getty the most significant group of vintage Killip prints in an American institution. The acquisition was made possible through the collective assistance of the Getty Museum Photographs Council, along with individual contributions from several members that allowed the Museum to purchase the complete body of Killip’s work.

Made between 1973 and 1985, Killip’s photographs document the social landscape of Northern England during the economic downturn that plagued the region. The images primarily feature working-class people and areas affected by the deindustrialization of Britain, and subjects range from derelict landscapes and council estates to parades and benefit concerts organized around the miners’ strikes of 1984. The scenes evoke the social tensions and economic upheaval of the period in British history known as the Thatcher era, named after Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979-1990. The photographs were compiled and reproduced in In Flagrante, considered by the artist to be a distinct and highly personal project.

“Chris Killip’s work offers an intimate and highly personal portrayal of the social impact of England’s industrial decline in the politically fraught years of Thatcher’s fight against the unions,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This acquisition greatly expands our holdings of Killip’s most important work, as well as strengthening the Department’s collection of postwar documentary photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. Our holdings of Killip will now have an important place beside those of Bill Brandt, Josef Koudelka, Martin Parr, and Graham Smith.”

Killip is considered one of the most influential documentary photographers of the postwar generation. Born and raised on the Isle of Man, he has made a career of documenting the people of Great Britain and the environments in which they live. As a result of his intensive approach, which frequently involves his immersion in the communities he photographs, Killip often forms strong relationships with his subjects and achieves an unparalleled intimacy in his work.

Killip’s work has been exhibited internationally, and in 2012 the Museum Folkwang in Essen organized a retrospective which traveled to Le Bal in Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Publications released during the last fifteen years include Pirelli Work (2006), Here Comes Everybody (2009), Seacoal (2011), and arbeit/work (2012).

On Sunday, October 19, Chris Killip will speak about his work at the Getty Center at 4:30 p.m. in the Museum Lecture Hall.

Plans for the exhibition of the photographs will be announced at a later date.

Image: Bever, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire (1980). Chris Killip (British, born 1946). Gelatin Silver print, 27.9 x 34.4 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council. © Chris Killip

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923 - 1937 has its UK premiere at The Photographers’ Gallery this Autumn, presenting over 200 vintage prints, many on public display for the first time since the 1930s.  

Brought  together  especially  for  this  presentation, they  mark  the  period  when Steichen was working for Condé Nast on their two most prestigious publications: Vogue  and Vanity  Fair.    The  exhibition  offers  a  rare  opportunity,  not  just  to witness a key period in history but also to gain insight into Steichen’s distinctive approach  towards  portraiture  and  fashion  photography.  First  and  foremost  an independent art photographer, he was a major pioneer in the development of the medium and its status as an art form.  

Steichen was already an internationally celebrated painter and photographer when in 1923 he was offered the lucrative and high-profile position as chief photographer at Condé Nast.  During his period of employment there, Steichen was said to have been  the  best  known  and  highest  paid  photographer  in  the  world.  For  the  next fifteen  years,  Steichen  would  take  full  advantage  of  the  resources  and  prestige conferred  by  his  role  to  produce  an  oeuvre  of  unequalled  brilliance.    His  work defined  the  culture  of  his  time,  capturing  iconic  figures  in  politics,  literature, journalism, dance, theatre and, above all, the world of haute-couture.

Universally  regarded  as  the  first  ‘modern’  fashion photographer,  he  was  in  fact originally  appointed  to  take  portraits  of  the  great  and  the  good  that  graced  the pages of Vanity Fair.  Seeing the effect these images had on the readership, he was persuaded to turn his attention towards the fashion pages in Vogue.  

The  works  in  the  exhibition  convey  Steichen’s  forward  thinking  and  ‘painterly’ techniques.  He  borrowed  from  a  range  of  aesthetic  movements  including Impressionism,  Art  Nouveau  and  Symbolism  to  create a  characteristic  Art  Deco style.  Within  his  meticulous  compositions,  he  treated  his  subjects  as  vehicles through which to explore shape, form, texture, light and shade. 

