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A friend from Sunderland has given me an album of thirty cartes de visite assembled in 1888.  The  eleven photographers whose work is represented were located in small towns throughout County Durham. The majority were in Sunderland, probably because this was the county's largest town and a major sea port.  One picture stands out from the rest in that the pose is more natural, with the subject seemingly unaware of being photographed, in contrast to the hard stares of most of the others in the album. This picture was taken by Madame Brunner, presumably Clementina Brunner nee Grant, 1833 - 1887.  On the back she describes herself as a "Pupil of Mayall Photographer to the Queen" .  Her address, 32 Fawcett Street, places her in the centre of the town's most important commercial street.   She was clearly not only a pioneering lady photographer but also one who had a very distinct style and a confident approach to the business aspect of her work.

I hope someone here might be able to help. I’m seeking information about the Photographic Information Council, which seems to have existed as a photographic industry promotional body in Britain between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. The Photographic Information Council produced leaflets, organised competitions (including the Junior Photographer of the Year prize) and wrote articles for local and national newspapers promoting photography and giving advice to novices.

They seem to have been based at two London addresses: Wardrobe House, Wardrobe Place, London EC4 and 140 Park Lane, London W1Y 4EL. Contributing writers / representatives include George Hughes, Howard S. Cotton, Robin Bowles, Harry Challoner, Michael Geraghty and Kenneth G. Pope.

Was anyone here a member or know anyone who was? Does anyone have any of their leaflets? I’m particularly interested their promotion of photography for school children. Were you a Junior Photographer competition winner or entrant? Please get in touch if so!

With thanks,

Annebella Pollen, Professor of Visual and Material Culture, University of Brighton. E:  a.pollen@brighton.ac.uk

Image: the new PIC trophy introduced in 1971 for its Young Photographer of the Year competition, boys' open class

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 conference, 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.

Conference: Photography in its environment
Leicester: Photographic History Research Centre
12-13 June 2023
Hybrid (in person and online)
Registration is now open here: https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-conference-2023-2/

Image:  Mark Kasumovic, Skipsea #2, inkjet print, 50 x 60 in, 2020

I have a collection of portfolios with photographs by J.F. Langhans.  Each portfolio containsa a group of photographs mounted, with both type and hand written notes, embossed with National Art Library, mostly ecclesiastical garments.  I received confirmation from V&A Museum that they were once part of their collection.  They still have a portfolio of the Iron Work as part of Industrial Arts.  A curator from V&A suggested I reach out to this group and tap into the great knowledge coming from the group.  I have also spoken to the langhans.cz organization, but they had little information on these.

Any information about J.F. Langhans or the other industrial art works that were covered in the commissioned work of King Edward VII, would be greatly appreciated.

The J. Paul Getty Museum seeks an Assistant Curator of Photographs to become a vital member of a team working with one of the foremost collections of photographs in the United States. The Assistant Curator will play an instrumental role in supporting the collection and its many audiences through acquisitions, exhibitions, original research, and innovative interpretation. The Department of Photographs is committed to developing programming that is engaging and meaningful to diverse audiences. The successful candidate will bring creative ideas and fresh perspectives to developing and interpreting the collection, key attributes for our ongoing work to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, both through our internal work and our public-facing programs. Under moderate supervision, the Assistant Curator will help develop the collection particularly in the area of European nineteenth-century photography, with an emphasis on the early history of the medium in France and England, maintaining and managing it in collaboration with colleagues and under the direction of the Senior Curator.

The Assistant Curator will contribute to the ongoing work of cataloguing the collection for the museum website, including doing research, updating information, and writing descriptions of individual objects.  The ideal candidate will be a highly motivated person with exceptional organizational skills and experience managing projects in an iterative, fast-paced environment. A natural consensus-builder, the candidate understands how to collaborate successfully in a team with other curators in the department, as well as with colleagues across the campus, including Conservation, Design, Exhibitions, Education, Interpretive Content, Communications, Imaging Services, Preparators, and Registrars.

Details are here

New find! Richard Beard Patentee 9th plate Daguerreotype circa 1841 of a young man , the first British portrait photographer, signed by John Goddard on back of plate, with a Thomas Wharton pinch beck designed case with his Royal coat of arms.

The first major exhibition as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s reopening on 22 June will showcase the ground-breaking work of 20th century British photographer, Yevonde. Supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund, the exhibition will include new prints and discoveries, revealed by the latest research on Yevonde’s colour negative archive, acquired by the Gallery in 2021.

