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Many collectors would love to lay their hands on what is probably Malta's most precious photography collection. One of the biggest archives on the island, the Richard Ellis glass plate negatives number about 40,000, dating from between 1862, when the Englishman landed in Malta, to his death in 1924.

After almost 150 years, the name of Richard Ellis is still synonymous to photography. He was one of the first photographers in Malta, although at that time there was Orazio Agius, Preziosi and a few other Englishmen.

Richard Ellis ended up in Malta quite by chance in April 1861. He had studied photography in Paris, which was the hub of the emergent art, and came to Malta at the age of 19 with his adoptive parents, James Conroy and his wife Sara, as the family were caught up in the Garibaldian struggle. On settling in Malta, Mr Conroy opened a photo studio in Senglea and Richard Ellis acted as his assistant. Nine years later they opened a studio in Strait Street, Valletta, and in 1871 Mr Ellis left the Conroys and set up his own studio.

Apart from buildings and scenes of Malta, Mr Ellis took many photos of ships, crews and ongoing projects. His son, John, gave up a career in medicine and joined the business to help his father and produced what must be the first X-ray images taken in Malta in November 1896.

John's son, also called Richard, continued to run the business in 1931, after the death of his father. He continued to take photos just like his grandfather had done and saved the Ellis archive from devastation in World War II by moving the negatives to the safety of a Wardija home. The building in Valletta where the photographs had been stored was badly damaged.

The 261-page book, "Richard Ellis: The Photography Collection", contains over 200 photos of Valletta and Floriana, reproduced from the original glass plate negatives taken by Ellis, some of which are over 140 years old, and documents important aspects of Malta's social history, as well as the history of the Ellis family. Published in 2007, it was the first of three volumes.

According to the local artist-photographer, Patrick Fenech, there is an urgent need for a national photography museum as entire archives are being sold off abroad, one in particular was a collection of 500 photos dating back to the period between the world wars, including cameras and related paraphernalia, which was sold for only £200!

Mr Fenech has been researching The Ellis archive for three years and he claims he has not even gone through half the collection yet. His wish is to have the vast archives, including equipment and massive studio cameras, displayed – “if not in a national museum, in an Ellis Photography Museum!”

The full report can be found here, and some information on the Ellis family legacy here.

The fellowship is open to international competition. 

Open to art historians, curators, critics, independent researchers, conservators, conservation scientists and other professionals in the visual arts, museology and related disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, who have a graduate degree or equivalent publication history.

Fellowships are tenable only at the National Gallery of Canada. The term of full-time residency must fall within the period 1 September 2011 to 31 August 2012. Awards can be up to $5,000 a month, including expenses and stipend, to a maximum of $25,000. Fellowships are not renewable. 

The Library and Archives provides office space and supplies for the program, with desktop computer workstation running the Windows XP operating system and equipped with Microsoft Word, as well as internal and external telecommunications facilities, and full library support services, including extended hours of access.

Completed applications must include all of the following:

A full curriculum vitae, including education, professional employment history, awards and honours, publications, exhibitions, and work-in-progress

Three letters of recommendation, sent under separate cover by the referees to the Gallery. These letters must address the candidate's achievements in general, and the fellowship proposal in particular

The proposed dates and timetable of the residency at the Gallery

Information on other grants applied for or received, employment commitments and paid sabbatical arrangements, for the proposed period of residency.

A statement of the aims, methodology and anticipated results of the investigation headed by a summary of the proposal (this section of the application is limited to a maximum of three pages)

Proposals for the dissemination of the results of the inquiry

A brief outline of the research materials and facilities required (e.g., bibliography of primary and secondary resources; access to National Gallery of Canada collections; access to the expertise and resources of other Ottawa area institutions; etc.)

An outline of projected costs, including expenses and stipend. Eligible expenses include relocation to Ottawa, subsistence during the residency, and project-related travel, supplies and services

Examples of finished work, textual, visual, or both.

All documentation, in English or French, should be postmarked no later than 30 April 2011.

Full details of the Fellowship including tenure, application, assessment criteria, posting deadlines etc can be found here.

Good luck to all!