In High Fashion presents  photographs that depict designs from  Chanel,  Lanvin, Lelong, Patou, Schiaparelli amongst many others, alongside a series of portraits.  These  include  luminaries  such  as  Greta  Garbo,  Cecil  B.  De  Mille,  Winston Churchill,  Marlene  Dietrich,  Josef  von  Sternberg,  Frank  Lloyd  Wright,  Amelia Earhart, the writers W.B. Yeats and Colette; the dancers Martha Graham and Fred Astaire   and   the   musicians   Vladimir   Horowitz   and   George   Gershwin.  

Providing  an  Art  Deco  backdrop  for  the  images  is  a series  of  three  unique wallpapers  that  Steichen  designed  for  Stehli  Silks Corporation  as  part  of  their Americana  Prints  collection  (1925 - 27).  This  collection  featured  specially commissioned patterns from noted artists and celebrities of the time. Steichen used abstract arrangements of matches, eyeglasses, jellybeans, rice, buttons and threads to create his designs.  Also on display will be a selection of rare copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair presenting Steichen’s photographs in their original context. 

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923 - 1937 is curated by William A. Ewing, Todd Brandow and Nathalie Herschdorfer and produced by The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery. This exhibition has previously been shown in North America, Australia, Asia and Europe. 

Visitor Information:

31 October 2014-18 January 2015

Opening times: Monday - Saturday, 10:00 - 18:00, Thursdays, 10:00 - 20:00,
Sunday 11:30 - 18:00
Exhibitions admission: £4.50 / £3.50 concessions, free entry Mondays – Fridays
10:00 - 12:00, free entry to under 16s
Address: 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW
Nearest London Underground Station: Oxford Circus
T: + 44 (0)20 7087 9300
E: info@tpg.org.uk
W: thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Image:

Edward Steichen
Actress Mary Heberden, 1935 (Vogue, March 15, 1935) Courtesy of Condé Nast Archive, Condé Nast
Publications, Inc, New York/ Paul Hawryluk, Dawn
Lucas and Rachael Smalley

A one-day postgraduate symposium is being held on 25 November 2014 in the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester. Photographic Histories of Psychology seeks to explore how photography and psychology have influenced each other throughout their histories. Its aim is twofold: to uncover how psychological notions have informed photographic practices, and to bring into light the historical role that photography has played in the making of psychological knowledge and its public dissemination.

The emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline and the popularization of photography occurred in parallel in the last third of the nineteenth century. Since then, photographs have been used in psychological experiments, and psychological theories of perception have been applied to understand the reception of photography. Whereas much research has been done on these topics, only sparse scholarly literature has attended to other aspects such as the role that photographic images played in the configuration of psychological and psychiatric thinking in the nineteenth century, and the ways in which psychological findings have penetrated into popular culture by means of photography.

Photographic Histories of Psychology will contribute to this scholarship by reflecting on how photographic materials have circulated through scientific and non-scientific contexts. It proposes to analyse the ways in which professional and amateur photography have historically appropriated, negotiated, rejected and disseminated psychological ideas. Rather than focusing on the notion of photographic representation or its meaning, we invite contributors to examine how, for example, psychological definitions of memory have affected the notion of the archive and the family album; how psychological theories on emotions have incited different gestures and expressions in front of the camera; or what role the illustrated press has played in the dissemination or depathologization of psychological disorders. Conversely, the event also seeks to examine how practices such as photographing, collecting photographs, or posing for the camera have penetrated into psychological discourses. How, for instance, particular uses of photography have inspired psychological research into historically specific patterns of behaviour.

