A series of six short talks by David Zeitlyn are now online. They give some background to the exhibition currently at the Fowler Museum UCLA ‘Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970-1990s’. The videos are illustrated by images from the show and others from other works by the three photographers featured in the exhibition: Jacques Toussele, Joseph Chila, and Samuel Finlak.
They are available at: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/photo-cameroon/
Photo Oxford Festival opens on 15 October with outdoor projections on the Ruskin School of Art building. This leads into a launch weekend of activity including Portfolio Reviews, film screenings, tours and opportunities to meet artists and curators in their exhibition spaces. The Festival is themed around Women and Photography - Ways of Seeing and Being Seen.
Of particular interest to BPH are exhibitions:
The events programme includes:
Visit the website for more details and to book: https://www.photooxford.org/home
Image: © Estate of Nancy Sheung | Staircase, 1960s
In this piece Peter Dench, courtesy of Olympus ImageSpace, steps into the Getty's Hulton Archive in east London and gets a partial tour of its 13km of shelving with curator Melanie Hough.
See: https://www.olympus-imagespace.co.uk/raiders-of-the-lost-archives/
This original blog was posted on 18th July 2020. Since then it has had to date 265 views. It is still on the blogs section should you wish to re read it. But the main question remains un answered and I repeat it here in a further attempt to find an answer
So how do cased images come to be taken by the W E Kilburn studio at Erddig and a third possibly so when the large majority if not all of the subjects taken by Kilburn were of notable subjects and subjects with royal connections in the Kilburn studio settings in Regent Street? How could this London photographer with a double royal warrant be tempted to go up to a remote country house just outside Wrexham?
See the original post here: https://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/w-e-kilburn-the-soldier-and-the-lady-on-the-parterre
Over to you
Over the winter of 2019/2020 images from the archive at Sutton Hoo were digitised in their entirety for the first time. The images, captured by Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff, were taken during the summer of 1939 and provide a remarkable insight into the people and processes behind the excavation of the Great Ship Burial. The entire collection is now available to view online and at Sutton Hoo.
The image collection consists of 11 photograph albums, loose black and white images, contact prints and negatives. The collection includes one album of colour prints, an incredible survival from the very earliest days of the use of colour reversal film, and original 35mm Agfa Isopan F negative film. The colour prints, as far as research has shown so far, appear to be the earliest surviving original colour photographs of a major archaeological excavation. The significance of this collection has been reflected in a successful bid for internal funding as part of the National Trust’s Collections Conservation Prioritisation (CCP) programme to both conserve and digitise the images to ensure they survive for future generations.
Mercie Lack (1894–1985) and Barbara Wagstaff (1895–1973) were members of the Royal Photographic Society and happened to be passing the excavation.
Read the full story and search the collection here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-hoo/features/conservation-in-action-at-sutton-hoo
Devon History Society has recognised photographer James Ravilious with a commemorative plaque on the house that he lived in from 1987 to 1999. The event was attended by James’s widow Robin, and their children Ben and Ella. Speeches were made by Dr Andrew Jones, Chairman of the Devon History Society, Peter Beacham OBE, formerly Heritage Protection Director for English Heritage and a close friend of James’s, and Emma Down, Archivist.
Ravilious documented Devon people and communities and his archive is a nationally significant resource. Revilious' and Roger Deakins' archives are held by the Beaford Archive and record north Devon life in the 1970s and 1980s. They are being digitised and number over 80,000 images.
See the Twitter report here: https://twitter.com/DevonHeritage/status/1443639944887549953 and https://twitter.com/devonhistorysoc/status/1443617394560323592
For more information about the Beaford Archive see: https://beafordarchive.org/ and for more on James Ravilious’s work see www.jamesravilious.com
For more on Devon History Society see: https://www.devonhistorysociety.org.uk/
Images: Devon History Society / Twitter
More than thirty people gathered in Edinburgh on 29 September to celebrate the installation of a commemorative plaque to John Thomson (1837-1921) on the exterior of his childhood home at 6 Brighton Street. The building in Thomson's day housed 77 people and is now immediately behind the National Museums Scotland in Chambers Street and close to the University of Edinburgh.
