Blogs

This photobook collection was brought together over the past 30 years with the intention of representing a broad range of titles dating from the late 19th century to the modern day. There are many rare and beautiful books in outstanding condition which sit alongside a diverse range of titles which have been historically overlooked but have now become an important part of the contemporary photobook ‘canon’.

There is no single photobook history, thus the title of this collection which is intended to form the foundation of further discoveries from both the past and the future.

It was a labour of love gathering these books together and the intention is now for them to find a new home. For more details on pricing and information about The Photobook Histories collection please contact: Nick Higbee at the Pallant Gallery Bookshop shop@pallantbookshop.com

Details: https://www.photobookhistories.com/

In 1946, shortly after his retirement from the Department of Geography at Sheffield University, Dr R N Rudmose Brown donated a small collection of photographs taken in British Columbia in the late 1860s to the Royal Geographical Society.

Their presence in the Society's Collection invites reflection on their donor, maker, origins, initial circulation, repurposing, preservation, significance, and meanings. Rudmose Brown, founder member of the Institute of British Geographers was the younger son of botanist Dr Robert Brown (of Camster), and had likely inherited the collection from his father, who had been a friend of photographer Frederick Dally (1838-1914), when the two lived in Victoria, BC, during the 1860s.  At that time, geography – not in the sense of a rigidly defined academic discipline, but rather more broadly as popular quest for knowledge about the world, its places, and its peoples – had a firm hold on the Victorian mind; photography was a way to foster, facilitate, and further its pursuit.

Employed as an aid to field work, an accessory of travel, and a form of visual documentation, photography, like geography, was a way of picturing place. More broadly and with the authority of on-the-spot observation, Brown's photographs speak to the entangled and mutually reinforcing connections between photo-graphos (light writing) and geo-graphos (earth writing). Through them, we can begin to understand how nineteenth-century photographs were embraced as agents of sight to extend the powers of human observation across space and time, and served as sites of agency where the subjective experience of space and time was expressed and shaped. 

Picturing place: reflections on a photograph collection from British Columbia
Joan M. Schwartz
London, Royal Geographical Society, and online
25 November 2022, from 1430-1545, £5 non-members
Register: https://www.rgs.org/events/autumn-2022/be-inspired-picturing-place/

An online print sale featuring the work of more than 50 of the best photographers working in Britain today runs until 19 December. It will raise funds for the new Centre for British Photography and the Hyman Foundation’s support of emerging photographers in Britain, through commissions, grants, exhibitions and acquisitions.

Featuring the work of Julia Fullerton-Batten, David Hurn, Karen Knorr and Martin Parr among others and priced at £70, the A4 prints will be available to purchase from 17 November – 19 December 2022 on the Centre for British Photography website: www.britishphotography.org.

The Centre, a new home for British photography, will open in London in late January 2023. It will build on the world-renowned Hyman Collection of British photography and the work of the Hyman Foundation. Three floors of exhibitions will present the diverse landscape of British photography today, as well as an historical overview. The 8000 sq. ft. Centre will be FREE to visit year-round and will offer exhibitions, events and talks, a shop and an archive and library.

Created by Sampad in partnership with Birmingham Archives, Library of Birmingham and University of Birmingham, From City Of Empire To City Of Diversity: A Visual Journey is an exhibition which documents post-1945 migration and the huge contribution made by those who settled in Birmingham from the Commonwealth.

The exhibition has been created from The Dyche Collection, one of the most important photographic collections within Birmingham Archives and acquired by Birmingham Central Library in 1990.

The collection of photographs from The Dyche Studios gives a fascinating and personal insight into Birmingham’s transformation. People who had moved to the city visited the studio to have their portraits taken so they could send them home to their families, capturing key moments in their lives and often painting a more positive picture of life in Birmingham than they were experiencing.

The exhibition also draws upon other collections held by Birmingham Archives, notably Benjamin Stone, Helen Caddick, Paul Hill, Nick Hedges, Vanley Burke and George Hallet.

Together with personal memories and stories of migration, these have been transformed into an exhibition which shows the range of experiences that have shaped Birmingham into the city it is today.