Registration now open
registration fee include sandwich lunch, tea and coffee

There are various products available, please make sure to register using the correct category:

* £0: This category is only for PHRC students and symposium speakers
* £10: This category is for De Montfort University students only
* £20: This category is for students of any other institution
* £26: This category is for non-students

Read more and register here: http://photographichistory.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/photographic-histories-of-psychology-one-day-postgraduate-symposium/

The two-day symposium aims to reflect on the role and relevance of architectural photography as a form of expression, as historical record and as spatial narrative.  Additionally, the symposium will examine the impact of collecting architectural photographs as well as their preservation and dissemination by means of digitisation, exhibitions and publications. The presentations and discussions will pay tribute to the late Robert Elwall, founder of the RIBA Photographs Collection and a distinguished curator and author whose influential international history of architectural photography Building with Light has given the symposium its title. 

Keynote speakers will include architectural photographers and academics such as Canadian photographer Geoffrey James whose panoramic images of the built landscape explore the relationship between society and its surroundings; Hélène Binet, a Swiss-French architectural photographer based in London and the author of Composing Space: The Photographs of Hélène Binet; Hugh Campbell, Professor of Architecture at University College Dublin; and Iñaki Bergera, a Spanish architect, photographer and theorist.

The symposium’s topics will cover broad research areas such as the historical and contemporary evocation of architectural interiors, buildings, place and landscape; forms of photographic response to genius loci and national identity; the reciprocal influence on and with publishing; and curatorial issues and approaches to architectural photography over time.

For more information and to book tickets visit http://www.architecture.com/WhatsOn/November2014/BuildingWithLightTheLegacyOfRobertElwall.aspx

Image: Sherborne School Dorset, 1960. © Edwin Smith / RIBA Library Photographs Collection

Interestingly and coincidentally two current postings: the John Dillwyn Llewelyn album to be sold at Sotheby’s and the Story Maskelyne camera obscura, at Christie’s are connected.

John Dillwyn Llewelyn was the father-in-law of Nevil Story Maskelyne, who had inherited the camera obscura from his grandfather, the Rvd. Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal. Before her marriage, Nevil’s wife, Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, assisted her father and became an accomplished photographer in her own right.  Her mother, Emma Thomasina née Talbot, printed Llewelyn’s negatives and Llewelyn’s sister, Mary Dillwyn, too, was a photographer. This family of pioneering women photographers is documented in some detail alongside the featured John Dillwyn Llewelyn in Noel Chanan’s recent biography, The Photographer of Penllergare (I reviewed this last year). Thereza’s surviving diaries and the three volumes of her late memoirs form an important thread in the narrative. Nevil’s meeting with Fox Talbot, his courting of Thereza and his subsequent career are also detailed alongside selective reproductions of his work. For those that missed it first time round a description of the Llewelyn biography and some of its many illustrations can be seen at

http://www.the-photographer-of-penllergare.co.uk

Please provide any information on the photographer, preferably with a source available via the Internet. Please take a look at the cover of his stationery shown there: http://www.photographyinphilately.com/piwigo/picture.php?/717/search/801 ;

A call for papers has been made for a workshop organised byProfessor Elizabeth Edwards and Dr Ewa Manikowska and titled: Survey Photography and Cultural Heritage in Europe (1851-1945):  Expanding the Field. The large-scale application of photography to the recording and preservation of cultural heritage is a transnational movement that appeared at a very particular cultural moment. This focuses on the phenomenon of survey photography in the same historical period,  from Britain in the age of High Empire across Europe to the multi-ethnic territories of the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. While there are striking links between the survey images produced in such distinct cultural and political contexts, there are also similarities and differences in the patterns underlying their production, use, dissemination, impact and the networks of survey actors.  This workshop emerges from the conviction of a need to establish a new research agenda at the intersection of the cultural history, history of photography,  and the concept of national heritage. Thus, the core aims of the workshop are to explore the practices and politics of photographic survey and to indicate and delineate the topics, chronology and methodology of survey photography seen as a European phenomenon (both in its transnational and local aspects) closely linked to the Western concepts of culture, identity and memory.

