Blogs

As part of a forthcoming display at the V&A Museum, London, about the history and use of different cameras, the museum is seeking donations of a small selection of negatives. Ideally, the subjects depicted in the negatives will be visible (ie. landscapes are difficult to read at such a small scale) and global in geographic location - not just from the UK.

Please do get in contact if you have anything in your personal collection that you would consider donating or know of someone who might be interested.

• One half plate collodion negative (ideally a portrait or still life) (1880 – 1895)
• Strip of black and white 35mm negatives (dates about 1933-43)
• Strip of black and white 120 negatives (dates about 1928-38)
• About six Kodachrome slides (in mounts) (dates about 1959-69)
• Strip of Kodak 126 cartridge film negatives (dates about 1965-75)
• Strip of colour negatives (ideally Fuji) (dates 1990-2000)

 With very best wishes,

Hana

Hana Kaluznick | Assistant Curator, Photography
V&A South Kensington | Cromwell Road | London | SW7 2RL
Email: h.kaluznick@vam.ac.uk 

Join Joan Schwartz, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, in this public lecture where she will discuss the challenges of photograph digitisation.

Under pressure from institutions, funders and users, collections managers often make photographs available online as searchable single items. In the process, meaningful information about the physical and intellectual contexts of creation, circulation, and viewing is sacrificed at the altar of speed, quantity, convenience, and the almighty dollar. In this lecture, Prof Schwartz is concerned with troubling changes, subtle and otherwise, brought about by digitization, whereby in the name of searchability important information about materiality, context, and meaning are often lost. Drawing on professional experience as a photo-archivist and scholarly interests as a photographic historian, she critiques examples of digitization and description initiatives, with a view to highlighting their potential pitfalls and encouraging best practices grounded in a deeper understanding of the power of photography as a form of visual communication. The result, she argues, is a broader appreciation of the critical differences between search and research, content and meaning underpinning access to and use of online images by cultural and historical geographers.

The Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre,
V&A South Kensington
Thursday, 27 October 2022, 18.30 – 20.30
Free
Book here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/E3WAwmNNOmy/leverhulme-lecture-prof-joan-schwartz-27-oct-22

The CHSTM working group on Colour Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires is hosting Catlin Langford who will be talking about Autochromes and Representation on Tuesday, 18 October 2022 from 1430 to 1600 BST. 

The talk is open to members of the Colour Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires. Membership of the group is free.

For more information, see https://www.chstm.org/content/color-photography-19th-century-and-early-2...

Bonhams auction of Fine Books and Manuscripts on 9 November 2022 includes several lots of photographs. Three in particular stand out. Lot 32 is a portrait photograph of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by Julia Margaret Cameron, given by Cameron to Mrs Tennyson in 1869. The print is estimated at £1500-2000. 

The second is lot 33 an album compiled by Lady Emily Ponsonby, née Bathurst (1798-1877), containing a collection of some 45 early photographs, the majority taken by her son Lt. Col. Arthur Edward Valette Ponsonby (1827-1868). Amongst several related items of ephemera are a Henry Ponsonby pen and ink sketch of Mrs Verschoyle taking a photograph in Eaton Square, July 19 1855, and a printed flyer for 'Photographic Sketches of People & Places in Corfu by Arthur Ponsonby', printed by Silver, Hypo & Son., Printers, 1859. Estimate £4000-6000. 

Lot 336 is a group of nine vintage photogravures by George Davison, including views of Harlech, 'The Onion Field', and southern France, seven are signed by the photographer, c.1890-1927. Estimate £1500-2500. 

Details of all lots are here: https://www.bonhams.com/auction/27375/fine-books-and-manuscripts/

Curated by Sabrina Meneghini, Curator and Archival Assistant at the Royal Commonwealth Society Department of Cambridge University Library, this exhibition presents reproductions of photographs and paintings by British artist Alfred Hugh Fisher (1867-1945).

The Fisher Collection, held in the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) Library at Cambridge University Library (CUL), is the subject of Sabrina Meneghini’s research and was the focus of her dissertation: ‘Classroom Photographic Journeys; Alfred Hugh Fisher and the British Empire’s Development of Colonial-era Visual Education’.