From City Of Empire To City Of Diversity: A Visual Journey
Birmingham Back to Backs
55-63 Hurst Street/50-54 Inge Street, Birmingham, West Midlands, B5 4TE
until 6 March 2023.
There will be a series of curator’s talks on23 and 26 January 2023.
Details: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/birmingham-west-midlands/birmingham-back-to-backs/exhibition

Katherine Howells at The National Archives, Kew, has written a blog about the copyright records held at TNA and how the data can around them be analysed.  In the 1860s photography as a new medium was coming under scrutiny and issues of ownership and copyright were being debated. This culminated in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, which allowed people to register photographs, paintings, and drawings with the Stationers’ Company for copyright protection for the first time. These records are now held at The National Archives in record series COPY 1.

This blog explores how the rich catalogue data for this collection can be cleaned and analysed in order to reveal how photographers and publishers responded to the new legislation and uncover information about the nature of photographic industries in the early 1860s.

Read the full blog here: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/analysing-britains-earliest-copyrighted-photographs/

Thanks to Dick Weindling for flagging this up.

Beginning in the 1920s, news agencies started distributing photographs using devices that transmitted images along telephone wires and radio waves. For the first time, large publics beheld images that had been separated from their material supports, travelling as electrical signals through telecommunications infrastructure. Yet, for another twenty years, wire photography remained limited to the industrialized world. All this changed during World War Two, when the American Office of War Information (OWI) established a news photography service that operated in colonial periphery, where privately funded news services had never distributed photos, since there was no chance of recovering profits.

Modern Enchantments, Anachronistic Space: The American Office of War Information Overseas Radiophoto Section in Central Africa and the British Raj, 1942-1945
Jonathan Dentler
Cpourtauld Research Forum
Monday 21st November 2022, 5:30pm - 6.30pm
Free, booking essential.
Online via Zoom, book here

A group of Frank Meadow Surtcliffe prints is being offered over several lots on 24 November in Morphets's Fine Art and Antiques auction.

Lots 6-31
Morphets, Harrogate
24 November 2022
See details here.

We have now extended the deadline and invite you to submit a titled abstract (c.100 words) with your name and affiliation to phmgicon@gmail.com by Friday 25th November! The 5-minute presentations should include around five PowerPoint slides, which should be illustrative rather than textual. Please get in touch as soon as possible for further details or to discuss your idea.

The Icon Photographic Materials Group is delighted to announce its upcoming online event: Lightning-talks (following on from the group’s Round Table events) accompanied by the group’s 2022 Annual General Meeting.

The event will consist of a series of five-minute presentations followed by questions and discussion. As always the event is welcome to anyone with an interest in the care and preservation of photographic materials.

We invite abstract submissions from conservators and non-conservators, whether you work in public institutions, private practice or education. Subjects could include sustainability, education, career development, preventive conservation and storage, scientific and analytical research, documentation, treatment practices, theory, history and ethics, outreach and funding (among others!). 

The Lightning-Talks event will be followed by a brief update from the group committee.

Call for Papers: Icon PhMG Lightning Talks and AGM

Lightning Talks and AGM: Thursday 8^th December 2022, 10 am - 1 pm

phmgicon@gmail.com

Dr Hanin Hannouch & Janine Freeston, have created a working group on color photography circa 1900, hosted by the Consortium of Science, Technology & Medicine. "The purpose of this working group is to propel a rising field of research; color photography in the 19th and early 20th century in order to reconfigure, expand, and problematize its role in the history of the discipline and in the historical contexts out of which it emerged." 

So far, 100 people have joined the group and so can you by clicking on this link!

Membership is free, easy, and it will give you access to a vivacious Resource section with free articles, videos, & our ever-growing multi-lingual bibliography on turn-of-the-century color photography.

The December 20, 4 PM UK time session will feature a presentation by Janine Freeston about "Women Making Color Photographs"

Abstract: Who are the women who produced color photographs? How did they contribute to the nascent trichromatic color photography processes at the turn of the last century? Are there more of them languishing in archives who have yet to be fully appreciated and how scholars uncover it? As the history of photography continues to evolve in its appreciation of women photographers, the substantial significance that women contributors made to color photography requires consolidation, such as Angelina Acland, Agnes Warburg, Violet Blaiklock, Marjory T. Hardcastle and Olive Edis to name a few. This talk highlights women working on unresolved color processes that demanded more technical, scientific and methodological prowess than that required from their counterparts working in monochrome. For example, some processes lacked chromatic fidelity, and yet a cohort of experimenting highly skilled photographers, a significant number of whom were women, persevered to offer numerous nuanced improvements that had evolved through their practical experiences or supplied work that supported the commercial potential that color photography presented.
I hope to appeal to members of this working group to interrogate their own resources and work together in amassing geographical, technical and biographical findings from the locations they are familiar with to provide a cogent and geographically balanced historical perspective highlighting the means and methods of contributions made by women beyond the exhibition of images. 