I am interested in the Beard licensed studio that was set up in Cheltenham in 1841 by John Palmer. What most interests me is the quality of any known images either held privately or known to be in public hands such as museums etc. There are three family daguerreotypes that are believed to have been taken by Palmer in 1841 and com-parison with any known examples would be interesting. Thanks

What's the link, I hear you ask? The Institution founded back in the 1940s and 50s by Alfred Kinsey looking into the modern field of sexology, and which provoked much controversy even right into this present day and age. And good, old innocent photographic processes of the 19th century?

The Institute will be holding an exhibition entitled "As We See Them: Exotic and Erotic Images from Modern Alternative Process Photographers" which presents the work of eleven artists using some of the earliest photographic processes to create contemporary images dealing with sexuality and the human figure. These will include cyanotyes, platinum-palladium prints, gum bichromate prints, photogravures, tintypes, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, aluminum-types etc. The images featured deal with sexuality and the human figure.

Details of the exhibition can be found here.

Well, I guess the only clear visible link I can find is the blue in cyanotypes!

Just in case you have not come across this wonderful, free resource from The British Library, it's a great site for those lazy Sunday afternoon reads. For starters, there is a section on the development of photographically illustrated books which parallel the explosion in communications during the 19th century. In a period of unprecedented advances in science, exploration, travel, tourism and industry, photography provided an exciting, innovative alternative to conventional methods of book illustrations. You can find this online exhibition entitled "Victorian Britain in 1,500 original prints" by clicking here.

Or, perhaps, if you have missed last year's 'Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs", you can still have a virtual visit, by clicking here. Enjoy them!

Published by Helion & Co, and written by  Fred McGlade, the book can be found by using the Amazon link on the right.

The Irish Times reported today that IMMA has built its collection very successfully on the basis of loans, gifts and bequests, and an exciting initiative this year is inaugurated by an exhibition in July.

Out of the Dark Room features 140 photographs from the very fine David Kronn Collection in New York, which extends back to 19th century daguerreotypes right up to contemporary works. Kronn intends to gift his entire collection to IMMA, with an annual bequest of a number of works each year, starting with Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

The project is a huge boost for IMMA's holding of photography.

Now, now. Don't get overly excited.

That was the price paid by a shrewd Helmut Gernsheim back in 1950 for the complete set of Crimean War photographs after tracking down a desendent of Roger Fenton in a Farnborough garage. After closing the deal, he loaded the prints into the trunk of his car and referred to the purchase as quite a haul!. Four years later, Gernsheim published a book based on these 360 mounted salt prints.

This was one of Gernsheim's greatest coups of his career. Do I sound jealous?

You can read the rest of the article here.

Photo:  Roger Fenton. 'Camp of the 4th Dragoon Guards,' 1855.

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, seeks a curator of photography. Photography is one of five focused collecting areas of the Harn, each of which is headed by a senior staff curator with a devoted permanent collection exhibition space. The museum currently houses a collection of over 1000 photographs ranging from daguerreotypes and mid-19th century images to large-scale contemporary works. One focus of the collection is landscape photography from the 19th to 21st centuries, but its greatest strength is a body of works from 1950 to the present. Included are a comprehensive collection of photographs by Jerry Uelsmann, who established the University of Florida as a center of photographic studies, and monographic collections of works by several other leading photographers, some of whom are closely associated with UF. A dedicated endowment for photography acquisitions will be available to the curator for development of the collection. The museum has an established record of major photography exhibitions ranging from shows from a local private collection of modernist photography to the presentation of contemporary work, most recently that of Dawoud Bey. The School of Art and Art History, with studio and art history programs in photography, provides opportunities for interaction with professional colleagues and collaborative educational programming. The curator of photography will manage and develop the collection and related programs. Other responsibilities include preparation of installations from the permanent collection, conception and implementation of exhibitions and related publications, original research for publication, lectures for academic audiences and the general public, cultivation of donor relationships, and conception and development of grant projects in collaboration with the development office and others. 

Master's degree in an appropriate area of specialization; or a bachelor's degree in an appropriate area of specialization and two years of appropriate experience. 

PhD in art history with specialization in the history of photography is strongly preferred. 
The successful candidate will have a distinguished record of scholarship and at least three years of curatorial experience dealing with research, acquisitions, exhibitions, and collaborative programming. 