In 1907 the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) hired Fisher, a writer and newspaper illustrator, to document photographically the people and landscapes of the British empire in order to facilitate school education. Fisher toured the empire for three years, taking photographs and making paintings from which COVIC produced sets of lantern slides and textbooks. These were to be presented as a series of geography lessons to schoolchildren.

His journey started in South Asia where he visited Ceylon, India, and Burma; followed by Aden, Somaliland, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, the British possessions in the Mediterranean, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji.

Furthermore, COVIC purchased images from places he was not able to visit such as the West Indies and South Africa.

The Fisher Collection has never been exhibited before. Its display in the Alison Richard Building (ARB) provides a unique opportunity to see Fisher and COVIC’s visual education project.

Details: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/29035/

Image: The English School, Nicosia: boys in the schoolroom include English, Turkish, Greek, Armenian. Photographer A. Hugh Fisher, 1908

The National Science and Media Museum in Bradford has worked in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture to digitise nearly 50,000 never before seen photographs, front and back, to bring the vast Daily Herald Archive to life through new online stories and a visual experiment on the platform.  

The collaborative project adds 100,000 new images and 35,000 new records to the Science Museum Group’s online collection and increases access to this vast collection of historic images. The newly digitised images will also be showcased in 25 online stories on the Google Arts & Culture platform alongside a visual interactive experiment as well as 15 new stories on the National Science and Media Museum’s website. 

The new online stories bring the archival photos in the Daily Herald Archive to life by providing a unique look into British society and industry during the mid-20th century. Some of the stories shed light on historic periods like the campaign for a universal pension, or the rent strikes in the 1930s, while others share quirkier moments like a prize-winning giant cabbage, the world’s largest tyre (in 1931) or a 16ft beanstalk. The stories also uncover ones that have often been left untold like the long history of the Romani community in southeast England. 

The historic digitisation will be celebrated with an official launch event at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford on 12 October. Invited guests and press will be given an exclusive preview of the newly digitised images, the online exhibit, and an interactive experiment along with the opportunity to visit the physical archive in the museum.  

Commenting on the collaboration, Jo Quinton-Tulloch, Director of the National Science and Media Museum said: “The Daily Herald Archive is one of the gems of our collection with over 3 million items from the newspaper that provide an incredible visual history of the first half of the 20th century. The digitisation project marks a major milestone for our museum by adding 100,000 new images to our collection and 35,000 new online records, providing wider access to the Science Museum Group’s largest public collection.  

Thanks to our collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, we can share this remarkable archive more widely and truly bring the collection to life through fascinating stories and the interactive visualisation.”  

Amit Sood, Director of Google Arts & Culture added: "Our collaboration with the National Science and Media Museum is a fantastic opportunity to explore one of their core collections in new, creative ways. The advancements in digitisation, coupled with algorithmic extraction and cutting edge AI allows users to explore a vast photo archive that captures a unique and captivating snapshot of British life." 

The Daily Herald was once the world’s top selling newspaper, and today its photographic archive is held by the Science Museum Group at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. The archive provides a rich visual history comprising of over 3 million items with prints from press agencies and freelance photographers alongside work created by Daily Herald staff photographers. The collection also includes 100,000 glass plate negatives and Day Books detailing the assignments allocated to the staff photographers. 

The digitisation of the photo archive comes at a time when the Science Museum Group, which includes the National Science and Media Museum, continues to improve online access to its collections. Online audiences can explore more than 300,000 objects and archives through the Group’s popular online collection, which receives more than 110,000 visits each month and more than five million visits since its launch in December 2016.  

The digitisation and public enjoyment of the Daily Herald Archive has been made possible in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.  The Daily Herald Archive project and experiment will be live at https://goo.gle/dailyheraldarchive from today, 12 October 2022.   

Images: 
Top: The Sun sign replaces Daily Herald, 1964. © Mirrorpix
Middle: Daily Herald readers. George Woodbine, Daily Herald, 1933. © Mirrorpix
Lower: Three steel erectors studying a building plan, Daily Herald 1935. © TopFoto

Using Ruth Locke’s Private Photographs from the Imperial War Museums Photograph Archive to Explore the Family’s Experiences and Intergenerational Memories. Alice will be examining photographs from the private collection of Ruth Locke. Ruth (née Neumeyer) and her younger brother Raimund came to England from Germany in May 1938 on the Kindertransport. They were accompanied by two photograph albums capturing their childhood in Dachau. The photographs reflect the family’s affiliation with the Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement, their appreciation of nature, the arts and culture. Alice will draw on oral history interviews with Ruth’s two sons and the blog they produced on their family history. Alice will examine the challenges and opportunities of looking at private photographs and oral testimony as sources to understand how German-Jewish children made sense of their life in Germany in the 1930s, emigration to the UK, and familial separation and loss. She will also examine how these memories were passed across generations.  