Also, on the menu, right after Janine is my short talk "Who is Gabriel Lippmann?"

Known for being a scientist and professor at La Sorbonne, color photographer, winner of the 1908 Nobel prize for physics, Lippmann's position in the history of (color) photography and that of his process "interferential color photography" can be described as awkward, at best. Why is that and who is he? Tune in to find out!

We will also be looking back at the wonderful speakers our working group has featured so far & revealing next year's schedule! 

Hanin

Dr Hanin Hannouch (she/her), Curator for analog and digital media (photography, film, and sound collections) at the Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna and editor of the book Gabriel Lippmann's Colour Photography: Science, Media, Museums (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) became, as of Monday 7.11.2022, member of the advisory board of the European Society for the History of Photography (ESHPh). She will be developing the research activities of the Society in the form of symposia and events with international cooperation partners, as well as steering the future of the ESHPh's journal "PhotoResearcher" with the team.

The latest issue of "PhotoResearcher" is titled "Photobooks as Propaganda: A Platform for Power, Protest and Persuasion" and is guest-edited by Dr José Neves, lecturer in Photography at the Faculty of Arts, Science & Technology at the University of Northhampton.

Hanin welcomes collaborations and exchange with scholars, artists, historians, and curators and is reachable per email: hanin.hannouch@weltmuseumwien.at

The latest issue of The Classic, a free magazine about classic photography is now available for download or can be picked up from its usual distributors. Issue 8 includes interviews with Charlotte Barthélemy  and Adrienne Lundgren, features on Café Royal Books, Erwin Blumenfeld, woman and late Qing Dynasty photographs and other. 

Download the last and back issues here: https://theclassicphotomag.com/

Magda Keaney, Senior Curator, Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, will be leaving her post at the end of December to return to her home country of Australia for family reasons.

Keaney has been in post since October 2018 and has been responsible for a a series of significant projects at the Gallery. When asked what she thought her main achievement had been she noted "leading the photographs curatorial team toward a complete collection re-contextualisation and display for the NPG 'Inspiring People' project. This includes major new acquisitions and a representation of the Gallery's daguerreotype collection." She added: "I have especially relished the opportunity to curate the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize 2019, 2020 & 2021. To meet and work with such incredible photographic talent through the award has been a particular joy. I will continue to work with my much-admired colleagues and the supportive and brilliant photography community and network that I've been a part of through my independent curatorial practice." 

Keaney will continue to work as an external curator with the NPG towards a major photographic exhibition project currently underway and soon to be announced. The NPG reopens to the public after extensive refurbishment in spring 2023. 

Magda can be reached directly at: magdakeaney@hotmail.com

Her NPG profile is here https://www.npg.org.uk/research/staff-research-profiles/magda-keaney and below: 

Job description

As Senior Curator, Photographs, I lead a team of curators responsible for acquisitions, displays and exhibitions, research and care of the Photographs collection. I work across historical and contemporary periods to ensure that the Photographs collection is well researched, accessible and presented in thought provoking ways. The Gallery has produced many important photographic exhibitions and catalogues which we are continuing to develop. As Associate Curator, Photographs, I curated Irving Penn Portraits at the Gallery in 2010.

I am excited to be working toward our ‘Inspiring People’ project which is a remarkable opportunity to reimagine the interpretation and display of the collection. We are thinking about ways to weave photographic portraits and the stories they tell about who we are through the Gallery in unexpected, challenging and uplifting ways.

Biography

I started my curatorial career working as a researcher at the National Gallery of Australia. I developed my first photographic exhibitions as an Assistant Curator at the Australian National Portrait Gallery and I worked on the inaugural historic display of prominent Australians at the institution. I subsequently worked as an Assistant and Associate curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London. I was Curator at the Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion where photography was key to a cross disciplinary exhibition program I instigated. At this time I started work for my book ‘Fashion Photography Next’ published by Thames and Hudson, then also presented as an exhibition with Foam Photomuseum in Amsterdam and the Fashion Space Gallery. Before returning to London, I was Senior Curator, Photographs, at the Australian War Memorial, where I curated the Centenary of Armistice exhibition ‘After the War’.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in the History of Art from the Australian National University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Curatorial Studies from the University of Melbourne and a MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Research interests

My current research at the NPG is focused on the major reconceptualisation and presentation of the photographs collection for the Inspiring People project spanning nineteenth century to the contemporary period. I am also researching the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman side-by-side for a forthcoming exhibition.