Over 25 newly discovered photographs by Yevonde, a pioneer of colour photography in the 1930s, will go on show for the first time when the National Portrait Gallery reopens to visitors, in the largest exhibition of the artist’s work. With over 150 works displayed, Yevonde: Life and Colour (22 June – 15 October 2023), supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund, will survey the portraits, commercial commissioned work and still lives that the artist produced throughout her sixty year career. Showcasing photographs of some of the most famous faces of the time – from George Bernard Shaw to Vivien Leigh, and John Gielgud to Princess Alexandra – the exhibition positions Yevonde as a trailblazer in the history of British portrait photography.

Reflecting the growing independence of women after the First World War, this exhibition will focus on the freedom photography afforded Yevonde, who became an innovator in new techniques, experimenting with solarisation and the Vivex colour process. The exhibition is the first to open as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s 2023 programme, following the largest redevelopment in its history.

Yevonde Middleton, known as Madame Yevonde or simply Yevonde (1893-1975), was a successful London-based photographer whose work focused on portraits and still life throughout much of the twentieth century. She was introduced to photography as a career through her involvement with the suffragette cause. As an innovator committed to colour photography when it was not considered a serious medium, Yevonde’s oeuvre is significant in the history of British photography.

In 2021, Yevonde’s tri-colour separation negative archive was acquired by the Gallery through funding from The Portrait Fund. Following extensive research, cataloguing and digitisation, funded by CHANEL Culture Fund, stunning new discoveries have been uncovered. Revealed for the first time in this new exhibition, they showcase the range of sitters and subjects that Yevonde photographed in colour – from glamorous debutantes and the royal family to leading writers, artists and film stars.

The vibrant colour portrait of one of the most photographed women in the 1930s, socialite Margaret Sweeny (1938), will be shown for the first time. Later, in 1963, as Duchess of Argyll, Margaret gained notoriety through a high-profile divorce. The scandal was recently dramatised in the 2021 award-winning BBC series A Very British Scandal, with Margaret portrayed by Claire Foy. The exhibition will also feature a new colour print of the portrait of Surrealist patron and poet, Edward James, 1933, used on the cover of his 1938 volume of poetry The Bones of My Hand. Yevonde’s still life often integrated elements of Surrealist iconography and she referenced the work of Man Ray in her own portraits.

The exhibition will explore Yevonde’s life and career through self-portraiture and autobiography, contextualising her work within the productive days of creative modernist photography. To this end, a previously unseen self-portrait in vivid Vivex tricolour from 1937 has been uncovered and will be displayed as part of the exhibition. The self-portrait sees Yevonde looking directly into the lens and at the viewer, positioned alongside her weighty one-shot camera and using Art Now – Herbert Read’s survey of modern art from 1933 – as a prop, clearly depicting herself as an artist with a camera.

Establishing her studio before the outbreak of the First World War, Yevonde’s work quickly became published in leading society and fashion magazines such as the Tatler and the Sketch, depicting new freedoms in fashion and leisure as well as capturing the growing independence of women. Her commercial work also appeared as advertisements constructed through humorous still life or by using models in tableaux. Yevonde’s audience included the readers of the growing field of women’s magazines including Woman and Beauty and Eve’s Journal.

An exciting new discovery revealed during the final stages of producing the exhibition publication, is the portrait of Dorothy Gisborne (Pratt) as Psyche (1935). Yevonde’s portrayal of the Greek goddess of the soul, with customary butterfly wings, is a previously unknown element of the Goddess series.

“Yevonde’s originality demonstrated through these photographs traverses almost a century and provides a vision so fresh and relatable. It is enthralling that there are further revelations to be transformed into colour after almost a century or, for some, for the very first time.” Clare Freestone, Photographs Curator, National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is pleased to offer a new £5 ticket for its Summer 2023 season of exhibitions, available to all visitors aged 30 and under. Supported by the Principal Partner of the new National Portrait Gallery – Bank of America – reduced £5 tickets for Yevonde: Life and Colour will be available to all visitors aged 30 and under, seven days a week.

Yevonde: Life and Colour will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring over 160 beautifully illustrated photographic works from the pioneering photographer. The book, which includes an introductory essay by exhibition curator Clare Freestone, will explore how Yevonde’s bold creations brought a burst of colour to photography in Britain. It is available to  pre-order now.  

www.npg.org.uk

Image: Margaret Sweeny (Whigham, later Duchess of Argyll) 1 by Yevonde (1938), purchased with support from the Portrait Fund, 2021

I have been collecting photographica (1839-1880) for over forty years, and the time has come for me to decide what to do with all the material that I have accumulated, which amounts to over 700 daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, and a host of fine cdvs, albumen prints, family albums, and so on.