About the speaker

Alice Tofts is final year collaborative doctoral programme student with Imperial War Museums and the University of Nottingham. She holds a BA in History and French from the University of Nottingham and a Masters in Museum Studies from University College London. Her research focuses on the Imperial War Museums’ collection of photographs from private collections of Holocaust survivors. Her research explores the myriad role of private photographs in both the familial and museum sphere: as historical objects, material and social objects, objects of enquiry, and memory objects. Her approach is multidisciplinary and draws on theory and methods from oral history, anthropology, visual culture, memory studies and museology

Virtual PhD and a Cup of Tea: ‘Talking with Images’: Private Photographs from the Imperial War Museums
13 October 2022 @ 1600--1700 
Online
Book here: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/virtual-phd-and-a-cup-of-tea-talking-with-images-private-photographs-from-the-imperial-war-museums/

World renowned film poster collector Dwight Cleveland's current project involves digitizing a portion of his historic lobby card collection with the Ivy League University Dartmouth. Here is the link to the article. For more information about Dwight and his fascinating collection, check out https://cinemaonpaper.com/.

The Photographers’ Gallery has announced that Shoair Mavlian has been appointed as its new Director. Currently Director at Photoworks, Shoair will take up the post in January 2023.

As Director of Photoworks Shoair leads the strategic vision and artistic direction of the organisation including exhibitions, biennial festival, commissions, learning and engagement, publishing and digital content. From 2011-2018 Shoair was Assistant Curator, Photography and International Art at Tate Modern, London, where she curated exhibitions including ‘Don McCullin’ (2019), ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’ (2018), ‘The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection’ (2016), ‘Conflict, Time, Photography’ (2014). While at Tate Modern she helped build the photography collection and curated collection displays enjoyed by over 5 million visitors per year.

Shoair was named in Apollo Magazine’s 40 under 40 Europe – Thinkers. She has a background in fine art photography practice and the history of photography focussing on the twentieth century, emerging contemporary practice, and work
related to conflict and memory.

The post was advertised earlier this year and the candidate specification noted: 'The ideal candidate will bring nuanced knowledge and experience of photography as a medium, and an understanding of constantly evolving and emerging forms of photography in a digital world. They will have a balance of creative and strategic mindsets, experience of successfully engaging diverse audiences, and a deep commitment to the values and ethos of the Gallery. In addition to this, candidates should bring an international outlook and an understanding of public cultural organisations, both within the UK and globally.'

Matthew Stephenson, Chair of Trustees, The Photographers’ Gallery said: “On behalf of the Board of Trustees, I’m thrilled that Shoair Mavlian will lead The Photographers’ Gallery in its next chapter. As Director of Photoworks, Shoair has shown her commitment to commissioning new work, opening up photography to new audiences and activating debate about the power and relevance of photography today. This valuable experience coupled with an ambitious vision for the future of TPG, will ensure the Gallery continues to showcase the very best of international photography and inspire future generations. I have no doubt that Shoair will bring passion and drive to lead TPG and build on the exceptional legacy of departing Director Brett Rogers. In her 16 years leading TPG, Brett has tirelessly championed photography for all and made TPG one of the most dynamic, relevant and exciting cultural spaces in London today.”

Shoair Mavlian said: “The Photographers’ Gallery is a much-loved cornerstone for the photography community locally and internationally, I’m thrilled to be stepping into this role at a pivotal moment in the organisation’s history, having just celebrated its 50th anniversary. I look forward to working with the trustees and team to develop the important legacies of the directors before me, building a welcoming and inclusive home for photography and photographers in London for everyone to enjoy.”

Perdendosi is a collaborative work by photographer Norman McBeath with Edmund de Waal. This publication which includes de Waal's text Twelve Leaves was launched recently at the London Review of Books bookshop.