My research is most often object and archive based and considers an expanded field of lens based practice. I have particular interests in women photographers, Australian photography, fashion image making, the photographic studio, photography and conflict and contemporary practice. I was the curator of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2019, 2020 & 2021, including ‘In focus’ displays by Ethan James Green and Alessandra Sanguinetti.

I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University.

Recent Publications

Over two decades I have written extensively about photography for magazines and journals as well as for exhibition catalogues including:

100 Fashion Icons, National Portrait Gallery, 2019

‘Cindy Sherman’s Fashion Pictures’, in Cindy Sherman, National Portrait Gallery, 2019

‘Forced into Images’ by Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, in Know my Name, National Gallery of Australia, 2020

Fashion Photography Next, Thames & Hudson, 2014

Irving Penn Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 2010

The Photographic Collections Network has announced a series of events which includes a seminar on Diversity and Representation in collections. The first workshop in a series on the Care of Photographs led by the National Trust, and we have a talk from a PhD researcher on working with Family Albums. In January we will be having an event from Creative Commons looking at Intellectual Property with a Creative Common License, and a session from National Lottery Heritage Fund on their Dynamic Collections Fund.

As usual, all our events are free to book with the option of making a donation. 

Details: https://www.photocollections.org.uk/

Rose Teanby has written a blog for the V&A Museum on Anna Atkins cyanotypes in the V&A photography collection. She writes...'I recently returned to visit the V&A Archive viewing materials relating to Atkins’s contribution to the 1984 touring exhibition The Golden Age of British Photography where once again her images added a splash of early monochromatic colour to an exhibition charting the history of British photography. The archival documents revealed the behind-the-scenes hard work of assembling, documenting, insuring, transporting and finally exhibiting images at five USA venues in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art....'

Read the full blog here: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/caring-for-our-collections/a-blueprint-for-the-future-cyanotypes-by-anna-atkins

James Hamilton has announced the rediscovery of an eighth, previously unrecorded copy of Hill and Adamson's publication A Series of Calotype Views of St Andrews. The publication was found in the Signet Library having been miscategorised in a post-1882 catalogue. 

Details: https://twitter.com/lixmount/status/1589604007013920769

For the WS Signet Library see:  https://www.wssociety.co.uk/

In the mid-1920s, a transatlantic team of physicians, surgeons, psychologists, and physicists gathered in the Boston séance room of the medium Mina ’Margery’ Crandon to study the extraordinary phenomena she produced in a trance state, especially the visceral, quasi-biological ‘ectoplasm’ that seemed to ooze from her body. Anxious to defend the scientific status of their research into this strange phenomena situated somewhere between the medical and mental, tangible and intangible, the all-male team of investigators produced a vast set of materials documenting and validating their research (many housed today in the Harry Price Archives at Senate House Library).

This talk centres on the stereoscopic photographs of Crandon taken by the researchers to index the ‘spiritualist’ phenomena witnessed and to supplement the poor observational conditions of the pitch-black séance room. It also considers the researchers’ use of their other senses — touch, hearing, smell — and the photographs’ material qualities to explore the complex relationships embedded in these photographs and practices between apparent polarities like trust and deception, vision and blindness, truth and illusion, proof and faith, and science and supernatural belief. The gendered dynamics of this investigation, related to issues of ‘control’ (scientific and otherwise), are also explored. What role did the photographs, and other forms of observation and control, play in the scientists’ efforts to validate, document, and (dis)prove the seemingly supernormal, yet peculiarly bodily, phenomena they witnessed? What of trust and deception? And what can the application of art-historical methods to such cases offer to the study of the relationship between science and extraordinary belief?

Dr Emma Merkling is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art as Principal Investigator on the grant project ‘Biomedicine and Belief:  Spiritualism, Observation, and Margery Crandon’s Extraordinary Body c. 1920–35′, funded by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. Her research focuses on the relationships between art history, history of science, and history of heterodox belief in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Courtauld’s Centre for American Art, the Science Museum, and the University of Stirling.

