Atlas Obscura has reported on the conservation of 1800 Gibson of Scilly negatives acquired by the National Maritime Museum at auction some ten years ago. The museum is also planning to digitise the entire collection.
Read the full piece here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gibson-family-shipwreck-images
I enjoyed the Bright Sparks exhibition, partly because it includes a lot of pleasing and fascinating items, and partly because it is so unintentionally funny. At the start of the show a cabinet containing various objects owned by Talbot, including a set of seven wooden geometric blocks, a gyroscope, a cork-stoppered bottle holding ‘Oxide of T’, a glass prism, a pile of torn-up letters, is, we are told, evidence that Talbot ‘never threw anything away’. We cannot of course know what the man did and did not discard, but what this eclectic assemblage indicates is that he was, like other Victorian gentlemen, an amateur scientist, a collector and a documenter. We owe a lot to these nineteenth-century enthusiasts, but rather than putting Talbot’s contribution in historical context, this exhibition attempts to ‘create a dialogue’ between his work and that of a somewhat random choice of ‘later photographers’.
I did not see the earlier show A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800–1850, which I hope put Talbot's work in the context of his contemporaries. The assumption in this show seems to be that exhibition-goers cannot relate to anything historical, scientific or informative. We can only think of photographs as something to put on Instagram. Many of the objects and images on display are interesting, but the text that accompanies them makes extraordinarily tenuous connections based on silly or unsubstantiated assertions. It is true that Talbot believed photography had enormous commercial potential in recording and illustrating areas as diverse as botany and travel. But to state that in publishing The Pencil of Nature Talbot ‘helped to launch the genre of the photo book’, and then represent this ‘genre’ with a random selection of publications by art photographers including Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows and Robert Frank is bizarre. The only connection between these books and Talbot’s is that they contain photographs, but so does an underwear catalogue, which would probably be closer to what Talbot was doing.
Other attempts to relate Talbot’s work to the contemporary viewer include the assertion that a photograph of some books he owned is ‘a kind of surrogate self portrait’, because ‘Strikingly, Talbot never took any photos of himself’. Is that really so surprising, given the technical means at his disposal? How many other Victorian photographers took selfies? This is simply another rather pathetic attempt to make the show accessible to an apparently moronic public.
Another tenuous link is that between Talbot’s desire to make photographs commercially reproducible, and Stieglitz’ magazine, Camera Work. The exhibition text makes the ridiculous assertion that ‘Camera Work is often regarded as the finest photography magazine ever produced’. Regarded by whom? Pictorialism went out of fashion well over 100 years ago. The exhibition is full of these strange assertions and wild claims. The text accompanying one of Man Ray’s images in his series Les voies lactées states that ‘American artist Man Ray made this photograph while he was living in Paris (he’d lived there for more than 50 years when he made this work) and concludes with the grammatically incorrect sentence: ‘Made near the end of his life, Man Ray contemplates the heavens above while looking down on a domestic, prosaic material, a juxtaposition typical of his Surrealist approach to art making’. Where does one start to demolish this? Man Ray was not a Surrealist, Surrealism was not about juxtaposing the banal with the cosmic, and anyway the image was made half a century after the movement. Who is to say what Man Ray was thinking at the time he made it? And what does any of this have to do with Talbot?
One photographer in the show who has seriously engaged with Talbot’s work is Simon Murison-Bowie, who spent a number of years revisiting Talbot’s photos of Oxford – location, lighting, time of day and year. Murison-Bowie's work – an enormous undertaking of detection and devotion – attempts to understand Talbot’s relationship with the city and how it differs from our present-day experience. In the Bodleian show this project has been dumbed down to a handful of images that happen to be made in publicly accessible places. There is no comparison to the Talbot original, except in thumbnail images on a map encouraging visitors to recreate the same photos themselves and put them on social media. How this suggested activity contributes to anyone’s appreciation of Talbot and his work is beyond me.