It is a study of leaves at the stage of their transformation when they have lost all colour, and become more like parchment than plant, taking up the most extraordinary shapes, giving the leaves unique identities and character. Many of the photographs were taken at the start of the pandemic in a time of daily news of increasing deaths and infections. Although not a direct response, this time had a profound influence on how Norman McBeath saw the leaves. Edmund de Waal’s accompanying text ‘Twelve Leaves’, which he describes as both autobiography and a journal of reading, is his own unique and moving response to living with these images for several months during lockdown. With a heightened awareness and increased sensitivity towards the natural world, ​Perdendosi offers a fresh perspective on the familiar.

The book is published by Hazel Press and is available for £12 from London Review of Books or Hazel Press.

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/perdendosi-norman-mcbeath-edmund-de-waal

https://hazelpress.co.uk/product/perdendosi-by-norman-mcbeath-edmund-de-waal/

The Richard Benson Lecture on the Reproduced Image commemorates the life and work of American photographer, printer, teacher and author Richard Benson (1943 – 2017). Benson developed innovative techniques for photographic offset printing and inkjet printing, embracing technologies old and new.

Speakers

Thomas Palmer was hired by Richard Benson in 1982 to assist with the printing of Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company. The project took four years, during which time Palmer learned the basics of offset print production, as well as platinum/palladium printing, photogravure and various other photographic techniques. After a stint producing photogravure editions for noted photographers, Palmer began making analog film separations for commercially printed photography books, again under Benson’s tutelage. For the last 30 years he has worked independently, transitioning from analog film separations to digitally produced image files for use in book production and digital dissemination. He has taught classes in book production at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Jock Reynolds was the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery from 1998 to 2018. Over the last twenty years, Reynolds has led the Yale University Art Gallery through the major renovation, expansion, and reinstallation of its exhibition, teaching, and collection facilities, and launched an active program of collection-sharing among college and university art museums. For his work as an artist, Reynolds has garnered numerous grants and awards, including two NEA Visual Artists Fellowships and multiple NEA Art in Public Places project awards. Frequently created in collaboration with his wife, Suzanne Hellmuth, his and their artworks have been exhibited broadly in the realms of visual art and theater, and are represented in numerous public and private collections.

Richard Benson: Master Photographer, Printer, Teacher and Maker of Things
Tuesday 18 October 2022
5.15 – 6.15pm
Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library
Free event, booking required

https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/oct22/richard-benson-lecture

Image credit: A portrait of Mr. Benson in 2012 from the series “From Darkroom to Daylight”, Harvey Wang. © Harvey Wang

As part of my PhD research I am taking a close look at the first Kodak cameras 1888-90, gleaning what I can from photographical journals, biographical material about George Eastman and promotional literature.

For illustration purposes, I would like a good copy of the diagram of the film path and mechanism in the first of the Kodak cameras, to be found in the manual which went with them. I am aware a copy of the 1888 manual is downloadable from Butkus.org, but this PDF only provides me with a low-quality image.

If anyone on BPS is in possession of an original copy, or knows another accesible source of one, or another place I could find a better resolution version of the image, I would be immensely grateful for the help. The diagram is below.

Many thanks

Peter Domankiewicz

This is the story of Francis Frith, a Victorian adventurer, pioneer photographer and visionary businessman, and his amazing legacy – a unique archive of over 300,000 photographs illustrating the changing face of Britain over 110 years.

Between 1856 and 1860 Francis Frith made three arduous expeditions to Egypt and the Holy Land, where he took some of the earliest photographs ever seen of those regions. He then founded his own photographic publishing company and began an incredible project – the creation of what is widely considered to be the first extensive photographic record of Britain.

For the next 30 years he and his company photographers travelled around the country recording thousands of cities, towns and villages, landmarks, historic buildings, coasts and countryside in photographs to sell to tourists as souvenir prints. After Frith’s death in 1898 his successors continued his project into the 20th century, by which time the Frith company had become one of Britain’s leading postcard publishers. By the time it closed down in 1970 it had created an unrivalled record of Britain over more than a century of change, which is now recognised as a photographic collection of national significance.

• Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Francis Frith’s birth in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in 1822, this book tells the story of his eventful life and is also a celebration of the extraordinary photographic legacy of this remarkable man, which is now viewed by millions of people
  around the world on the Frith website francisfrith.com.
• Extensively researched, it contains new information about his Middle Eastern expeditions, including the identification of a number of his companions and extracts from letters written by one of them on their journey through the Sinai Peninsula.
• Lavishly illustrated with over 500 period photographs, ranging from the monuments of ancient Egypt to nostalgic images of the people and places of Britain between 1860 and 1970.
• An absorbing read for anyone interested in the early history of photography, travel and exploration in the 19th century and Egyptology, as well as British history.

A Grand Spell of Sunshine. The Life and Legacy of Francis Frith
Julia Skinner
The Francis Frith Collection
£35. 400 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-1-84589-924-0
email: sales@francisfrith.co.uk
web: www.francisfrith.com

Charlotte Connelly has been appointed Head Curator of the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. She replaces Dr Geoff Belknap who has moved to a new role as Keeper in Edinburgh. The post was advertised earlier this year. 

Charlotte is currently Museum Curator at the The Polar Museum, Cambridge. She holds a MSc in Museum Studies, a BSc History and Philosophy of Science and has just submitted her PhD thesis.  She previously worked at the Science Museum between 2010 and 2014. See: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/people/connelly/ 

She tweets at @curatorconnelly

William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor of photography, created around 15,000 photographs in the nineteenth century, most of them attempts to produce compelling scientific documents or pictorial records of the world around him. However, among those that have survived are also prints in which an image has been obscured, obliterated or simply failed to register.

Borrowing its intriguing title from a poem written by Talbot, this book features twenty-four of these prints, his most experimental photographs. Originally intended as test prints or creative exercises, all that remains on these shaped pieces of photographic paper are chemical stains or imprinted patterns or shapes. Offered to the reader as enigmatic physical artefacts, these failed or ruined photographs are here reanimated as objects of beauty, mystery and promise, as artworks that speak of photography’s most fundamental attributes and potentials.

An accompanying essay illustrated with comparative images places these photographs in a broad historical context leading up to the present, revealing what relevance Talbot’s experiments have to contemporary concepts of the art of photography.

The Forms of Nameless Things: Experimental Photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot
Geoffrey Batchen
Bodleian Libraries, November 2022
ISBN: 9781851245932
£30

The Association for Art History has a call for forty 2023 Annual Conference sessions held in-person at UCL. The Association for Art History’s 2023 Annual Conference is open to all and you don’t need to be a member to attend or present a paper. The call closes on 4 November. 

There are many sessions which include photography, would benefit from a photography perspective, or are focused on photography. These include: 

The conference will take place at UCL, London, from 12-14 April 2023. 

• Photography and 21st-Century Migration
• Toward a Media History of Art and Design Education
• Victorian Colour Revolution: The Nineteenth-Century Chromatic Turn
• Remaking Femininity: Women’s Portraiture in Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture

All session calls are here: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2023-annual-conference/

The Edward Reeves Archive in association with the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at UAL and Edward Reeves Photography present Stories seen through a glass plate: in their footsteps, an exhibition of historic photographs of Lewes and its people displayed on lightboxes throughout the town centre during September and October 2022.

• A new exhibition for 2022 from the Edward Reeves Archive. A century of life in Lewes, showing townsfolk in the places they lived, worked, relaxed and celebrated. Walk in their footsteps.
• Displaying new unseen images from the Edward Reeves archive.
• Accompanying exhibition, Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus, examines the crucial role of the building in town life.

The Edward Reeves Archive lightbox exhibition returns in 2022 with Stories seen through a glass plate: in their footsteps. Including formal portraits taken in the Reeves’ Studio as well as Lewes street scenes, it reveals the world in which the subjects lived and the people they may have encountered. Contemporary newspaper reports and guidebooks have provided personal back stories, describing family life, work, and leisure pursuits.

Illustrated with stunning photographs, showing the amazing quality of the images taken from the original glass plates, the lightboxes are placed in locations relevant to the subjects. You will meet Edward Reeves and his daughter Mary Elizabeth, also a photographer, their neighbour Ruth Simmons who married twice and then emigrated to Canada, and from just across the High Street Caroline Napier and Annie Mullens who ran a school for young ladies. In their daily life they may have bumped into Thomas Weston, ‘haircutter and perfumer’ out on his penny farthing bicycle or passed by Edwin Battersby, managing clerk of the Lewes Probate Registry and attempted murderer. Among the street scenes, the witnesses to an early car crash, a town celebration for a coronation that didn’t happen and the lively aftermath of a general election result with the report of eggs thrown and fireworks discharged!