Science in the Séance Room: Stereographs, Medical Men, and the Testing of ‘Margery’ Crandon’s Extraordinary Body, c. 1925
Dr Emma Merkling
Monday, 14th November 2022
5:00pm - 6.00pm
London: Courtauld, Vernon Square campus, Lecture Theatre 2 and online via Zoom
Booking: https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/science-in-the-seance-room-stereographs-medical-men-and-the-testing-of-margery-crandons-extraordinary-body-c-1925/?dm_i=AHZ,838NK,ML3WGR,X469A,1

The V&A has announced today further details on the second and final phase of the V&A’s Photography Centre, which opens in spring 2023. The Photography Centre will become the largest space in the UK for a permanent photography collection, and the seven galleries – four of which will be new additions – will showcase the museum’s world-leading holdings and enable visitors to experience photography and its diverse histories in new ways.

The V&A has collected and exhibited photography since the founding of the museum in the 1850s, and today its collection is one of the largest and most varied in the world. Phase One of the museum’s Photography Centre opened in 2018, with three galleries designed by David Kohn. 2023 sees the completion of the second and final phase of the Photography Centre with an additional four galleries, with base-build designed by Purcell, and fit-out designed by Gibson Thornley Architects.

Two of the new rooms will showcase global contemporary photography and cutting-edge commissions in rotating displays. The other new spaces - a room dedicated to photography and the book, and an interactive gallery about the history and use of the camera – will shine a light on the processes involved in photography, as well as the study and presentation of the medium. These new rooms join the three existing galleries, with two galleries for changing displays from the collection and a space dedicated to digital media, which will also present new content.

Marta Weiss, V&A Senior Curator of Photography and Lead Curator of Phase Two of the Photography Centre, said: “Photography lies at the heart of the V&A. The museum has collected photography since 1852 and continues to acquire the best of contemporary practice. As photography plays an ever-increasing role in all our lives, the expanded Photography Centre will be more relevant than ever. We look forward to welcoming visitors to explore the medium’s diverse histories and enjoy our world-leading collection.”

Highlights of the opening displays will include recent acquisitions exhibited at the museum for the first time, including works by Liz Johnson Artur, Sammy Baloji, Vera Lutter, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Tarrah Krajnak and Vasantha Yogananthan, as well as a monumental photographic sculpture by Noémie Goudal. Two major new commissions supported by the Manitou Fund will also be unveiled, with a photographic series by leading Indian artist Gauri Gill, and a digital commission by British media artist Jake Elwes. The Manitou Fund has committed to funding six commissions for the Photography Centre, which will see a new print and digital commission in 2023, 2025 and 2027. On completion, the Photography Centre will also feature new, themed displays, presenting works from the 1840s to the present day, beginning with Energy: Sparks from the Collection, exploring how all photographs need some form of energy to exist, and a smaller display, How Not to Photograph a Bulldog, featuring dog photography manuals from the Royal Photographic Society Library.

About the Photography Centre:

Phase 2 - Room 95 - Inside the Camera
Room 95 will be an interactive gallery exploring how cameras work and how they are used, from the Victorian view camera to the first iPhone. The highlight will be a walk-in camera obscura, demonstrating the optical phenomenon that is the basis of how all cameras work. A timeline of cameras will show their evolution, with accompanying animations explaining the inner workings of these iconic devices.

Phase 2 - Room 96, Room 97, The Parasol Foundation Gallery Photography Now
Two new galleries will be dedicated to showcasing recent acquisitions of global contemporary photography, including special commissions. Highlights in the inaugural display will include works by Liz Johnson Artur, Sammy Baloji, Vera Lutter, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Vasantha Yogananthan, all acquired with the support of the V&A Photographs Acquisition Group. A series of self-portraits by Tarrah Krajnak, acquired with the support of the Parasol Foundation Trust, will also feature. A spectacular anamorphic sculpture by Noémie Goudal will bring photography off the wall to explore both geological time and the nature of perception.

A new commission, supported by the Manitou Fund, from leading Indian photographer Gauri Gill will also be unveiled. This new body of work depicts temporary architecture on the outskirts of Delhi, ingenuously constructed by farmers from repurposed materials. The makeshift dwellings housed farmers bringing their concerns from the village to the capital, in response to new laws that threatened their economic security.