We invite papers both general and based on specific case-studies from the period between 1851 and 1945, which consider survey and record photography in its wider European context and which contribute to an understanding of its wider definition, analysis and understanding. The workshop will discuss survey photography:

-          as a response to specific historical moments;

-          as a local and transnational phenomenon;

-          as a codification of national heritages;

-          as a scientific and an amateur practice;

-          as a geographical practice;

-          as a response to imperial expansion/consolidation;

-          as definition of group identities through the visualisation of cultural heritage;

-          through its institutions and actors;

-          through its specific photographic practices;

-          through the photographic survey archive;

The workshop will take the form of pre-circulated papers (all papers to be submitted by the end of February 2015). Participants will be asked to use their papers as the basis of a 20 or 30 minute presentation (depending on final schedule) addressing the issues of the workshop.

The number of speakers is limited to 20. Applicants will be notified of the chosen proposals by 30 November 2014. The workshop will take place on 14–15 April 2015 in the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Accommodation costs can be covered when necessary.

Survey Photography and Cultural Heritage in Europe (1851-1945):  Expanding the Field

(A workshop organized by Prof. Elizabeth Edwards and Dr. Ewa Manikowska

Warsaw, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, 14–15 April 2015)

Abstract of no more than 300 words should be sent by 15 October 2014 to:

Dr Manikowska (emanikowska@hotmail.com) & Professor Edwards (eedwards@dmu.ac.uk)

De Montfort University's Photographic History Research Centre has published its Autumn research seminar programme. All are welcome and there is no need to book, just turn up. Enquriies can be directed to the convener: Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Photographic History Research Centre (eedwards@dmu.ac.uk). For abstracts check PHRC website or PHRC blog http://photographichistory.wordpress.com

Autumn 2014

Tuesdays 4 – 6pm   Hugh Aston Building  [check rooms for each seminar]

October 14  (HU 2.31)

Caroline Edge (University of Bolton)

Creating a collaborative Worktown Archive: Mass Observation and mass photography

In 1937 Mass Observation announced their intention to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ which would document everyday life in Britain. Photographer Humphrey Spender was recruited to participate in the organisation’s experimental study of Bolton. This lecture examines how his photographs, now held in the Worktown Archive at Bolton Museum, have been documented and reactivated using photographic methods in collaboration with the local community. 

November  11 (HU 2.08)

Dr Louise Purbrick (University of Brighton)

Collodion prints and corrugated iron: photography, materiality and the nitrate trade

On the surface of slag heap in an abandoned nitrate works lies a broken panel of corrugated iron. The nitrate works, Oficina Alianza, is one of many industrial ruins of the Atacama desert of northern Chile, sites once exploited by European speculators who dominated the extraction and export of nitrate, a highly valued ingredient of fertilizers and explosives.  At the height of the trade in late nineteenth century, a photographic album, Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899, was sent as a ‘souvenir’ to the senior partner of British merchant house Antony Gibbs and Company at his City of London offices by representative of his firm in Chile. It contained around a hundred collodion prints that traces the mining of nitrate, its movement across the desert to Pacific ports and European markets. The album, a material form in its own right, also documents the materials from which nitrate works were constructed: corrugated iron, an industrial colonial architecture that remains characteristic of industrial ruins of northern Chile. These entangled material presences of nitrate trade are examined in this paper as documents of the chemical, industrial and capitalist transformations of a remote desert landscape.

December 9 (HU 2.31)

Professor Maiken Umback and Professor Mathew Humphrey  (University of Nottingham)
Picturing Nature: Photographs (and Non-photographs) Between Political Mobilisation and Ideological Decontestation

Pictorial representations of nature abound, but how, when, and why are images of the natural world used for ideological purposes? In this paper we examine two, apparently conflicting, ideological strategies involving representations of nature – stabilisation and mobilisation. Ideological discourse can utilise nature for the purposes of naturalisation: they link politics with a particular conception of the natural order that reinforces existing belief structures and renders them ‘invisible’. Nature can also be used to mobilise support against existing political arrangements, to disrupt and challenge hegemonic power structures, to critique industrial society, even civilisation itself. As we shall argue, the two can also become paradoxically intertwined.Images play a crucial yet complicated role in such processes. Thus, when and for what purposes those who mobilise nature politically think photography a helpful vehicle, when they consciously abstain from using photographs, and when they reach for alternative genres of visual representations, are questions we explore (though shall not be able to answer definitively) in this paper.