The centenary of Thomson's death in 1921 was the catalyst for the plaque and follows the restoration of Thomson's grave in 2019. Betty Yao MBE and Jamie Carstairs, Deborah Ireland and others, lobbied Historical Environment Scotland, the Scottish government body which manages the plaque scheme. Representatives from the Scottish Society for the History of Photography, HES, the Royal Photographic Society, curators and photo-historians were all represented, Thomson is best known for his publications of his travels in Asia and Street Life in London and for the work he undertook for the Royal Geographic Society in training explorers in photography. He was also a member of the Royal Photographic Society,
An exhibition of 94 of Thomson's photographs, curated by Betty Yao, is also on show at Heriot Watt University. This is the first showing of Through the lens of John Thomson in Edinburgh, Thomson is an alumni of one of the university's predecessor bodies.
Separately, publisher MuseumsEtc has released a 936-page, two-volume set, comprising John Thomson's Street Life in London and an accompanying volume with context and commentary by Emily Kathryn Morgan. See: https://www.museumsetc.com/products/street-life-in-london-two-volume-set
For the exhibition see: https://www.hw.ac.uk/uk/services/is/heritage/china-through-the-lens-of-john-thomson.htm
Photographs: © Michael Pritchard
Alex Boyd is a Scottish-German visual artist, writer and curator who has debuted a new body of work at Stills, Edinburgh, which explores the unseen uses of the Scottish landscape by the military. The exhibition runs from 30 September to 13 November 2021.
Boyd’s work examines landscape, identity and the underlying tensions which exist in place. He works primarily as a photographer and printmaker, a practice which has incorporated early techniques such as wet-plate collodion and calotype through to contemporary image capture systems such as drones. This new work, made over several years, develops themes explored in his Saltire Award shortlisted book St Kilda -The Silent Islands.
The Scottish landscape is one which is heavily utilized by the military, with the Ministry of Defence one of the largest landowners in the country. In this new exhibition, Boyd explores the largely unseen places used to train our armed forces and those of our NATO allies. From the remote bombing ranges of Cape Wrath and Tain Air Weapons Range in the North, to the tank and infantry training areas of Kirkcudbright in the South West of the country, Boyd has walked and documented several hundred miles of a land often hidden behind red flags. Here in the vast stretches of open countryside, relics from a century of conflict from World War One through to the Cold War, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the recent failed campaign in Afghanistan stand as monuments and reminders of Scotland's and Britain's role on the world stage.Working with archaeologists, ecologists and conservationists, another more complex narrative also begins to emerge -a place where nature thrives among burned-out vehicles and shell craters. '
Tir an Airm' (Land of the Military)also features the work of invited artist Mhairi Killin RSA, who will share work from her series 'Fata Morgana' an exploration of drone warfare testing in the Outer Hebrides.
The Royal Collection Trust's Prince Albert project has come to an end and is now fully live and accessible. Prince Albert: His Life and Legacy makes freely available a total of 22,000 archival documents, prints and photographs from the Royal Archives, the Royal Collection and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
The latest additions include Albert and Victoria’s collection of almost 1000 negatives. Prince Albert and Queen Victoria regularly commissioned photographers to record royal household staff at royal residences. The resulting glass plate negatives depict individuals ranging from equerries and ladies-in-waiting to ghillies and keepers of the Royal Kennels. Among the sitters are Dr Ernst Becker, Carl Ruland and Baron Stockmar who were particularly significant to Prince Albert.
The negatives shown includes work from Bambridge, Fenton, Caldesi and other well-known royal photographers as well as members of the royal family themselves.
The unique visual record these negatives assemble indicates the high regard the queen and the prince held for their employees, regardless of rank, and provides information on the people the royal couple surrounded themselves with at home.