Room 98, The Kusuma Gallery - Photography and the Book
A flexible space dedicated to Photography and the Book will reflect how books have been a fundamental way of presenting photography since the 1840s. The Kusuma Gallery, which has been funded by The Kusuma Trust, will visibly house the extensive Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Library, following the transfer of the RPS Collection to the V&A in 2017. The RPS Library contains journals, books, pamphlets and manuals from all over the world, spanning topics from aerial photography to X-rays. More than 20,000 books, published over nearly 200 years, will be available to visitors by request, with a selection of browsing books on open shelves.

The Kusuma Gallery will also feature changing displays of photographic books, periodicals and archival material. The first display will be How Not to Photograph a Bulldog, a light-hearted foray into one of the many topics covered by the photographic manuals in the RPS Library.

Films about the RPS Library and photographic processes will be shown on digital terminals for visitors to enjoy. This flexible space will also be used for teaching and other programming.

Phase 1 - Room 99, The Modern Media Gallery Digital Gallery

The Modern Media Gallery continues to be dedicated to digital media, challenging definitions of what photography is and generating questions around the use of photography today. The gallery will showcase a new digital commission by Jake Elwes, supported by the Manitou Fund.

Phase 1 - Room 100, The Bern and Ronny Schwartz Gallery Room 101, The Sir Elton John and David Furnish Gallery - Photography 1840s-Now

Developed during Phase One of the Photography Centre, these galleries will be entirely rehung for the 2023 opening. A new display, Energy: Sparks from the Collection, will shine a light on the diverse kinds of energy in photography – both the hidden processes intrinsic to creating a picture, and the subjects in front of a camera. Featuring works from the 1840s through to the present day, it will explore how, from the advent of photography, power in all its diverse forms has sparked the imaginations of photographers.

Situated in the V&A’s Northeast Quarter, the Photography Centre reclaims the beauty of seven original 19th-century picture galleries, restoring them to their original glory and purpose. Planned in two phases, the Centre is part of the V&A’s FuturePlan development programme to revitalise the museum’s public spaces through contemporary design and the restoration of original features.

Beyond the physical gallery spaces, a key focus for photography at the V&A is research and the development of new sector-leading initiatives. A major strand is The Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project, established in 2021 to support women in photography. Led by the inaugural Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography, Fiona Rogers, and funded by Ms. Ruth Monicka Parasol and The Parasol Foundation Trust, the Project encompasses a curatorial post alongside acquisitions, research, education and public displays. The Project’s first acquisition by Tarrah Krajnak will be included in the opening display, and an exhibition presenting the work of Laia Abril will open at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham, 10-27 November 2022, in collaboration with the V&A and Photoworks.

The V&A is also delighted to announce additional support from The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation. Alongside significant funding of Phase Two of the Photography Centre, the Foundation has generously extended their commitment to a series of two-year Fellowships in photography for early-career curators until 2028. The V&A is pleased to announce the appointment of Mary Phan as the second Curatorial Fellow in Photography, supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, who will be in post until 2024.

The Photography Centre is being made possible by Sir Elton John and David Furnish, The Kusuma Trust, The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, The Parasol Foundation Trust, Modern Media, Shao Zhong Art Foundation and many other generous supporters.

The V&A will be releasing visuals of the new spaces closer to the opening.  

International photographic societies and camera clubs burgeoned in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The mutual support and collaboration amongst individual members along with the practical and educational undertakings of these self-reliant photographies is a fitting focus for the recognition of photographers who could assert themselves and see themselves as a community of practice of their own making.

The educational projects of photographic societies and camera clubs were shaped by an infrastructure that enabled collaborative forms of communication; products of socio-technical networks that fostered new relationships of learning between the individual and the collective. From the late 1870s, the number of clubs and societies began to soar: the fourteen groups recorded in the British Journal of Photography Almanac in 1877 had grown to 365 by 1910. Almost weekly the pages of the photographic press reported the foundation of new clubs and societies. At a time when the number of amateur photographers themselves was expanding, and club life was seen as a respectable social occupation, the cooperative ethos on which these ‘local schools’ were built was considered by contemporary commentators as a ‘culture of rational exchange’ and fostering an ‘ideal of sociability identified with liberal education, eloquence and good fellowship’ (Sawyer, Photographic News, 1883: 286). These organisations ranged from amateur groups that emulated learned societies to less socially exclusive and formal, and to camera clubs based in hospitals, workplaces or mechanics institutes. There were national societies, such as the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, the National Photographic Association of the United States, the Société Française de Photographie, the Japan Photographic Society, and a plethora of album clubs and postal camera clubs exchanging prints or lantern slides for aesthetic critique.