Closing date is 28th Feb 2011, and details of the full job description/application can be found here.

CHINA: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872 is an historic photographic exhibition including 150 images taken in China between 1868 and 1872. The exhibition includes a wide variety of images, themes and locations in China from Beijing to Fujian to Guangdong including landscapes, people, architecture, domestic and street scenes.  The show in Beijing is accompanied by several displays of original clothes from the era.

John Thomson (1837–1921) was born in Edinburgh two years before the invention of the daguerreotype was announced to the world in 1839. This discovery was the beginning of photography. That same year Fox Talbot introduced the calotype process, and with this new medium David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, two remarkable Scottish photographers living in Edinburgh, produced nearly 3,000 images, including city views, landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Their work undoubtedly had a profound influence on Thomson. In the years leading up to Thomson becoming a professional photographer, the technology of photography also developed at an incredible speed. The invention of the wet-collodian process in 1850 is regarded as the watershed: it reduced the exposure time and the cost of making photographs; it also produced sharper images. The wet-collodian process quickly replaced daguerreotype and calotype. As Thomson remarked: ‘the detail in wet-collodian negatives was of microscopic minuteness whilst presenting the finest gradation and printing quality which had never indeed been surpassed by any known method’. But this in itself added to his difficulties: it was necessary to make the negatives on glass plates that had to be coated with wet-collodian emulsion before the exposure was made, thus there was a large amount of cumbersome equipment that had to be carried from place to place.

Yet what marked Thomson’s work out was not simply the massive amount of visual information he offered. His uniqueness was his zeal to present a faithful and precise, though not always agreeable, account of China and Chinese people. He wanted his audiences to witness China’s floods, famines, pestilences and civil wars; but even more so, he wanted share them the human aspect of life in China. He wanted his work to transcend that of the casual illustration of idiosyncratic types, to portray human beings as individuals full of peculiarities.

In 1920, Thomson decided to sell his 650 glass negatives, including those of China, to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, but died before the transaction could be completed. Eventually Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853–1936), the American-born pharmacist and philanthropist, bought the negatives from Thomson’s heirs.

The 150 images included in this exhibition are all from the Wellcome Library’s collection. While a few images were reproduced in Thomson’s published works and shown in exhibitions, the great majority of his photographs have never been exhibited.

First shown in Beijing, the exhibit made its way to Liverpool last year before heading to Thomson's native Scotland next month. Details of the exhibition can be found here, and a BPH blog here.

Photo:  A Manchu lady after having her face painted, Beijing 1871-2. © The Wellcome Library, London

An exhibition of photographs by Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron from the Royal Collection will go on display from 31 January until 27 April 2011 at Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House, in the Lake District.

31 January - 27 April 2011

Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House
Bowness-on-Windermere
Cumbria
LA23 3JT

More details are at: www.blackwell.org.uk

To coincide with its 40th anniversary, The Photographers' Gallery will stage a charity auction at Christie's South Kensington on Thursday 17 February 2011. Designed to raise the final portion of funds to transform its Ramillies Street Gallery, the event will comprise a Live and Silent Auction, offering nearly 70 lots. With estimates ranging from £600 to £10,000, this will be the perfect opportunity for collectors of photography to add to their collections, while supporting a new state-of-the-art photography gallery in London. 

From Helmut Newton to Rineke Dijkstra, Sebastião Salgado to Corinne Day, the works on sale will reflect some of the extraordinary talents who have exhibited at the Gallery during its 40 year history. Many of the included artists, such as Lee Miller and Sally Mann, exhibited for the first time in the UK at The Photographers’ Gallery.

The works will be on public display at Christie’s South Kensington from Saturday 12 until Thursday 17 February 2011, culminating in the Live Auction of over 30 lots at 20.00, Thursday 17 February 2011. A series of free public talks by featured artists Simon Roberts, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Karen Knorr, as well as Gallery Curator Stefanie Braun, will be programmed during the viewing days.

All proceeds from the Auction will go towards the Gallery’s ongoing capital campaign to build a new photography gallery at Ramillies Street, just off Oxford Street, in the heart of London’s West End. The transformed Photographers’ Gallery will comprise three dedicated gallery floors, an education floor, improved Bookshop and Print Sales, and a street level Café/Bar area. Construction has already started on this impressive project with the Gallery due to open in Autumn 2011.