The Irish Office of Public Works has published a book on the photographer William Despard Hemphill (1816–1902), a native of Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. The book accompanies an exhibition about Hemphill that is currently touring venues around Ireland. 

A well-respected medical practitioner with a wide range of interests, Dr Hemphill experimented with the latest photographic techniques and won several prestigious awards. At a time when photography was a complex, expensive and sometimes dangerous pursuit, Hemphill was among the first to photograph in detail antiquities such as the Rock of Cashel and Holycross Abbey. He was welcome too in some of the ‘big houses’ around Clonmel where there was considerable interest in amateur photography.

Hemphill’s images – portraits, still life, architecture and scenery – are records of immense historical value. They are also sublime works of art, inviting us to reflect on temporal beauty, artistic rendering and photography as interpretation. A fascinating aspect of Hemphill’s work was his stereoscopic photography.

The illustrated 104 page publication: William Despard Hemphill, Irish Victorian Photographer (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2014). ISBN 9781406428254) is edited by Dr Karol Mullaney-Dignam, and includes contributions from David H Davison, Richard Comerford and Eric Earle.

I am in the early stages of a project designed to establish a database of British users of Gustave le Gray's waxed paper process in the 1850s and would delighted to hear from collectors and curators who might have contemporary salt or albumen prints from waxed paper negatives in their collections. A low res thumbnail of any image would be a very useful addition.

I am interested in the work of any UK-born photographer who used the process, wherever in the world he or she might have done so. The project is exclusively concerned with users of pre-waxed negatives, and not the many contemporary post-waxed plain paper processes.

Anyone who has such images, or who has questions about the project can contact me at john@johnhannavy.co.uk

Thanks, Professor John Hannavy

Christie's is to offer a Jones camera obscura associated with Nevil Story-Maskelyn in an auction of Travel and Science on 8 October 2014. It is estimated at £4000-6000. The camera obscura was previously offered by Christie's in 2012 when it sold for £15,000 ($24,180) including buyer's premium and VAT.and in June 1981 when it failed to sell.  Sadly Christie's has only illustrated the device from the back but it is complete with a lens. 

Christie's have described the lot as 'associated' with Nevil Story-Maskelyne when, as was reported on this blog in 2012 it is actually a late eighteenth/very early ninetreenth century camera obscura (the clue is in the ink stamp which refers to 'His Majesty', with Victoria not ascending the throne until 1837). It's first owner was Story Maskelyne's grandfather, the astronomer royal, Nevil Maskelyne (1732-1811), from whom it was passed down.

The previous BPH blog report and discussion can be found here and the lot description for the upcoming auction here. 

Lot Description

A CAMERA OBSCURA ASSOCIATED WITH NEVIL STORY-MASKELYNE
Jones, mid-19th century
reflex model, the mahogany body of dovetail construction, with hinged lid, lens in wooden mount and 'push-pull' focusing front section, signed JONES Artist LONDON ; BY HIS MAJESTY'S SPECIAL APPOINTMENT No. 4, Wells Street Oxford Street.   12½in. (32cm.) long

Provenance

Nevil Story Maskelyne (1823-1911).
Thence by descent.
Christie's South Kensington 25 April 2012, lot 69.

Lot Notes

Nevil Story-Maskelyne (1823-1911) left law for the Natural Sciences in 1847, and was soon lecturing on mineralogy, a field he would come to lead. His research ran from the petrology of Stonehenge to developing the collection of minerals and meteorites at the British Museum into the 'largest and best arranged series ... in existence' (ODNB online). He and his wife Thereza May Llewelyn were both involved in the pioneering of photography. He was close friends of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) -- whose own camera obscura is held at the Science Museum London.