The overall feeling I got from the show was annoyance at being patronised. I would have liked to have felt enriched by my visit rather than insulted. I was also irritated by various silly factual mistakes and errors of spelling and grammar in the texts accompanying the exhibits. Next time, Bodleian, employ a proofreader. There is no shortage of them in Oxford.
But it has its hilarious moments – it is fun to see that Stephen Spender’s family photo album is just like everyone else’s from that era, even if its link to Talbot is a puerile attempt to make a connection between his posed portraits of family members and our snaps today. And the show includes some exhibits which make the trip down Broad Street worthwhile. Talbot’s etching of a fern is exquisite, as is his photogram of three grasses. I enjoyed seeing the first photograph of the Mona Lisa, I was touched by Talbot’s ‘Collection of hand-folded seed packets (mainly empty) with manuscript labels’, I liked Garry Fabian Miller’s camera-less photos of ivy leaves. And I loved seeing a Julia Margaret Cameron print on display (Oxford has so many of these languishing in cellars), despite the laughable assertion accompanying it that ‘photographs make pretence look plausible’.
The item I most coveted was Talbot’s electrostatic discharge wand. The photographs made by Hiroshi Sugimoto using sparks from the wand could never have been produced by Talbot with the methods available to him, and yet they are in the same spirit of invention, experimentation and wonder at the world shown by this photographic pioneer almost 200 years ago.
Details: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/brightsparks
This one-day, interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together researchers, archivists and curators to explore twentieth-century photo-magazines from across the British Empire and Commonwealth during the so-called ‘golden age of photojournalism’.
As well as the birth of photojournalism, the seismic political, cultural and technological revolutions of the interwar period also gave rise to a novel publication format – the photo-magazine. As Stuart Hall characterised it in his seminal 1972 essay on Picture Post, these were ‘image-over-text’ publications which gave primacy to the photographic image arranged into dynamic layouts and photo-stories by an innovative cadre of picture editors and art directors.
Exemplified by photo-reportage from the Spanish Civil War, this novel format was catalysed during the Second World War via widely circulated visual information campaigns by both commercial organisations and political actors. In the postwar period, the photo-magazine format was deployed by British occupying forces in defeated Germany. Photo-magazines were also a vital element of flourishing public relations initiatives by both newly established agencies of the UN and a host of industrial and manufacturing companies concerned about image management.
Thus, throughout the central decades of the last century, the general readership photo-magazine was developed and used to communicate with large, diverse and/or distant audiences. This format constituted a defining aspect of a public’s visual experience prior to the segmentation of magazine audiences from the 1960s and the dominance of television. This period – arguably, the golden age of photojournalism – coincides with the decline and disestablishment of the British Empire.
We aim to coordinate a selection of papers that look at publications from across the British Empire and Commonwealth in this period. These will address how such photo-magazines sought to instruct and entertain; how they represented social issues; how they othered and racialised indigenous communities; how they documented conflict; how they obscured, as much as revealed, historical developments; how they constructed, connected or divided audiences and publics; and how they explored or framed key tensions in the changing political landscape of the British Commonwealth and its constituent dominions and dependencies.
Hosted by the Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media History at Cardiff University, this initiative is a collaboration between Dr Tom Allbeson (Senior Lecturer in Media History, Cardiff University) and Dr Kevin Foster (Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University).
We invite proposals for individual 20-minute papers from scholars, archivists and curators at all career stages working on relevant topics, as well as proposals for themed panels comprising three related 20-minute papers.
Please submit an abstract (max 500 words) and a short biography (max 200 words) by 1 August 2023 to the convenors, allbesont@cardiff.ac.uk and kevin.foster@monash.edu.
If possible, we will endeavour to provide funding to support travel costs for early career researchers. For international contributors, we could also consider a themed panel delivered via Zoom.