Historical accounts of clubs and societies are sparce, because many of these groups, considered to be minor, were not listed in the photographic annals and the greater numbers of their collections have been broken up, dispersed, and even lost. Yet, club life from an understanding of how people learnt (or should learn) photography, allowed its membership to receive by various ways a collaborative and efficient training and, through group participation, to escape some of the technical pitfalls which beset many photographers who proceeded to work alone.

This one-day workshop opens a critical conversation about the under-researched emergence and decline of these clubs and societies, outlines new ways to research, theorise, and interpret their educational projects, and asks what this reveals about the values and meanings that members attached to these practices and of how photography consolidated and strengthened the bonds amongst those groups.

To this end, we invite papers for 15 minute presentations from students, academics, practitioners, and museums and archives professionals at all career stages working in research areas such as photographic history, visual and popular culture, media and communication studies, medical humanities, social and cultural history, history of art, material and design cultures, archives and records management, and any other related fields of research.

What roles have the learning communities of photographic societies and camera clubs played in the histories of photography and visual culture? How did club life, at times recognised as popular and progressive, fraternal, instructive and sociable, cement cooperative strategies for growing bodies of amateur and professional photographers to learn from one another? Were these clubs and societies mostly ‘fraternal’ male groups? How did this space intersect with narratives of gender and subtexts of brotherhood in its educational and entertainment uses for female groups? Did any standout for their female or children’s membership?

Proposals may explore, but are not limited to:

• Global histories of the camera club and photographic society (from any historical period)
• Photographic societies and camera clubs as supplementary schooling
• Amateur groups emulating learned societies
• Launch of the Amateur Photographer in 1884 and the rise in popularity of Amateur Societies
• International, national and regional differences in the organisation of both photographic societies and camera clubs
• The role of periodicals in drawing together societies and clubs and consolidating communities of practice
• Education, sociability and instruction within the practices of clubland culture
• Society networks and intersecting communities of learning
• The RPS and female ‘Colour Group’ members
• The relationship between gender and clubland
• Camera clubs specifically for women or children
• Collaborative education to enhance members’ active participation
• Scientific, medical, colonial photographic committees, societies or clubs
• The material culture of clubrooms, exhibitions, soireés, meetings, lantern evenings
• The social and cultural roles of exhibitions of societies and clubs
• The relationship between the RPS and affiliated provincial camera clubs
• Power relations in the clubroom
• The legalities of club life and presidents, secretaries and officials, especially in small self-regulated clubs  
• The relationship between postal, microscopical, album or lantern slide clubs and modern communication technologies in urban and non-urban contexts
• Amateur photographers and the survey and record movement
• Links with other types of bodies that sponsored photographic societies such as field, naturalistic and archaeological societies, companies
• Photographic federations, unions, associations, and inter-society arrangements
• The rise and decline of clubs and societies   
• Researching societies and clubs in archives and special collections

Paper proposals should be submitted as one Word or PDF document to Dr Jason Bate j.bate@bbk.ac.uk by Monday 6th February 2023. The document should include:

• Your full name
• Email address
• Institutional affiliation (when applicable)
• Paper title
• Proposal of no longer than 250 words for presentations of 15 minutes
• Short biographical note (100-150 words)

Event format: The event will take place in the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck in London (UK) in person, and we will be able to accommodate fifteen presentations, and offer £50 towards travel expenses for up to four PhD students. 

Keynote speaker: Dr Michael Pritchard, photohistorian and Director of Programmes at the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.

CfP: Photographic Societies and Camera Clubs
Thursday 25^th May 2023
Birkbeck College, University of London, in person
Deadline for paper proposals: by Monday, 6 February 2023
Dr Jason Bate e: j.bate@bbk.ac.uk

Images: top: Group photograph of the Central Association of Photographic Societies at Kewes, 3 June 1939; lower: 1902 selectors of the RPS 1902 annual exhibition.