Blogs

The Royal Society has digitsied and made available over 10,000 letters of the astronomer and photographic pioneer Sir John Frederick William Herschel FRS (1792-1871) for the first time on the Royal Society’s Science in the Making archives portal. This collection of nearly 10,900 letters, drafts, copies and notes is the largest repository of scientific correspondence from and to Sir John Herschel, leading figure of Victorian science and is based on 

Digital audiences can now travel through time to read about Herschel’s work in his own words and those of his correspondents. They can delve into first-hand accounts of Herschel’s mapping of the southern hemisphere skies and his contribution to the development of photography, including inventing the blueprint. They will also find his early mathematical work, and even his contested translation of Homer's epic poem, The Iliad.

The V&A has recently acquired a collection of over 2,000 photographs by Bert Hardy (1913-95). Hardy was chief photographer for Picture Post magazine from 1941 to 1957 and the photographs in the acquisition span his entire career and consists mostly of vintage prints and some Kodachrome slides. His work represents a highpoint of twentieth-century British photography and international photojournalism. Hardy was the subject of a recent retrospective exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery, London. 

The School of Journalism at Cardiff University holds the Bert Hardy archive containing material from 1936-2018. See: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/0766a454-c2f6-3f9d-ad1c-5497bd17e07f

The V&A is currently advertising a PhD student placement to work on the collection. 

To provide opportunities for early-career training for PhD students, the V&A has made available a range of doctoral placements based in collections departments, archives, the National Art Library, research, and collections care and access. Each placement is a discrete project designed by members of V&A staff (who will also act as the placement’s supervisor), involving collaborative as well as independent research.

The RPS Medical Group was founded in 1946. While the Group continues to exist, its collection of an estimated 4,000 photographs and archival papers, dating from the 1910 until the 1990s, now forms part of the V&A RPS collection.

The collection appears to have been formed as a resource for teaching and research, a record of technical advances, a platform for the recognition of photographers and hospital photography units, and as a visual record of surgical procedures, medical conditions and pathology.

The collection has a UK focus, with works by key practitioners such as the Group’s founder, Rosalind Maingot (1894-1947) and radiographer John Arthur Fairfax Fozzard (1905-93). It also contains the work of photographic departments including St Bartholomew's, Royal Free, St Thomas’ and Guy’s hospitals in London.
The collection contains some sensitive and graphic imagery. Ethical considerations will be a key factor in considering approaches to its cataloguing, research and dissemination. The student would be expected to seek advice from the V&A terminology group and experts outside of the museum sector.

The main tasks are to survey the material and its physical condition, categorization and organization, to organize and rehouse items in appropriate storage, research and write a summary and to catalogue a selection of the holdings.

This is an unpaid doctoral placement that is financially supported by the successful applicant’s PhD stipend in line with UKRI guidance.

See: https://vam.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3519937?cid=3279&rsid=24732&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

To provide opportunities for early-career training for PhD students, the V&A has made available a range of doctoral placements based in collections departments, archives, the National Art Library, research, and collections care and access. Each placement is a discrete project designed by members of V&A staff (who will also act as the placement’s supervisor), involving collaborative as well as independent research.

The project will investigate holdings related to Latin America in the V&A Photography Collection. It will focus on objects acquired between 1850 and 1950, to situate findings in the context of early global networks and institutional connections to Latin America that can be mapped through photography. Many relevant holdings feature in bound photographic albums from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are largely uncatalogued and undigitised. Other relevant holdings include topographical imagery, travel photographs and photographs of Latin American artefacts, as well as work by well-known photographers from the 20th century.

The placement will produce a survey of holdings related to Latin America in the Photography Collection, outlining historical context, scope and content. It will create a findings list for uncatalogued objects; and undertake more detailed provenance and object-level research for a defined group of material, resulting in new or enhanced catalogue records. The student will be encouraged and supported to write a blog post and lead a Print Room event relating to their work.

The project builds on momentum across the V&A to engage with Latin America. It will contribute new ways of thinking through institutional histories, and ripen collections for use in the Photography Section’s contemporary commissioning programme.

This is an unpaid doctoral placement that is financially supported by the successful applicant’s PhD stipend in line with UKRI guidance.

See: https://vam.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3515597?cid=3279&rsid=24732&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

To provide opportunities for early-career training for PhD students, the V&A has made available a range of doctoral placements based in collections departments, archives, the National Art Library, research, and collections care and access. Each placement is a discrete project designed by members of V&A staff (who will also act as the placement’s supervisor), involving collaborative as well as independent research.