Call for Papers: Photo-magazines across the British Empire & Commonwealth, c.1925-75
One-day workshop, School of Journalism, Media & Culture, Cardiff University
Friday 22 September 2023
Deadline for paper call: 1 August 2023
Does anyone know the whereabouts of the attached Claudet stereograph? I’m finishing a book with a major focus on experiments with photographic motion in early stereographs. If possible, I would like to publish a clearer version of this important image.
The image was published in the 1960s in the Photographic Journal when it was described as being with the Claudet family.
I would appreciate any help on this.
Robert
The publication of Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization has been announced by The MIT Press. Billed by the publishers as 'an intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s', the book traces a history of the modern pictorial economy that foregrounds the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography: picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists.
Picture Research focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet.
Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, as well as interviews with professionals in the UK picture industry, the book reveals the research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that have been needed to make pictures available to a public, both before and after (or rather, under) digitization.
In short, Picture Research makes visible and explicit the invisible labour that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.
Nina Lager Vestberg is Professor of Visual Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is a member of the editorial board of History of Photography, and her work has been published in journals ranging from Journal of Visual Culture to Museum Management and Curatorship.
Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization
Nina Lager Vestberg
272 pp., 6 x 9 in, 12 color illus., 21 b&w illus, paperback
ISBN 9780262045315
MIT Press, 2022
£38
Details: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045315/picture-research/.
Open access version: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5595/Picture-ResearchThe-Work-of-Intermediation-from
In Search of the Blue Flower celebrates the life and work of photographer Alexander Hamilton. It presents his early formative years, sharing the way his engagement with the cyanotype process has informed his art practice, from his time at Edinburgh College of Art, to his program of exhibitions and residencies, through to his work within the field of public arts. This personal history is combined with essays by academics, scholars and curators who engage with the intellectual roots of his work and practice. A comprehensive selection of Hamilton’s photography, including his unique plant-based cyanotypes, completes this beautiful book.
The book includes essays by Vanessa Sellars, Julie Lawson, Christian Weikop and Jaromir Jedlinski.
In Search of the Blue Flower. Alexander Hamilton and the Art of Cyanotype
Alexander Hamilton
Edinburgh University Press, 2023
£30. order: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-in-search-of-the-blue-flower.html
Hear artist Garry Fabian Miller in conversation with Martin Barnes (Senior Curator of Photography, V&A) and Bronwen Colquhoun (Senior Curator of Photography, Amgueddfa Cymru) about his life, practice and collaborations. This event has been programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Môrwelion/The Sea Horizon which is currently on display at National Museum Cardiff until 10 September 2023.
Môrwelion/The Sea Horizon will be open for those that would like to view the exhibition before the event. Attendees are invited to enjoy music performed by Composition students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in the gallery from 1-1:45pm. These new works have been composed in response to The Sea Horizon exhibition.
The talk will be followed by a screening of five short films made by the artist in collaboration with Sam Fabian Miller. The films invite you to explore Garry Fabian Miller’s ‘camera-less’ practice that experiments with darkness and light, and weaves in work by the artists, writers and thinkers that have inspired him over the years, including Alice Oswald, Oliver Coates and Kathleen Francis.
In Conversation: The Sea Horizon
National Museum Cardiff
17 June 2023 at 1400
See: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/11914/In-Conversation-The-Sea-Horizon/
Art Monthly Australasia carries a review by Elisa deCourcy of the Bodleian Libraries' exhibitions A New Power and Bright Sparks. The latter remains on view until 18 June 2023.
See: Art Monthly Australasia, Winter 2023, Issue 336. https://www.artmonthly.org.au/current
for details of Bright Sparks see: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/events-exhibitions
A couple of recent articles are worth sharing. In the May Apollo magazine Diane Smyth poses the question 'Do photography collections in the UK need more focus?' and compares the opening of the new V&A Photography Centre with the closure of Newcastle's Side Gallery and takes in the Bodleian Libraries and changes - openings and closures - to other collections in recent years.
