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P&O has a long and proud history stretching right back to 1815 when "a young man with no influence and but limited pecuniary means, opened an office in Lime Street, London and commenced business."  The young man was Brodie McGhie Willcox and he was joined in his new endeavour, as ship broker and agent, by Arthur Anderson, employed by him as a Clerk.  Willcox and Anderson soon became partners and with the financial backing of a Dublin ship owner, Captain Richard Bourne, the "Peninsular Steam Navigation Company" issued its first prospectus in 1835.  The rest, as they say, is our history.

The P&O Photographic Collection is a unique record of the company's ships and history from the advent of commercial photography in 1860's to 2000, and includes over 15,000 photographs which range in type from albumen prints to glass plate negatives and 35mm colour slides. Today, the collection is maintained by Dubai-based global marine terminal operator DP World, which acquired the P&O Group in 2006.

The photo archive, including posters, paintings, drawings, postcards etc is now online and can be found here.

Photo: View of passengers on the deck of CEYLON (1858). 
Sepia Albumen Print

Following the introduction of the daguerreotype process in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was initially regarded as the principal inventor of photography. It was not long, however, before the legitimacy of this title fell under dispute. Other inventors, including Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce and William Henry Fox Talbot most notably, were seen as possible rivals. This debate about the rightful claimant, otherwise known as the ‘priority debate’, has remained an important issue for many photohistorians ever since.

Although Daguerre always plays a role in publications discussing the advent of photography, he is not always treated favourably. His reputation has become damaged over time as, intentionally or not, photohistorians fall back on clichéd arguments and generalisations. 

Daguerre’s rivals, including Niépce, Talbot, and Hippolyte Bayard, are at times pushed by photohistorians, many of whom rely on various pieces of evidence to strengthen their cases, like lawyers in a courtroom drama.

What’s wrong with Daguerre? shows that wishful thinking and preconceptions, national pride and commercial attitudes play a significant role in photohistoric writing. Although the inventors are long gone and their processes have long since been eclipsed by modern techniques, the old rivalry between them continues. What’s wrong with Daguerre? explores the reasons why Daguerre and the daguerreotype are often devalued, and analyses why advocacy on behalf of Talbot and his calotype process has been so successful.

Hans Rooseboom, What's wrong with Daguerre? Reconsidering old and new views on the invention of photography

35 pp., soft cover, 21 cm, € 7,00 (shipping not included)

 For ordering details see below or contact the author: h.rooseboom@rijksmuseum.nl

Please note that this book can only be ordered from the author/publisher.

Price (shipping & handling included)

Within the Netherlands: € 9,00

To other European countries: € 9,75

Outside Europe: € 10,30 / USD 14.00 / CAD 14.00

Orders

To order a copy please email us your name, address and the payment method you have chosen.

Our email address is h.rooseboom@rijksmuseum.nl.

In case you would like to order more than one copy, please email us to determine the (more favorable) shipping & handling costs.

We prefer payment by bank transfer or PayPal. We only accept cash payment when sent as a registered letter.

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Website: www.nescioprivatepress.blogspot.com

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection -  This exhibition is selected from the wide-ranging art holdings of Bank of America, one of the largest and most comprehensive corporate collections of photography in the world. The collection was significantly influenced by scholars Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who in the late 1960s assembled a core group of photographs covering the entire history of the medium for The Exchange National Bank of Chicago, a legacy Bank of America institution.

In 2011, nearly 100 works from Bank of America’s photography collection will be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibit, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection, will feature photography that spans the earliest development in the medium, dated 1851, to the present day with a collection of internationally renowned contemporary works. The exhibition will then travel to museums in Europe.

Details of the Boston exhibition is here, and the European tour will be posted in BPH when available.

Exposed: Photography and the Classical Nude is a celebration of the naked human body in photography - and of the influence of the Classical ideal of ancient Greece and Rome on that art form.

From the 1840s to the present day, many of the great names of photography are represented including: Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Leni Riefenstahl, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim, Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Herbert List, Max Dupain and Lewis Morley.