I have no heirs and I am not a keen salesman, so I reached an important decision, which I have begun to put them into effect. No-one is going to buy my entire collection, I reasoned, but some institution might like to own the better parts of it.

In a word, I decided to donate!

It would be wonderful to donate an entire collection to a dedicated institution, but that will never happen. Firstly, the material would duplicate what any photographic museum would consider the core of its collection. Secondly, the quality of the material in a collection is variable. While I have found some wonderful and/or historically important pieces, there is a lot which is of great interest to me, but which would find no place in a national or a regional collection.

I decided to offer only material which might enrich or expand collections which already exist.

I would like to be remembered as a donor, obviously. More importantly, I would like the material that I have gathered to play some part in the formation of future generations of photo historians and photo collectors. I approached institutions in England where I was born, and in Italy, where I live, describing the contents of my collection, and I received encouraging replies from two museums which were interested in considering at least a part of my holdings.

I visited the museum in England which had expressed an interest, and immediately withdrew my offer to donate. The museum had been revamped since my last visit, which meant they had gone digital, so most of the original material was locked in the vault. I favour hands-on, and real exhibits. In my opinion they had ruined what was once the perfect museum, i.e, a miscellaneous collection of the weird and the wonderful.

After disappointment in England, I turned to the institution in Italy.

The Biblioteca Panizzi, an Italian national library, based in Reggio Emilia sent the head of their photographic collection, a noted photohistorian, and a conservator to visit me at my home and see what I was offering. In the course of two days we examined much of the material, and we reached an agreement. In the first instance, I proposed to donate my so-called “Teaching Collection,” which consists of material that I have used over the years while teaching the history of early photographic processes. This amounted to over 100 daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and ferrotypes. One year later, after this material had been catalogued, scanned and conserved, I made them a second offer, which was also accepted: my “Post Mortem Collection,” which consists of daguerreotype, ambrotype and cdvs images of corpses, mourners, chapels, churchyards and graves.

At the moment, I am contemplating a third donation which has still to be formalised.

The pleasure of donating, as I boldly entitled this note, comes from knowing that the sections of my collection which I love dearly, and which have some importance in the history of photography, will be available to anyone like me, who is fascinated by the visual technology of the nineteenth century.

https://www.bibliotecapanizzi.it/2023/03/michael-g-jacob-e-i-dagherrotipi-post-mortem/

The photographer Dorothy Bohm has died aged 98 years after a short illness, just a few months short of her 99th birthday. A public celebration of Dorothy’s life and work will follow on the afternoon of Sunday 25 June, to mark what would have been her 99th birthday.

Obituary to follow. 

Read more about her remarkable life here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/10/photographer-dorothy-bohm-interview-work-life-balance

The latest RPS Historical Group talk, 'W. & D. Downey, Photographers: The Road to Balmoral,' was recorded and is now available to view online. It includes the discovery of Downey's Crystal Palace Portrait Gallery that toured villages in Northumberland in 1856, how the company utilised early photography networks in the North East of England and London, and suggests a new date for the establishment of its first portrait studios in Newcastle.

https://youtu.be/HeLgFdZeQ3Y

Thomas Begbie is known mainly because of the discovery of a cache of glass plate stereos in St James Square Edinburgh in 1955. These stereos from the late 1850s, the work of Alexander McGlashon, were incorrectly assumed to have been the work of Begbie. This post attempts to tease out what is known of Begbie

Census and other registration records point to him being born in 1841, (e.g. the 1901 census taken on 31st March gives his age as 59). The family business was that of lapidary and it seems that he probably trained as a lapidary.  Thomas’s father died in October 1855 and the business had ceased to exist by mid 1856.

The 1861 census lists Begbie as a lodger in 121 Rose Street, a crowded two storey property, suggesting that he was probably struggling a bit financially; his occupation is given as photographer, the earliest such reference. However it is extremely unlikely that he would have been able to carry out any photographic activities in such cramped accommodation so perhaps the enumerator has used a generic term whereas in reality photographic assistant would have been more accurate.