The Architects Journal gives a technical summary of the V&A Photography Centre which cost £3 million (base build) and £1.25 million (fit-out).
See: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photography-uk-collections-va-james-hyman-bodleian-npg/
The programmes are printed and we're looking forward to another exciting conference, Photography in its Environment!. Recent challenges such as the climate crisis have pushed the field to consider how photography shapes and is shaped by the environment. From the mining of natural resources to the effects of mass digital storage, the environmental impact of photography is at the forefront of discussions in photography research, education and practice.
In this annual conference of the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University Leicester (UK), speakers will reconsider the history of photography using the environment, broadly understood, as a departing point. What kind of histories can be written about photography in its environment? Would it be useful to understand photography as an environment? Papers will not only examine photography from the point of view of current environmental concerns, but also, how photographic practices, images and archives have developed in relation to natural, industrial and other environments. By centering the environment as an analytical category, we hope to discuss the ways in which natural, colonial, personal, digital and other types of environments have shaped photography as well as how photographic histories can help to understand environmental histories.
Talks will consider topics that address themes and questions like:
Keynote speakers: Estelle Blaschke (University of Basel) Conohar Scott (University of Lincoln)
Photography in its Environment
Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK / Hybrid (in person and online),
12-13 June 2023. Registration deadline: Jun 8, 2023
You can still register to join online or in person.
For the first time at Watts Gallery, discover an exhibition dedicated to a 19th century craze that saw the birth of 3D images. Victorian Virtual Reality: Photographs from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy will present highlights from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy to explore the 19th-century photography craze that, for the first time, enabled pictures to appear in 3D.
Featuring over 150 stereoscopic photographs, experience how this lesser-known Victorian innovation continues to captivate today through a range of viewers and digital techniques.
Discover the 19th-century art of stereoscopy, which saw a second wave of popularity in the mid-20th century. It was at that time that the young Sir Brian May – later the lead guitarist for Queen – began his passion for this photographic phenomenon and formed his world-leading collection of stereoscopy.
Through viewers, stereoscopic photographs and interactive elements, explore topics such as celebrity portraits, snapshots of Victorian life, scenes of satire and devilry found in Sir Brian May’s collection. Stereoscopic photographs and other artwork from Watts Gallery Trust’s own collection will feature among the loaned works.
Victorian Virtual Reality will be the first exhibition at Watts Gallery dedicated to stereoscopy. It will open with an introduction to the stereoscopy and early images from Sir Brian May’s collection, including his first ever stereocard – the Weetabix hippos - and examples of the earliest viewing devices and photographs of Victorians at home, sharing and viewing their own collections of images.
Victorian Virtual Reality
4 July 2023 – 25 February 2024
Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, Surrey, GU3 1DQ
See: https://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/victorian-virtual-reality
Robert Thornton Brain was a retired Inland Revenue Officer in 1891 when he began taking stereoviews of Great Yarmouth and beyond. His stereoscopic photographs were usually given a serial number and a date, along with a brief description of the subject. He also included some technical details such as the exposure time, aperture and the manufacturer of the photographic dry plate. Various plates were tried by Robert Brain and included Ilford, Paget, Castle etc.
I am having difficulty in deciphering the annotation on this card of Great Yarmouth’s Britannia Pier that appears to say :- “Soo” for the manufacturer of the dry plate. Does any member of this forum have any ideas what dry plate manufacturer this abbreviation represents?
Any suggestions will be gratefully received.
Tuesday 30 May is National Creativity Day, and Newport's creative arts department in Coleg Gwent will be celebrating this by creating Wales’ largest cyanotype. This Welsh record-breaking cyanotype will be made in Waunfawr Park, Newport, opposite Crosskeys Campus, on Tuesday 30th May at midday and everyone is welcome to be involved.
The cyanotype artwork will 11 meters long and three meters wide – 33m2 in total. It will be made using staff and learners to create silhouettes to represent the wonderful diversity of people in Crosskeys Campus.