Hemera, a London based curatorial collective specialising in photography, has just launched the London Photography Diary,  a website dedicated to listing photography exhibitions, events, and conferences in London: www.london-photography-diary.com.  The website also features photography related videos, reviews,  and an image sharing portal. Please check it out and join our mailing list to receive our weekly newsletters. The two curators who are editing the site are Sarah Allens and Rachael Graves.

The Derby Telegraph reports  that the Winters studio, Derby, has discovered a cache of previously unknown negatives and is looking for volunteers to helps conserve and digitise them, as it makes its archive available. It notes: Thousands of glass plate negatives are stacked in a cold, damp cellar – but even the staff at Winter's have no idea what is in them. The shop's manager, Angela Leeson, said: "We have managed to archive some of the collection and make sure that it is secure and not going to be damaged by the damp."However, the negatives in the basement are a complete mystery.

Anyone interested in helping to catalogue the archive should e-mail office@wwwinter.co.uk or call 01332 345224.

An open day is taking place at the studio on 13 September 2014. See: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/open-day-w-w-winter-photographers-11-13-september

Read more here: http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Thousands-images-Derby-s-past-cellar-photography/story-22899390-detail/story.html

Image: Derby Telegraph

Sotheby's New York is to offer an album of photographs by John Dilwyn Llewelyn from the collection of Paul Walter on 30 September. This album comes originally from the collection of the photographer’s granddaughter, the ‘Mrs. Crichton’ referenced on the title page (née Emma Charlotte Llewelyn).  It was among a rich selection of albums of Llewelyn’s photographs offered at Sotheby’s Belgravia in 1977.

The catalogue text reads: 

JOHN DILLWYN LLEWELYN

1810-1887

AN ALBUM, ‘PHOTOGRAPHS BY J. D. L.’

an album comprising 51 leaves with mounted photographs, including many views of the Llewelyn Family Estate, Penllergare, and Environs, studies of the Llewelyn Family including several Composite Groups, one with a decorative pen and wash border, numerous Botanical Studies, and many charming Rustic and Scenic Views, albumen prints, most identified in ink on the mount; the title calligraphically inscribed ‘Photographs by J. D. L’ in black and red ink beneath a mounted photographic stag head, and ‘Sir John Dilwyn [sic] Llewelyn, brother to Mrs. Crichton’ in a later hand in ink, 1850s. Small folio, 1/2 red leather, marbled paper boards 

The photographs 8 3/4  by 11 1/4  (22.2 by 28.6 cm.) and smaller

PROVENANCE

Sotheby’s Belgravia, 1 July 1977, Lot 188

CATALOGUE NOTE

This album comes originally from the collection of the photographer’s granddaughter, the ‘Mrs. Crichton’ referenced on the title page (née Emma Charlotte Llewelyn).  It was among a rich selection of albums of Llewelyn’s photographs offered at Sotheby’s Belgravia in 1977.  John Dillwyn Llewelyn married a cousin of William Henry Fox Talbot, and thus became a member of Talbot’s circle.  He had already experimented with the daguerreotype in the 1840s, and moved on to paper photography, with impressive results, in the 1850s.  The images in this album show, among an array of subjects, many facets of the idyllic Llewelyn family estate in Wales, Penllergare, and its much-celebrated grounds.  Llewelyn was the son of a botanist, and his love of plants, landscaping, and, by extension, the natural world is manifest in this charming album.  Views of nature and plants are complemented by studies of the Llewelyn family and neighbors, including images entitled ‘Gipsies,’ ‘Our School Children,’ and ‘Willy Fishing.’  Also included are Llewelyn’s photographs of neighboring houses, Sketty Hall and Lanelay, and images of local color, including the fully-manned ‘Tenby Lifeboat.’