The lightboxes will be available to view until Sunday 23rd October. Brigitte Lardinois, Director of the Photography and the Arts Research Centre at LCC, UAL: “The Edward Reeves Archive project is very important in the history of British photography and I am delighted that with the help of our many volunteers we are able to once again share some of this unique collection.”

Tom Reeves, fourth generation photographer at Edward Reeves Photography: “It is really exciting that, through the efforts of our volunteers, we have been able for the first time to search our archive for specific named subjects, so in this exhibition we can include portraits of people exhibited in the windows of the houses that they once occupied. That sheds a fascinating light on a past Lewes and its people.”

Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus. This additional exhibition at Lewes Town Hall displays photographs from it’s opening in 1893 to the current day, shows the central role the building has always played in the social and commercial life of the town. A Royal visit, concerts and theatricals, meetings and tea parties, and a remarkable exhibition of early electric lights and equipment can all be seen.

Stories seen through a glass plate: in their footsteps
Thursday 29th September – Sunday 23rd October 2022
Lewes High Street, Cliffe High Street & surrounding area
Exhibition maps available at the Lewes Tourist Information Centre, Lewes Town Hall, Edward Reeves Photography
(159 High Street) and many of the host shops and businesses.

Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus
Thursday 29th September – Saturday 15th October
Monday – Saturday, 10.00am – 4.00pm
Baxter Corridor, Lewes Town Hall (High Street Entrance)

Established in 1855, Edward Reeves Photography is believed to be the oldest continuously operated photographic
studio in the world. It houses an archive of over 250,000 glass plates in addition to over 400,000 images on film
and in the form of digital files. With much of the original paperwork intact, this archive is a unique record of daily
life in and around Lewes, and of the history of commercial photographic practice. The Victorian studio is still in
daily use and the business is now owned and run by Edward Reeves’ great grandson Tom Reeves with his wife Tania
Osband. For more information, visit www.reevesarchive.com.

Images: © Edward Reeves Photography

The University of Manchester's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine has relaunched its seminar programme which will be both live and online via Zoom. On 22 November Dr Alexander Medcalf will look at the World Helath Organisation's photography archive. As the quote in the title suggests, over almost half a century the WHO invested heavily in procuring photographic material and showcasing it in magazines, newspapers and at exhibitions around the world.

Dr Alexander Medcalf, Department of History, University of York
22 November 2022 at 1600 (GMT)
"The most extensive photographic collection in the world": seeing health "through the eyes" of the WHO, 1948-1990  
Abstract and further details
Register for free: https://blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2022/10/01/chstm-research-seminar-22-november-2022/

What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Why are some photographs valued and others not? Why are some photographic practices visible and not others? What value systems and hierarchies do they reflect?

What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. It focuses not on formal collections of photographs as accessioned objects, be they ‘fine art’ or ‘archival’, but on what might be termed ‘non-collections’: the huge number of photographs that are integral to the workings of museums yet ‘invisible’, existing outside the structures of ‘the collection’. These photographs, however, raise complex and ambiguous questions about the ways in which such accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories and knowledge-systems, through multiple, folded and overlapping layers that might be described as the museum’s ecosystem.

These photographic dynamics are studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an institution with over 150 years' engagement with photography’s multifaceted uses and existences in the museum. The book differs from more usual approaches to museum studies in that it presents not only formal essays but short ‘auto-ethnographic’ interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work. As such this book offers an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs ‘do’ in museums, expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

What Photographs Do. The making and remaking of museum cultures
Edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious
£30.00
ISBN: 9781800082991
Publication: November 21, 2022
£30 (paperback); £50 (hardback); £0 (open access download)
Details: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/192313?_pos=1&_sid=42025d3ac&_ss=r

Robert Pols’ Early Photographic Studios website, that is a directory of the photographers of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Suffolk between 1840 and 1916, has now moved to www.earlyphotostudios.uk  It includes a list of Robert’s publications and a discount code to purchase these from the Federation of Family History Societies.