Lecturer in Photography and Course Leader of the FDa and BA Photography programme Peter Britton says "This will be a test process for something exciting we have happening later in the year... We have just started the process of applying to the Guinness book of records to make one of the worlds biggest photographs. We will be using the cyanotype process again, to create an image that is ENORMOUS - the worlds biggest cyanotype! As for date and location, to be confirmed, but probably September this year..."
More on BPH when details are released. In the meantime this record-breaking Welsh cyanotype is equally exciting.
https://www.coleggwent.ac.uk/ and https://www.peter-britton.com/
As Great Britain faced a third year of gruelling trench warfare on the continent and dirigible attacks on its shores, the American expatriate Alvin Langdon Coburn joined with fellow London transplant Ezra Pound to produce a series of experimental photographs Pound dubbed ‘vortographs’. This talk from Anne McCauley will explore how these pictures came into existence by focusing on the day of their public presentation at the London Camera Club and why abstraction found a particular resonance at this historical time and place.
Anne McCauley, ‘Alvin Langdon Coburn, the Great War, and the “World’s First Abstract Photographs”: 8 February 1917’
30 May ‘23, 1800 - 1930
Keynes Library, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H OPD
Free and open to all
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/research/centres/history-and-theory-of-photography/
Spanning nearly 200 years of photography history, the sale begins with a wide range 19th century processes, albums, and subjects, including an enigmatic portrait of a young man “contracting his eyebrows” from Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne Du Bolougne’s (1806-1875) landmark publication The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, c.1854-1856, a beautifully-presented set of chromo-collotypes by master Japanese printer Kazumasa Ogawa (1860-1929), and a rare ambrotype depicting an distinguished African American gentleman, c.1860.
The sale continues into the 20th century with headlining works that include a pair of ‘loop-de-loop’ prints by Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) from his personal albums, which embody the care-free and fun-loving life of the young photographer and his family, a rich platinum-palladium still life by Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) that demonstrates the photographer’s masterful use of light and process, a striking, large print of New York City’s Flatiron building by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), and a selection of works by British social documentary photographers of the 20th century, including Thurston Hopkins (1913-2014), Colin Jones (1936-2021), Roger Mayne (1929-2014), and Wolfgang Suschitzky (1912-2016).
19th & 20th Century Photography AuctionHMS Erebus took part in the Ross expedition of 1839–1843, and was abandoned in 1848 during the third Franklin expedition. The sunken wreck was discovered by the Canadian Victoria Strait expedition in September 2014. In a fascinating series of blog posts Professor Russell Potter reports on several visits to see the process of conservation on recovered artefacts.
One, particularly, is relevant to daguerriean photography. A metal device sparked Potter's interest. He notes: "I was struck at once by the fact that the square seemed similar in proportion to the Franklin daguerreotypes made by the operator from Richard Beard's firm" and thought it might be to do with plate polishing. The hunch was confirmed by Mike Robinson who confirmed it was part of a device patented by John Johnson in 1841 and known to have been used in Richard Beard's studios.
Potter concludes: "So now we have something we didn't have before: clear evidence that indeed such an apparatus was aboard HMS "Erebus," and that, assuming it was used as intended, Daguerreotypes were almost certainly made during the expedition. It's only one small step to add to the hope that someday such plates may be recovered; if they are, they'll be the earliest photographs ever taken in the Arctic!"
Read the full, illustrated, blog here: https://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/
With thanks to Anne Strathie for the link.
Southport's The Atkinson venue and the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), with Ponting's biographer Anne Strathie, is showing a new exhibition Herbert Ponting: Explorer and Photographer at The Atkinson from 10 June to 2 September 2023. Ponting's family lived in Southport from the 1880s.
Alongside the exhibition of photographs and rarely seen artefacts relating to Herbert Ponting are a series of talks and events.