In addition to his keen aesthetic ability with the camera, Llewelyn was a technical innovator, as well.  An early adopter of the wet-plate process, he overcame the need to sensitize plates on-site through the use of Oxymel, a mixture of honey and vinegar, which kept the plates moist and camera-ready for the duration of a photographic outing.  The 60-odd photographs in this album give ample proof of Llewelyn’s status as one of the most accomplished and broadly-talented photographers of his day.       

See more here: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/photographs-n09204/lot.47.html

Following on from the recent BPH exclusive news of the auction of a Rejlander album of 70 prints the complete album is now available to view online as a page-turning version. Click the link here to access it: http://bit.ly/VPXWfU

The auction viewing is Tuesday 9 September from 2 - 7pm, Wednesday 10 September from 10am - 4pm and on the morning of the sale, Thursday 11 September from 8:30am. 

UPDATE 2: The album sold for £70,000 to 'a foreign institution'. Asssuming that it is exported then the album will be subject to an export licence before it can leave the UK.  

See the original report here: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/exclusive-rejlander-album-of-70-prints-to-be-offered-at-auction

Autograph ABP presents Black Chronicles II, a new exhibition exploring black presences in 19th and early 20th century Britain, through the prism of studio portraiture – continuing its mission of writing black photographic history. 

Drawing on the metaphor of the chronicle the exhibition presents over 200 photographs, the majority of which have never been exhibited or published before. As a curated body of work, these photographs present new knowledge and offer different ways of seeing the black subject in Victorian Britain, and contribute to an ongoing process of redressing persistent ‘absence’ within the historical record.

Many of the images on display have very recently been unearthed as part of our current archive research programme, The Missing Chapter - a three-year project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. This is the second exhibition in a series dedicated to excavating archives, which began with ‘The Black Chronicles’ in 2011.

Black Chronicles II is a public showcase of Autograph ABP’s commitment to continuous critical enquiry into archive images which have been overlooked, under-researched or simply not recognised as significant previously, but which are highly relevant to black representational politics and cultural history today.

For the first time a comprehensive body of portraits depicting black people prior to the beginning of the second world war are brought together in this exhibition - identified through original research carried out in the holdings of national public archives and by examining privately owned collections. This research also coincides with Autograph ABP’s continuous search for the earliest photographic image of a black person created in the UK.

All of the photographs in the exhibition were taken in photographic studios in Britain prior to 1938, with a majority during the latter half of the 19th century. Alongside numerous portraits of unidentified sitters, the exhibition includes original prints of known personalities, such as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, goddaughter to Queen Victoria; Prince Alemayehu, photographed by renowned photographer Julia Margaret Cameron; or Kalulu, African ‘boy servant’ (companion) to the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley. This extensive display of over 100 original carte-de-visite is drawn from several collections, and presented in dialogue with Autograph ABP’s 1996 commission ‘Effnik’ by Yinka Shonibare MBE.

A highlight of the show is a dedicated display of thirty portraits of members of The African Choir, who toured Britain between 1891-93, seen here for the first time. Perhaps the most comprehensive series of images rendering the black subject in Victorian Britain, these extraordinary portraits on glass plate negatives by the London Stereoscopic Company have been deeply buried in the Hulton Archive, unopened for over 120 years. These are presented alongside those of other visiting performers, dignitaries, servicemen, missionaries, students and many as yet unidentified black Britons. Their presence bears direct witness to Britain’s colonial and imperial history and the expansion of Empire.

Black Chronicles II
12 September – 29 November 2014
Rivington Place, London
EC2A 3BA
Admission Free

See: http://autograph-abp.co.uk/exhibitions/black-chronicles-ii

Images:

top: Mussa Bhai, The Salvation Army, 1890. London Stereoscopic Company studios. Courtesy of © Hulton Archive/Getty Images; below: John Xiniwe and Albert Jonas, London Stereoscopic Company studios, 1891. Courtesy of © Hulton Archive/Getty Images