One hundred nude images will be on display at the University of Sydney's Nicholson Museum during the Sydney Festival next month, details of which can be found here.

Photo: Antikythera (Apollo), Herbert List, Gelatin silver print, 1937.

World renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz visited the National Media Museum on Tuesday 14 December - the latest stop on a personal journey she is undertaking looking at places relating to inspirational and culturally significant people. Her travels, which will be documented in an upcoming book titled Pilgrimage, brought her to Bradford to view and photograph items belonging to Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 1879), part of the Royal Photographic Society Collection in the National Photography Collection which is held here.

Annie looked at personal letters, photographs, albums and a folio, all of which belonged to Cameron, one of the earliest pioneers of photography. Cameron, like Annie, was celebrated as a great photographer and for her work producing portraits of famous people and historical figures of the era.

Annie said: "I am very impressed with how you care for such legacies – of Julia Margaret Cameron's work and items from the Royal Photographic Society period. There really are treasures here. It is one thing to take care of such work but to give this access to anyone who wants to study or see it is fantastic."

http://nationalmediamuseum.blogspot.com/2010/12/world-renowned-photographer-annie.html

Annie is shown in the photograph with Curator Colin Harding.



The full blog entry can be seen here:

I just obtained a Kricheldorff Klapp Reflex listed as from 1905. It is a very interesting folding SLR with a focal plane shutter. I have found it impossible to discover much about the maker, could not find his patent, but believe he made this camera with some variations betwen 1905 and 1910, possibly later. Can anybody help with more information? I can post pictures if people are interested.

A review of the conference "William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography" (24-26 June 2010, CRASSH, Cambridge) can be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1113/40

This exhibition of photographs from the National Gallery of Canada is the third in a series of survey exhibitions that examine iconic works from the Photographs Collection and situate them within a historical and social context. Photographs by some of the medium’s earliest practitioners, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Hill and Adamson, Anna Atkins, and Julia Margaret Cameron, will be featured. The exhibition’s approximately 100 works will present examples of several different photographic processes, among them salted paper prints, daguerreotypes, albumen silver prints, collotypes, carbon prints, and woodburytypes.

Details of the exhibition can be found here. A book to accompany the exhibition will also be published towards the end of Jan 2011, and can be found on the Amazon link on the right.

The Lives of Great Photographers is a compelling new exhibition drawn exclusively from the National Media Museum’s  extensive and diverse Photography Collection,  including works from The Royal Photographic Society  Collection and the Daily Herald Archive. Together this exhibition presents a selection of photographs by some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Further details can be found here.

Perhaps not generally known, but Ida Kar (1908-74) was a pioneer who photographed some of the most important artists of her generation – including Henry Moore, Georges Braque and Jean-Paul Sartre. Kar was born in Russia in 1908 and studied in Paris at the height of the surrealist movement. By the late 1930s she had set up her first studio in Cairo where she met her second husband, Victor Musgrave. They moved to London and threw themselves into the Bohemian lifestyle. He became one of the most important art dealers and she became one of the most important photographers.

The National Portrait Gallery announced that it hopes to change that by mounting an exhibition of nearly 100 photographs, some never publicly shown before, by a woman at the heart of postwar cultural life in London.

The full report can be found here, and the exhibition details here.

Photo: Ida Kar's photograph of Georges Braque, taken in 1960. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London

The University of Rochester and George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, the world's preeminent museum of imaging, have entered into an alliance to further public engagement, research, and education in the arts and sciences, with a focus on the museum's photography and motion-picture collections. This will be the most extensive museum and university alliance of this type in existence.

Read the full press release here.

The Vatican is embarking on a project to restore and digitize its archive of more than 8 million photographic images. The images, which date to the 1930s, comprise a unique visual history of seven pontificates. But many of the negatives have been damaged by handling and poor storage, officials said.