The V&A has recently acquired a collection of over 2,000 photographs by Bert Hardy (1913-95). Hardy was chief photographer for Picture Post magazine from 1941 to 1957. His work represents a highpoint of 20th century British photography and international photojournalism. The photographs in the acquisition span his entire career and consists mostly of vintage prints and some Kodachrome slides. The V&A seeks a student to work with Photography Curators on cataloguing the collection on a database and to organise, number, sleeve and box the photographs. The student will also be expected research a specific aspect of the collection that links with their interests.

This is an unpaid doctoral placement that is financially supported by the successful applicant’s PhD stipend in line with UKRI guidance. full time

Details: https://vam.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/3519915?cid=3279&rsid=24732&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

Side Gallery which had temporarily closed last year and was under threat of permanent closure (see here) having lost its Arts Council National Portfolio status and funding has provided an update of its position. In 2023 is secured over £50,000 as part of a Crowdfunding exercsie and it has just been awarded a £236,000 grant by The heritage Fund which 'secures our building for the next year, which will allow us to host pop-up exhibitions and do comprehensive cataloguing.'

Side's statement sent to those who had supported its Crowdfunder says: 

When we last emailed you in March we had several exciting updates to share about the collection, however, the future of Side Gallery was still uncertain… 
We had one final funding application under review, which if not won would mean the permanent closure of the Side Gallery. 
I am pleased to announce that we have been awarded a £236,000 grant by The Heritage Fund thanks to National Lottery players. 
This grant secures our building for the next year, which will allow us to host pop-up exhibitions and do comprehensive cataloguing.
But this grant isn’t just about the gallery, it’s much bigger.
This means exploring new partnerships and ensuring we are more connected to working photographers and the North East arts community. 

This grant will enable us to run a 12-month project that includes:

• Expanding our team (new roles to be announced soon)
• Business & Resilience Development
• Creating new exhibitions representing many viewpoints, nurturing an inclusive culture
• Exploring new ways to collaborate with new artists, audiences and lifelong supporters. 
• A comprehensive, publicly accessible catalogue of the AmberSide Collection

The grant puts us on the path to reopening the gallery, but we not going back to business as usual; instead, we are forging a new direction that is mindful of our original principles.

We have a long way to go, but we would not have made it this far without you
Your donation to #SaveSide allowed us to protect the collection and gallery space and spend time creating the highest-quality funding applications. 
Thanks to you and the 2,000 others who care deeply about telling North Eash stories we #SavedSide. 

We’ll share updates and stories from the project along the way, and can’t wait to see what this next chapter brings for the collection and photography in the North East. 

All the best, 

Laura Laffler

Amber Film & Photography Collective

See: https://www.amber-online.com/side-gallery/

Here is a low-res. image of the report from the British Journal of Photography on 18th Feb. 1977.  I am looking to passing on the archive I have (courtesy of the family of Richard Sadler who assembed it) to a researcher who might take the project of collating and assembling the material to give a full picture of this innovative project.  It comprises media files of recordings of the lectures, transcriptions of them, articles on those delivering them, correspondence with the visitors, photographs and other materials.  If you have an interest I'd be pleased to hear from you. 

If you are a cartomaniac like me, you will definitely be interested in a new book on the subject by renowned collector, Paul Frecker, which is scheduled for release next week, and can be pre-ordered now. 

Paul is also giving an online talk about the carte-de-visit on 18 July. 

Cartomania: Celebrity, Deception and Identity
Online, free, at 1800 (BST) | 1900 (CET)
Register here

Acclaimed British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014) was famous for his evocative documentary images of young people growing-up in Britain in the mid-1950s and 1960s. This exhibition, of around sixty almost exclusively vintage photographs, includes many of his iconic street images of children and teenagers, alongside an almost entirely unknown selection of intimate and moving later images of his own family at home in Dorset, as well as those taken on his honeymoon in Spain in 1962.

Self-taught and influential in the acceptance of photography as an art form, Mayne was passionate about photographing human life as he found it. This is the first exhibition of his work since 2017.

Roger Mayne: Youth
14 June-1 September 2024
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
London, The Courtauld
See: https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-roger-mayne-youth/

The photographs in this exhibition do not depict rare or special things. They show toothpaste, tombstones, and hats. But these familiar trappings of everyday life will be, at times, unrecognizable—so altered by the camera as to constitute something entirely new. Enticing consumers with increasingly experimental approaches to the still life genre, the photographs featured transform everyday objects into covetable commodities. The camera abstracts them from functional use, at times distorting them through dizzying perspectives and modulations of scale. Spanning the first century of photographic advertising, the exhibition will illustrate how commercial camerawork contributed to the visual language of modernism, suggesting new links between the promotional strategies of vernacular studios and the tactics of the interwar avant-garde. Corporate commissions by celebrated innovators, including Paul Outerbridge, August Sander, and Piet Zwart, will appear alongside obscure catalogues and trade publications, united by a common cause: to snatch the ordinary out of context, and sell it back at full price.