 At some point after April 1861 Begbie moved to London and was living in Hill Street when he married Sarah McDonald in 1864. By August of the following year when his daughter was born he had moved back to Edinburgh. Very interestingly her birth certificate gives Begbie’s occupation as photographer’s assistant as is the case on each of the birth certificates of his following three children. As, with one exception, these certificates bear Begbie’s handwritten signature, they can be taken as an authoritative statement of his occupation.  The exception is signed by his wife and also states that he is a photographer’s assistant.

In April 1867 Begbie became a member of the Edinburgh Photographic Society

By 1871 he is living with his wife’s family; her brother, whose occupation is a lapidary, is listed as the head of the household, again suggesting that he is still struggling to progress in photography.

Begbie’s circumstances improved during the 1870’s as he moved to a two roomed house in 7 Leith Street in Edinburgh, at last the head of his own household. From 1874 he is listed in the Post Office Directory at that address as a photographer and in the 1879 and two following directories he has placed a small advert for his photographic business. However after 1881 there are no further entries although he is still listed as a photographer in the 1891and 1901 censuses;  by 1901 he has moved into another two room house in 23 St James Square in Edinburgh; both his sons are in the jewellery trade. He is retired in the 1910 census.

Begbie died in St James Square in March 1915, two months after his wife’s death.

There are few contemporary references to him. A detailed search of the online British Newspaper Archive failed to produce any references, and there seems to be scarcely any surviving photos bearing the Begbie name; personally I have encountered only a few cdvs. It is reasonable to assume that he was not particularly successful as a photographer.

Intriguingly at the time of his death his two sons were in the jewellery trade. An obvious question is why didn’t they follow their father into the photographic profession – indeed did Thomas Begbie continue a parallel career in the jewellery trade, helping to make ends meet, and passing these skills on to his children?

Begbie is a shadowy figure who clearly had aspirations as a photographer but success seems to have eluded him; had it not been for the misattribution of the McGlashon photographs Begbie would likely have been no more than a footnote in photographic history.

Born 12th March 1872, photographer and writer Percy R. Salmon FRPS donated items to the Royal Photographic Society Museum in 1950. Now part of the V&A collection, one photograph, a collodion portrait dated around 1860, has been catalogued.

Discover more in a new blogpost at https://pressphotoman.com  

As many of you know, the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University supports the following websites:

• Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839-1865 
• The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
• Roger Fenton's Crimean Letterbooks
• Photographic Exhibitions of the RPS 1875-1915
• Members of the Royal Photographic Society

Our servers urgently need upgrading to maintain security and there will be some disruption impacting access to these over the coming months. We would encourage any students or researchers to make use of them in the next few days before they temporarily go off-line.

We will continue to update you on progress and hope to have all your favourite sites back up and running better than ever (and safer than ever) very soon.

Thank you for your support and patience.

Professor Kelley Wilder
Director, Photographic History Research Centre

For roughly 150 years, people have been accustomed to seeing photomechanical prints on a daily basis. Prints exist in a variety of milieus with multiple variations over time, use, and geography. Historic and contemporary examples are prevalent in museums, libraries, archives, and personal collections worldwide. Photomechanical prints were developed to fill many needs including practical and economical methods for mass reproduction, techniques to facilitate the simultaneous printing of images and text, increased image permanence, a perception of increased truthfulness and objectivity, and an autonomous means of artistic expression. They exist at the intersections of numerous disciplines: photography and printmaking, functional and artistic practices, the histories of photography and the graphic arts, and the specialties of paper and photograph conservation.

The program will provide an opportunity for conservators, curators, historians, scientists, collections managers, catalogers, archivists, librarians, educators, printmakers, artists, and collectors to convene and collaborate while exploring all aspects of photomechanical printing. The resulting advancement of our collective understanding of these ubiquitous but under-researched materials will allow for new interpretations and improved approaches to their collection, interpretation, preservation, treatment, and display. 

A limited number of scholarships are available for international participants. Scholarship applications are due May 15. Funding for this program comes from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fund for Collaborative Workshops in Photograph Conservation and the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC) Endowment for Professional Development. FAIC relies on your contributions to support these and its many other programs. Learn more about donating to the foundation.

Photomechanical Prints: History, Technology, Aesthetics, and Use
Washington DC
31 October-2 November 2023
Programme, further information and registration: https://learning.culturalheritage.org/p/photomechanical

I have long been fascinated by this concept ever since I first saw an engraving in the Illustrated London News, 10 November1855, of the van that Roger Fenton took to the Crimea, with Marcus Sparling in the driver’s seat. It seemed so implausibly compact given the multitude of tasks it was said to perform ‘fitted up for living, cooking, sleeping, and darkroom work’.