The press release can be found here: AuctionP.pdf.

Photo:  Jeff Wall, After ‘Landscape Manual’ 1969/2003 © Jeff Wall.

As mentioned in an earlier BPH blog, the BRLSI is in the process of mounting an important new exhibition of the Rev Francis Lockey's work who was born in the late 19th century and died in 1869.  The Rev Lockey used the calotype photographic process, which had been patented by WH Fox Talbot and he used it to take masses of photographs of both Bath and the surrounding districts during the years from 1849 to 1861. 

The Rev Lockey and his family lived in Swainswick in the house known as Swainswick Cottage. The building survives today, complete with Lockey's purpose built photographic printing studio.  The earliest surviving images, including one of Bath Abbey dates from 1849 and were taken within eight years of the invention of the calotype process in 1841 by Fox Talbot of Lacock Abbey.

Gill Silversides at BRLSI says: "Although no paper evidence currently exists of correspondence between Francis Lockey and William Henry Fox Talbot, Lockey did produce photographs of the cloisters in Lacock Abbey in the mid 1850s, which would suggest direct contact between Fox Talbot as the inventor of the technique and Lockey.

Full details of the Bath in Camera 1849-1861 exhibition can be found here. A collection of 62 of the surviving plates are printed in a book entitled Shadows and Light by David McLaughlin and Michael Gray which can be bought for £5 at BRLSI reception, or you can try the Amazon link on the right.

A launch event where Michael Gray will explain how the prints were produced will be held on 14th Jan at 7pm. The full news report can be found here.

Photographic collections are found in libraries, archives and museums all over the world. Their sensitivity to environmental conditions, and the speed with which images can deteriorate present special challenges. This one day training session is led by Susie Clark, accredited photographic conservator. It is aimed at those with responsibility for the care of photographic collections regardless of institutional context.

The day provides an introduction to understanding and identifying photographic processes and their vulnerability, information on common conservation problems and solutions, and the preservation measures that can be taken to prolong the life and accessibility of photographic collections. Contact with real examples of different photographic processes is an important feature of this training session which is therefore limited to only 16 places. At the end of the day participants will be able to:

• identify historic photographic processes
• explain how damage is caused
• implement appropriate preservation measures
• commission conservation work.

Feedback from previous participants

• I learned how to store photographic material, how to identify different photographic processes and techniques to preserve photographic stock.
• Very worthwhile due to practical nature of the training day. I am able to leave here today confident that we can improve and upgrade basic preservation solutions, particularly storage, based on information learned about photographic processes and supports.
• I will review our approach to preserving photographic collections, upgrade storage media, and survey collections to identify preservation priorities.

Programme

Preservation Advisory Centre Training Day

Friday 20 May 2011

British Library Centre for Conservation
96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
 

Click below for details of the event:

http://www.bl.uk/blpac/photographic.html

http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/events/preserving-historic

Invented by the Auguste and Louis Lumiere in 1907, autochromes are one-of-a-kind transparencies that are extremely beautiful when backlit. Its invention was a milestone in the history of photography as it was the first commercially available means of making colour photographs.

The five autochromes exhibited are Steichen's portrait of Rodin in front of his sculpture The Eve and his widely reproduced portrait of Stieglitz holding an issue of his influential publication, Camera Work.These fragile photographs-composed of minute grains of potato starch dyed red, blue, and green-cannot withstand the exposure of long-term display without suffering irreversible damage.

Because of the high risk of the color fading, the Metropolitan-like most museums-has had a policy of not exhibiting its important collection of Autochromes. The Metropolitan recently completed a three-year study of the stability and light-sensitivity of Autochrome dyes, conducted by Luisa Casella, the Museum's first Mellon Research Scholar in Photo Conservation, in close collaboration with Masahiko Tsukada of the Museum's Department of Scientific Research, and supervised by Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum. The study established that the Autochrome dyes are partially, though not completely, protected from light fading when in an environment where all oxygen has been removed.

Guided by this research, the Museum will display these five original autochromes within individual oxygen-free enclosures and under carefully controlled lighting conditions for just that one week only. So catch it while you can!