The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography
until 4 August 2024
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
See: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-real-thing-unpackaging-product-photography

Image: Anton Bruehl (American (born Australia), Hawker 1900–1982 San Francisco, California)

On 13th June at 6.30pm I will launch this book by Jeremy Hill of Monksgrange Archives on the photographic work of Goddard Orpen. The event will take place in the Gallery at Farmleigh House in the Phoenix Park Dublin. The house was formerly owned by the Guinness family and is now owned used by the Government of Ireland for various functions and as a residence for State visitors to Ireland such as Queen Elizabeth II, who stayed there in 2011.

Orpen was both a lawyer and an historian. His wife Adela Richards had inherited Monksgrange House and Estate in County Wexford, Ireland from her father. Goddard added photography to his many talents and took photographs at Monksgrange and elsewhere in Ireland and also in other countries such as Great Britain, Italy and France. He also engaged in painting and was a cousin of the famous Irish painter Sir William Orpen, some of whose work is also being exhibited at Farmleigh https://www.farmleigh.ie/events/orpens-at-farmleigh/

The prints being exhibited were taken from 5x4 inch and 5x7 inch dry glass plates with some also from film negatives. This work was done with great skill and care by Irish photographer Anthony Hobbs. The text is by Jeremy Hill who is the current owner of Monksgrange and keeper of the Monksgrange Archives https://www.monksgrangearchives.com. The book will be available from that site following publication

Orpen's photography is of a very high standard, particularly as regards both composition and his use of light. The standard is well beyond that of the usual 'gentleman amateur' of his period as this image of his daughter Iris playing the violin in 1898 shows. The handling of the light on the face of Iris would be difficult to achieve with modern equipment, let along the equipment available, even to wealthy photographers, in the 1890s

Adela, who was born in Virginia USA, was the wife of Goddard and mother of Iris and her brother Eddie and was also a painter herself. One of the exhibits in the exhibition features a scene at Rue de l 'Echaude in Paris which was photographed by Goddard and also painted by both himself and Adela, all done in 1899. Eugene Atget later photographed the same scene in 1905. Here is Adela photographed by Goddard in England in 1885 

The exhibition also features many other works showing the Orpen family, the farm at Monksgrange, 19th Century trains as well as travel in Ireland, Britain, France and Italy. All of the works exhibite are of a universally high standard. The cover photograph for the book shows Adela at work in her garden with her son Eddie and some family pets beside her. At the right behind Eddie is the family observatory which contained a 6 inch Grubb telescope, made in Dublin. Anyone who has read my blog before will know my enthusiasm for anything made by Thomas and Howard Grubb and that I have a collection of their 19th Century camera lenses.  In a nice piece of symmetry, the gallery at Farmleigh is just beside a large clock tower which contains a clock made by Howard Grubb c 1880 - 1885. Details are here https://www.farmleigh.ie/the-clock-tower-at-farmleigh/ 

I am looking foward to speaking at this event about the work of a wonderful Irish photographer, who was unknown to me until recently, unlike his more famous cousin whose work I have admired for many years. Jeremy Hill and Anthony Hobbs are to be thanked for bringing this wonderful work to our attention. 

With the most extensive retrospective of her photography yet staged in the UK, Tate Britain celebrates Lee Miller as one of the 20th century's most urgent artistic voices.

First exposed to a camera by working in front of it, Miller was one of the most sought-after models of the late 1920s. She quickly stepped behind the lens, becoming a leading figure in the avant-garde scenes in New York, Paris, London and Cairo.

The exhibition will showcase Miller’s extraordinary career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography. Exploring her artistic collaborations, the exhibition will also shed light on lesser-known sides of her practice, such as her remarkable images of the Egyptian landscape in the 1930s.

With around 250 vintage and modern prints, including those never previously displayed, the exhibition reveals Miller's poetic vision and fearless spirit.

Determined to forge her own path, she later commented, ‘It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.’

Lee Miller
Tate Britain
2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/lee-miller

Image:  Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England c.1943. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Tate Modern, London, has given advance notice of a new exhibition Global Pictorialism which will run from 4 December 2025-25 May 2026. It is being developed and researched by the Tate's new photography curator Charmaine Toh.  Discover how pictorialism, the first international art photography movement, developed across the world from the 1880s to the 1960s.