The restoration project, unveiled at a news conference Dec. 7, will take at least five years. The negatives -- including early glass plate negatives -- will be cleaned and scanned for digital preservation, and a new storage facility will control temperature and humidity levels to prevent future damage. The archive had its beginnings in the 1930s, when Rome photographer Francesco Giordani set up a photo studio near the Vatican and was called to do various portraits of Pope Pius XI. He was called more and more often when the Vatican newspaper began publishing photos in its pages, and by the 1960s, his archive was already immense. When Giordani retired in 1977, the photo archive was left with the Vatican, which didn't really know what to do with the collection. After being temporarily housed at the Vatican Museums and elsewhere, it was entrusted to the offices of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

The impact of digital technology on print photography and music production is the subject of a new exhibition entitled ANALOG. It shows us inside the last of London’s photographic darkrooms, as well as taking a visit to a working reel-to-reel music studio.

In 2006, when Richard Nicholson began photographing London’s professional darkrooms there were some 214 still in existence; when he completed the project four years later only 5 remained. In these labs many of the iconic images of 20th-century culture were processed, from the high-contrast b/w prints of the cast of Trainspotting to lith portrait album covers for U2.

Details can the exhibition can be found here.

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) has made an incredible archive of historic family photographs available online through the free photo-sharing website Flickr. The historic photographic collection includes over fifty years of wedding and family portraits taken between 1900 and 1952 by the Allison Photographic Studios in Armagh, an especially rich resource for genealogists with connections in County Armagh, South Down and also in County Monaghan in the Irish Republic.

About 200 digital images are currently available, browsable alphabetically by family surname. The remainder of the photos will continue to be transferred from fragile glass plate negatives into digital format until all 1530 images have been posted on Flickr.

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has issued its 2009/10 Acceptance in Lieu Report. Of interest to BPH is the acceptance of 49 prints from the twentieth century which was settled in August 2009 and are now in the Tate Gallery, London. The collection was used to settle tax worth £227,290. The collection consists of the material described below:

The offer comprised 49 photographs by the following artists: Bernice Abbott (1898-1991), 3 prints; Richard Avenden (1923-2004); Roger Ballen (b.1950); Herbert Bayer (1900-1985); Hou Bo (b.1924); Dorothy Bohm (b.1924); Bill Brandt (1904-1983), 4 prints; Brassaï (1899-1984), 3 prints; Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002); Henri Cartier Bresson (1908-2004), 2 prints; Calum Colvin (b.1961), 12 prints; Martin J Cullen (b.1967); František Drtikol (1883-1961); Elliot Erwitt (b.1928); Robert Frank (b.1924); Jo Alison Feiler (b.1951); Lee Fridlander (b.1934); Tim Gidal (1909-1996); Lucien Hervé (1910-2007); Paul Joyce (b.1944); Dorothea Lange (1895-1965); Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), 2 prints; Yau Leung (1941-1997); Man Ray (1890-1976); Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989); Dario Mitidieri (b.1959); Irving Penn (1917-2009), 5 prints; Sebastião Salgadio (b.1944); W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978); Peter Suschitzky (b. 1941); Edward Weston (1886-1958), 2 prints and James Van der Zee (1886-1983).

The collection has been assembled over the last 30 years by Barbara Lloyd and the photographers represented include many of the greatest names in photography from the 20th century. Of particular significance are the five images by Irving Penn which include two New York cityscapes of 1947 and 1985; two portraits from New Guinea and Morocco; and a portrait of the French writer Colette of 1960. The Mapplethorpe is a 1976 portrait of the New York singer-songwriter Patti Smith. One of the Edward Weston photographs, taken in 1924, is a dramatic image of the Mexican senator and general, Manuel Hernández Galván, titled Galván Shooting. Galván fought by the side of the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. When Weston took the photograph, Galván was campaigning for political office, but was assassinated shortly after their meeting.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1935 is one of the outstanding images of the 1930s. In 1960, Lange spoke about taking the photograph: “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

The Panel considered that the collection met the second and third criteria that it was in acceptable condition and fairly valued. The photographs have been permanently allocated to Tate in accordance with the condition of the offeror.

The full AIL Report is here: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press_releases/2010/~/media/Files/pdf/2010/AELU/MLA_acceptance_in_lieu_report_2009_2010