Westminster City Council's vast archive of London history will be serialised and available online for the first time, as part of a new project. It will be a visual celebration of life in Westminster through the ages. Each day throughout 2011, a selection of some of the most fascinating, thought-provoking, entertaining and poignant images (photographs, engravings, sketches) from their extensive image collection will be put online.

The archive can be seen here. 

Photo: The Open Air School in St James's Park, with Miss Walsh taking the lesson. Image property of Westminster City Archives.

For anyone with an interest in the market for historic and contemporary photography internationally The Photograph Collector is a monthly newsletter of required reading. Published in the United States since 1980 The Photograph Collector has an international reach is is concerned with auctions, dealer activity, exhibitions and relevant news and reviews globally. Of particular interest is the PC's annual index of photograph values based on a basket of regularly offered material.

Editor Stephen Perloff reports in the current issue dated December 20 2010 that the newsletter will no longer appear in print from January 2011 and instead will be mailed as a PDF to subscribers which will benefit international readers and allow for more timely information to be included. As postage is no longer an issue all subscription rates are being equalised at $149.95.

Email: info@photoreview.org or www.photoreview.org for more information about the newsletter and other publications.

William Blackmore (1827-1878) remains a little knownmillionaire mid-Victorian polymath. He was a successful lawyer based in Liverpool and subsequently London. An international financier involved in numerous North American land grants, he was also principal financier of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. His reputation by the mid 1870s within London financial circles was that he ‘has means of obtaining information in the City such as very few men possess.’ Blackmore visited Salt Lake City and met Brigham Young (1801-1877), president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and wrote a confidential report on the ‘Mormon Empire’ for the Cabinet of the British government and independent industrial leaders; in April 1872 Blackmore dined at the White House with United States President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885); he funded and populated with artefacts perhaps the leading ethnographic museum in 19th century Great Britain, located in his home town of Salisbury; he was an early patron of the leading Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and the commissioner of an influential set of watercolours of the Yellowstone region by Thomas Moran (1837-1926); and he was acknowledged by contemporaries to have so effectively exploited photography to document North American Indians that his photographic collection was copied to form the basis of the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Yet Blackmore’s legacy was to be comparatively limited. He went bankrupt and committed suicide in 1878. Shortly after his untimely death, his papers and other materials were consigned to storage and lay apparently unused for almost half a century. William’s other art collections were subsumed within those of his brother and loyal ally, Humphrey. Following Humphrey’s death in 1929 a major dispersal campaign began in earnest. While some of William’s business documents were saved, a significant number were apparently destroyed, and artefacts were subsequently dispersed through auction and sale to other public and private institutions. The Blackmore Museum was incorporated with that of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum after Blackmore’s death, and was amalgamated in 1902; it remained something of a place of pilgrimage to American archaeologists until the early 20th century. While a new gallery was built in 1933 linking the buildings of the Blackmore Museum to the Salisbury Museum, William’s museum was already in terminal decline and its collections were to be broken up and dispersed over a period of over four decades.

Anthony Hamber has written the first biography of William Blackmore to cover the wide gamut of his professional and private interests and the significance and impact of his wide ranging achievements. With reproductions of many Victorian photographs, and a diligently researched text, fully referenced with bibliography and index, Hamber’s work is a major contribution to understanding an important but neglected figure and his world.

Collecting the American West: the Rise and Fall of William Blackmore, by Anthony Hamber is published by Hobnob Press, December 2010, 320pp paperback, many illustrations,

The flyer can be downloaded here: Collecting%20the%20American%20West%20%20A5%20flier.pdf

I am researching early photography in Nottingham (UK) and would appreciate viewing any daguerreotypes from the Nottingham studios. These may be difficult to identify as the cases may only indicate ‘licensee of Beard” or similar  BUT if you have any cases (or indeed any other information) relating to the following I would greatly appreciate some details:  Alfred Barber, George Popowitz, E. Kaim, or Richard Young Booker. All pre 1851.   The Whitlocks of Birmingham (Joseph W. or Whitlock & Thompson) also operated in Nottingham for a short while but it may be difficult to distinguish any Nottingham examples from work at the more successful Birmingham studio.

Thanks

Geoff Blackwell