Bringing together over fifty artists from Shanghai to Sydney, New York to Cape Town and Brazil to Singapore, this truly international exhibition takes a fresh and inclusive look at the history of art photography. Featuring never-before seen works from around the world alongside pieces from Tate’s Collection, Global Pictorialism highlights the vast and varied artistic possibilities of photography as a medium.

Global Pictorialism
4 December 2025-25 May 2026
London, Tate Modern
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/global-pictorialism

Image: Luo Bonian, Drawing Water from a Well series, May 1932 ©️Luo Bonian, Courtesy of Luo Bonian Art Foundation and Three Shadows +3 Gallery

A Pressphotoman mini-series of blogposts featuring new research about photography in 1860s Eldon Square, Newcastle upon Tyne has just been published.

Part 1 explores how W. & D. Downey came to open a studio at number 9.
Part 2 traces William Softley Parry's photographic journey to number 17.
Part 3 investigates whether their neighbours at number 7, Edward and Eliza Charlton, were skilled 3D photographers.  

Read here

Photo credit: Eldon Square, Newcastle upon Tyne c. 1860s. Courtesy of Private Collection, Zurich.

We call for papers that explore new ways to study magazines and magazine photography as practiced in the United States, 1930-1970. We invite participation from all scholars, writers, curators, archivists, librarians, artists, and independent researchers who use illustrated print culture in the study of American social history.

We seek to loosen categories such as “photojournalism,” “art photography,” “documentary,” “illustration,” or “snapshot,” in favor of broader consideration about the multiple ways photographs function. We are interested in all forms of photography destined for the printed page: editorial, advertising, illustration, educational, scientific, political, and more. We invite consideration of all kinds of magazines, including general interest and fashion as well as science, medicine, shelter, design, travel, house organs for corporate clients (such as The Lamp/Standard Oil of New Jersey), industry publications and propaganda (Amerika, published by USIA).

We invite proposals (from any discipline) for 20-minute talks about US magazine history, 1930 to 1970. We hope to reconsider the historiography of magazine photographers, editors, and designers, to highlight the collaborative nature of magazine production, explore technological considerations, and reveal behind-scenes decision making. How did the public’s interest in photography influence the growing marketplace?

We are inspired by exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, (re)Framing Conversations: Photographs by Richard Avedon, 1946-1965, Princeton and MFA Boston’s, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (2022), The Jewish Museum’s Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine (2021), and Art Gallery of Ontarios’ Building Icons: Arnold Newman’s Magazine World, 1938-2000 (2023), and by scholarship such as Nadya Bair’s The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (2020), Thierry Gervais, The ‘Public' Life of Photographs (2016), and Vanessa Schwartz and Jason Hill, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (2015), and the National Museum of African American History’s co-stewardship, with J. Paul Getty Trust, of the Johnson Publishing Company Archives.

This day-long set of presentations and discussion will be held at the National Museum of American History. Speakers will receive an honorarium. The goal of the conversation is to expand histories, explore new methodologies, identify repositories, and build scholarly community.

Please send a 300-word proposal, and short bio to: photographyandmagazines@gmail.com by July 1, 2024.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum in Exeter has announced the inaugural Stephen Herbert Award, which will enable a researcher to come to the museum to consult the museum's early cinema or optical media holdings. The award is named after the much loved and hugely influential film historian Stephen Herbert, who died last year. The award has been kindly gifted to us in Stephen’s name by his partner Mo Heard and we welcome applications that focus on the areas that particularly excited Stephen; the optical media that preceded cinema, such as magic lanterns, illusions, stereoscopes, and animated toys, and the first couple of decades of cinema history in the 1890s and early twentieth century. Material collected by Stephen has been donated to the museum recently, such as his work on magic mirrors and the pioneer Wordsworth Donisthorpe. Applicants could consult these items, or any of the other extensive holdings at the museum from a variety of donors on moving images from the 17th century up to around 1918. Go to www.bdcmuseum.org.uk for more information on our collections.

The award is for up to £500 and we particularly welcome applications from early career scholars or from independent researchers who might otherwise find it difficult to afford to visit Exeter. The monies are to be used for travel and accommodation costs incurred while visiting the Museum to undertake significant research that will be enhanced by access to our collections. Proposed research should contribute to publications or other demonstrable outcomes, such as films or artworks. Successful applicants will be required to write a blog post for the museum’s website about their research following their visit.