Copies of the actual photo exist in various national collections and can now be found e.g. on Wikimedia, as used here.

I’ve never really studied other itinerant photographers who used them until now, however, I am currently researching Oliver Sarony and Samuel Oglesby.

The van Sarony rolled into Wisbech with in 1854 was in stark contrast to Fenton’s, being described as  a “monster carriage (measuring 32 feet in length and weighing seven tons,) with its elegant suite of rooms beautifully fitted up and admirable [sic] adapted for photographic purposes.” Another report that year talks of his van literally cracking the flagstones in the market place in Cambridge.

Consequently I would be grateful if other members could point me in the direction of any accessible background reading on such travelling vans in England, or on Oliver Sarony himself.

I have read that Sarony had links with other photographers and artists, e.g. Heathcote’s ‘Faithful Likeness’ mentions John Baume and the colourist Alfred Lancaster. However, I’ve not read of any links between Sarony and Oglesby, but there seem to be some from 1856 when they were both in Norwich.

Oglesby having moved on Bury St. Edmonds, possibly aiming to capitalise on Sarony’s reputation, said that he used the same artists as Sarony, and offered for sale at least one of Sarony’s photographs, of a General Windham. Subsequently whilst in Boston in 1857, by then Oglesby, like Sarony, had changed over to collodion paper prints, for a time he offered them at half price to people who had previously had daguerreotypes taken by Sarony and wished to exchange them. Sarony settled in Scarborough in 1857, whilst Oglesby continued his travels. They both also used the same design on their CDV mounts in the 1860s (which may, or may not, be significant, as that was not uncommon).

The output of itinerant photographers usually ranks them at the lower end of the quality spectrum, however, the photographs of this pair are anything but, if the quality of their surviving cartes de visites is anything to go by. Whilst ‘local news’ pieces in contemporary newspapers were generally effusive, especially for advertisers, the favourable reviews of the fidelity of their photographs seem more fulsome than most.

Oglesby is an interesting character, in 1833 he and his brother Henry were sentenced, age 10 and 12 respectively, to 7 years transportation for theft of items valued at 8s. 6d. Due to a backlog of prisoners awaiting transportation, they spent 2 years on the prison hulk Euryalus, moored off Chatham. There they remained until they boarded the convict ship John Barry on 31 August 1835. It set sail on 7^th September, with 320 convicts on board, bound for New South Wales arriving in Australia on 17^th January 1836. Apart from discovering that both brothers received their Certificate of Freedom on the same day, 28^th June 1841, to date I have found nothing else about them for the period 1836 – 1849.

Samuel re-emerges in the summer of 1849 as a daguerreotype photographer in Adelaide. I have tracked various references to him 1849 – Aug.1852 on Trove. He subsequently returned to the UK (before or after Beard’s patent had expired?); Heathcote has him in Peterborough in June 1854. After some itinerant years touring the country, his van rolled into Preston in the autumn of 1861, where he settled before moving to Llandudno 5 years later; he died there in 1879.

I’m hoping that there might be some antipodean members who could advise me as to how I might fill in some of the gaps in the timeline.

A series of events organised by the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre together with the Centre for British Photography and Four Corners, coinciding with the exhibition  Jo Spence: Fairy Tales and Photography at the Centre for British Photography, an exhibition of materials from the Hyman Collection and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck, curated by Patrizia Di Bello and James Hyman, with help from Eliza Neil and Marta Duarte. 

Workshop 

11 March 2023, 3-5 pm, at the Centre for British Photography, 49 Jermyn St, St. James's, London SW1Y 6LX 

Synthetic Documents: Jo Spence’s ‘self’ portraiture, from The Faces Group to the Polysnappers 

With Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe. Please note that registration and a fee will be required to book a place on this as spaces are limited. These are not for profit but to manage space. Book here.  

The photographer Jo Spence (1934–1992) is closely associated with the radical London left of the 1970s and 1980s and particularly feminist politics. The phrase ‘the personal is political’, often deployed to summarise some of the aims of the Women’s Liberation Movement, invokes the idea of self-representation as a primary political goal, but what does ‘the personal’ mean in a context of collective political organisation and art production? This workshop invites participants to take a long view of Spence’s self-portraiture, beginning with her early collaboration with Terry Dennett, as well as her work with female-only photography collectives, including the Faces Group and The Polysnappers. Through the handling and discussion of documents from the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, and a presentation on the history of Spence’s collaborations by curator and writer Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe, the workshop aims to unpack the role of the personal in collective political identity both in the 1970s and 1980s, and today within our changed political and media landscape. Attendees are invited to bring images they classify as self-portraiture, of themselves or others, to use in the group discussion which includes our own relationships with photography and ideas about political representation as well as the lessons we can learn from Spence.  

Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe is a curator and writer, usually based in London, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at Birkbeck University writing a dissertation on Jo Spence and Terry Dennett. Currently, she is in residency at AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions in Paris where she is working on a project focused on the connections between British and German radical left-wing culture of the 1970s.  

FORTHCOMING: 

Reading Group 

14 March 2023, 7-8:30pm at Four Corners, 121 Roman Rd, London E2 0QN. 

Art Form and Funding: The 9–5 and the 5—9 

Free and open to all but RSVP required due to limited capacity, please respond to this email to confirm attendance and receive PDFs of the texts.  

Please join for a reading group and discussion on the history of art form and art funding in the UK and specifically London. Focused on the shared history of Four Corners and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, we will discuss archival material and our own experiences of living and making work today. We will be reading in advance ‘Ten Years of the Photography Workshop’ by Jo Spence and Terry Dennett from Photographic Practices: Towards a Different Image (1986) ed Phillip Bezencenet and Stevie Corrigan and ‘The Rising Moon’ an article on Four Corners from Amateur Photographer (1978).  

In Discussion 

30 March, 6:30 to 8pm, at the Centre for British Photography, 49 Jermyn St, St. James's, London SW1Y 6LX 

‘Jo Spence: Fairy Tales and Photography’ 

Marina Warner in conversation with Patrizia Di Bello, reflecting on the themes of fairy tales and transformation in Jo Spence’s work, and its resonances in contemporary culture. Info and Booking. 

Roundtable discussion 

13 April, 6:30 to 8pm 

‘Jo Spence: The Archive Which is Not One’ 

A roundtable discussion with Charlene Heath, James Hyman and Patrizia Di Bello, discussing multiplicity, dispersal and repetitions of the ‘dispersed’ Jo Spence Memorial Archive. How do archives construct the past for the present and the future? Info and Booking.  

Image: Detail from Jo Spence Faces Group (Lyn), 1975-1977. Workbook with gelatine silver prints and masks. Ryerson Image Centre, Jo Spence Memorial Archive 

How can photographs help us to understand the history of warfare? This afternoon of talks covers the origins of war photography and its early practices, exploring how the invention of the photographic camera in the nineteenth century forged new ways of seeing conflict and its human costs.

How did the photographic image begin to shape perceptions of war? What can photographic albums reveal about the experience of conflict? And what ethical issues are raised by the practice of taking photographs of violence for public consumption?

With a range of speakers, these talks consider the value of photographic archives for shedding light on global histories of warfare, seeking to expand popular conceptions of what a ‘war photograph’ looks like, as well as how we should think (and feel) about these images.

‘The Origins of War Photography’ coincides with the Photo Oxford Festival 2023, 'The Hidden Power of the Archive' (14 April-6 May), giving you the opportunity to visit other events and activities in Oxford.

The Origins of War Photography
Sat 29 Apr 2023, from 1300-1730
£55
University of Oxford, Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JA
Details and book: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/the-origins-of-war-photography?code=O22P199ARJ#fees_container

Can anyone please help me interpret the content of the photographs shown eg nature of the sitters, social context and significant elements of dress etc.

This two-day event initiates a critical conversation about the largely overlooked space of the darkroom, and outlines new ways to research, theorise, and interpret the roles that it has played in our modern world. In the Photographic Darkroom will seek to do so by shifting the focus from the visual product (e.g., negatives and prints) to the setting itself within which these objects were produced, positing that the material, socio-cultural, and corporeal dimensions of the darkroom had an influence on how people conceptualised and, consequently, understood photography. This will enable us to rethink the role of photography in the development of modern visual culture, and its wider historical relations, from fresh viewpoints.

Further information – including the full programme of speakers and abstracts – is available on the conference website.

Conference: In the Photographic Darkroom (08-09 June 2023)

This is a hybrid event: Please join us online or on site at the University of Westminster, London (UK).

All tickets are free but registration is required:

Click here to reserve tickets for on site attendance.

Click here to reserve tickets to attend online.

For any queries please contact Dr Sara Dominici at s.dominici1@westminster.ac.uk