Ponting’s father was appointed Manager of Preston Banking Company in the 1880s and the family set up home in Park Road West, Southport.
Herbert Ponting: Explorer and Photographer
10 June-2 September 2023
Free admission, Monday-Saturday, 1000-1600
The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport, PR8 1DB
Details: https://www.theatkinson.co.uk/exhibition/herbert-ponting/
The second and final phase of the V&A's Photography Centre is now complete and ready for its public unveiling on Thursday, 25 May 2023, At an opening event this evening V&A Director Tristram Hunt and the leading curator Marta Weiss explained the thinking behind the Centre and acknowledged the support of donors and photographers.
Below are a few photographs of the new spaces that compliment and extend the existing galleries.
Birkbeck, University of London, and the British Film Institute are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2023 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.
With privileged access to the BFI’s extensive collections, this project seeks to uncover a story of British filmmaking that foregrounds the shaping influence of migrant skills, techniques, voices and visions in the emergence of a British aesthetic. The aim is to challenge and nuance our understanding of what we mean when we speak of ‘British cinema’.
This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Agnes Woolley (Birkbeck) and James Bell (BFI) and the student will be expected to spend time at both Birkbeck and the BFI, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK. The studentship can be studied either full or part-time.
Project Overview
Dominant narratives about the emergence and development of British film in the twentieth century have largely overlooked the influence of filmmakers from outside Britain. While the 1970s inaugurated an era of reflexive, radical filmmaking by Britain’s diasporic populations, less understood is the transnational sensibility cultivated by migrant filmmakers in the preceding decades and how it continued to underpin the stories Britain told about itself through film, as well as the aesthetic approaches used to tell those stories. While there has been work done into some areas of the subject – for instance into the contributions of German-speaking migrant filmmakers who came to Britain in the 1930s to escape Nazism – there remain large gaps in our understanding of the great impact made to the ongoing development of the British cinema in the post-War years by migrants from Europe, the wider Commonwealth and beyond, as British cinema moved through the 1950s and into the new movements of the 1960s.
The project examines the influence of the ‘outsider’ perspectives of, for example, refugees from post-war Communism in Eastern Europe or British colonial subjects on the story of Britain as presented in its national cinema. With this in mind, this project approaches the BFI’s collections with the intention of drawing out the neglected contributions of migrant filmmakers operating in a variety of roles, such as Director of Photography, Screenwriter or Composer; exploring what influence they have in the overall shaping of the film, and on broader aesthetic and thematic developments in British film. The project might examine the influence of, for example, Polish director Mira Hamermesh, who fled Nazism in 1941; director Robert Vas, who left Hungary following the uprising in 1956; or actor/director Lloyd Reckord, who left Jamaica in 1951. The student will access – and be trained to use – the BFI’s moving image collections (both digitised and physical material), and papers in the archive’s Special Collections holdings. Some of the figures cited above made films funded by the BFI itself, and the student would have unique access to newly-digitised films from that collection, and related paper collections. The work will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the material in the BFI’s own collections, and to its own history.
Research questions include:
Uncovering the Influence of Migrant Filmmakers on the Emergence and Development of British Film 1940-1970
Start date: 1st October 2023
Closing date for applications: Monday 19th June 2023, 5pm.
Deadline for references: Friday 23rd June 2023, 12 noon.
Interview date: w/c 3 July 2023.
Informal enquiries about this collaborative project can be sent to Agnes Woolley a.woolley@bbk.ac.uk
We will be hosting an online briefing for interested applicants in early June. Please register your interest by emailing a.woolley@bbk.ac.uk
Full details here
The Firsts rare book fair which takes place at the Saatchi Gallery, London, from 19-21 May 2023 includes a selection of early photography from Stewart & Skeels. Included within their fair offerings is fascicle no. 1 of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, 1844. It is offered at £60,000.
Also included is a Julia Margaret Cameron print of Sir John Herschel and other photographs.