See more and apply: https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/news/the-stephen-herbert-award/

A new blog discusses the University of Cambridge 1897 vote on whether to allow women the titles of their degrees, and looks at the photographs that recorded extraordinary scenes.  The vote (Spoiler alert) went badly against the women and it was not until 1948 that women were finally admitted to full membership of the University. A day and night of riotous celebrations by the male undergraduates followed. Shop windows were broken, a giant bonfire was lit in the Market Square and fuelled with pillaged shutters and any other wood that the students could lay their hands on.

The extraordinary scenes of 21 May 1897 were captured by photographers stationed on rooftops and high places around the Senate House, where the voting took place. Photographs by Messrs Stearn on the Cambridge Digital Library capture the massed crowds and the excitement of the men spilling out of the Senate House after the result was announced. Of all the photographs, surely the most iconic is that of the crowd beneath the notorious effigy of a ‘new woman’ bicyclist in blue bloomers and pink bodice, suspended from a window above the Bowes & Macmillan (now Cambridge University Press) bookshop. The effigy was later pulled down and decapitated by the jubilant undergraduates.

Read the full blog and see the photographers here: https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=28325

Presented at the André Malraux Museum of Modern Art – MuMa, the exhibition Photographing in Normandy (1840-1890). A pioneering dialogue between the arts aims to highlight the decisive role that Normandy played in the beginnings of photography. Exhibiting photographs on the occasion of the fifth edition of Normandie Impressionniste and especially for the 150th anniversary of the movement, makes perfect sense, as painting and photography have maintained close links, underpinned by a spirit of invention, of emulation and innovation which led to the renewal and multiplication of images in the nineteenth century.

The exhibition brings together masterpieces of painting and photography, from pioneers to the biggest names, including amateurs. Iconic works rub shoulders with rare or little-known works. The variety of formats and techniques allows us to understand the extraordinary technical abundance of these beginnings of photography. The paintings of Impressionist and pre-Impressionist painters come from the prestigious collections of the MuMa, the Musée d'Orsay, the Fine Arts museums of Amiens, Caen, Honfleur and Lyon (including Jongkind, among others). Courbet, Dubourg, Boudin, Pissarro, Monet …) alongside photographs by Hippolyte Bayard, Stéphanie Breton, Hippolyte Fizeau, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, the Macaire and Warnod brothers, John Ruskin, William Henry Fox Talbot … Near two hundred works are to be discovered.

A field of experimentation and innovation for the greatest photographers since the 1840s, whether inventors or artists, Normandy is the ideal place to measure the reciprocal influence of the arts. Photography records a rich heritage whose fragility and importance we then measure, follows the progress of the transformation of the coasts by seaside architecture and the arrival of rich summer visitors, seeks the picturesqueness of the countryside, tackles the scenes of genre and maritime views very clearly asserting his artistic ambitions.

The period covered by the exhibition extends from the first years when photographic techniques were disseminated, until the dawn of a new era, that of cinema and the democratization of photography, notably via photo clubs. The animated image was then close to marking the end of the century, and the creation of photographic companies reflected the renewed accessibility to the process. The precursors, the professionals and enlightened amateurs are no longer the only creators of images. Another story begins.

Photographing in Normandy 1840-10890
25 May-22 September 2024
Details: https://www.muma-lehavre.fr/fr/expositions/photographier-en-normandie

Image: Alphonse DAVANNE, N°2 Etretat Left cliff , 1864, Print on albumen paper from glass negative, 24 x 31 cm. Paris - National Library of France

We are pleased to invite you to the 2-day symposium Vestiges of Memory: Intersections between Photography and Autobiographical Memory held at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury on 18 – 19 July. Across two days, this research symposium sets out to explore new ways in which 21st century artists, photographic practitioners and other researchers interrogate, mine, imagine, respond to, question and reflect upon intersections between autobiographical memory photography.

Vestiges of Memory: Intersections between Photography & Autobiographical Memory
Thursday 18th July – Friday 19th July 2024
The University for the Creative Arts, Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AN Information, programme and registration: https://www.uca.ac.uk/events/research/vestiges-of-memory

eidolon is delighted to announce the launch of its first international grant for projects which explore, promote and conserve vernacular photography. The deadline for submission is 30 August , and applications can be made under two categories, with a total of €25.000 to be distributed. The eidolon Grant is an international programme that is presented annually to artists, academics, professionals, researchers, collectors and vernacular photography enthusiasts whose past work and proposed project is centred around the image heritage of everyday photography.

Details: https://everydayphotography.org/centre/grant#about