See: https://albert.rct.uk/glass-plate-negatives/royal-household-portraits
With thanks to Helen Trompeteler for highlighting this.
Image: Dr Ernst Becker (1826-88), Lucy Kerr (1822-74) 26 - 26 Jul 1854. RCIN 2083108
Ryerson Image Centre is hosting a noon time collection talk with Steven Evans who will discuss the Francis Bedford Research Collection. Steven Evans is a Toronto-based photographer and collector who has focused on architecture and the urban environment for over 40 years. Evans graduated from Ryerson University’s Media Studies program in 1982 and as a collector in the years since, Evans has compiled, over two decades, a comprehensive resource of early photographs and other objects associated with the British photographer Francis Bedford.
The collection surveys Bedford’s impressive achievement as a leading maker of architectural and landscape images during the late 19th century. This talk is an opportunity for the public to learn about the Francis Bedford Research Collection, of nearly 1300 objects, which features the photographer’s early work with illustration and lithography, and examples of his amateur and commercial photography.
The Francis Bedford Research Collection
30 September 2021
12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) | 1700 (BST) | 1800 (CET)
Free, book here: https://ryerson.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VxzPpxY-T76yhdQr2t_d2Q
Grant Scott, who has done so much with his film Do not bend: The photographic Life of Bill Jay to remind us of the seminal role played by Jay in British photography from the late 1960s to mid-1970s, has made a new discovery. He has located Jay's contact sheets from a trip he made with Tony Ray-Jones to New York in 1968 hidden in a plastic box in a house in Tempe, Arizona.
Scott sets out the background to the trip and illustrates them. One hopes that there is more to come.
Scott blogs about them here; https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2021/09/16/seven-days-in-new-york-tony-ray-jones-bill-jay-a-host-of-characters-and-the-future-of-british-photography/
His film about Jay is available free to view on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd47549knOU&t=60s
Image: Bill Jay, New York, 1968 / United Nations of Photography
Peter C. Bunnell, whose passionate and inspired teaching profoundly changed the field of photographic history, passed away at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on Monday, 20 September 2021. As the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University, a position he accepted in 1972 and held for 30 years before his retirement, Bunnell educated a generation of undergraduate and graduate students in what is still a young branch of art history; his was the first endowed professorship in the history of photography at any American university.
An enthralling storyteller with a deep personal knowledge of the medium’s history, an infectious enthusiasm, and an unfailing devotion to his students, Bunnell drew capacity crowds to his undergraduate courses and attracted graduate students from across the country and beyond. A testament to the widespread and lasting influence of his teaching, Bunnell’s Princeton protégés have served as curators and professors at leading institutions including the Metropolitan Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; The Morgan Library; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; George Eastman Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the International Center of Photography; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Fotostiftung Schweiz; Aperture; Brown University; Indiana University; City College of New York; Bard College; Bowling Green State University; and Zurich University of the Arts, among others.
As curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum throughout his 30-year tenure on the faculty, and as Museum Director from 1973 to 1978 and Acting Director again from 1998 to 2000, Bunnell built a broad-ranging collection of photography, the first-hand examination of which became an unforgettable central element of the student experience in his classes and seminars. “These photographs are used,” he said, “they don't just sit around in boxes.” In fact, he taught all of the discussion sections of his courses himself, always with original photographs rather than with slides. Photographer and former Princeton professor Emmet Gowin recalls Bunnell’s extraordinary gift for “awakening and reaching the hearts and minds of students of all kinds, but especially his ability to connect with and support students attempting to practice the art of photography themselves.” At the time of Bunnell’s retirement in 2002, Gowin praised his capacity to understand the work of artists “who were in no way synchronous with his own stances or world views. To a degree almost unthinkable, the collection he built at Princeton is without gender bias or cultural bias, but embracing of all that was fresh and difficult in the work of young contemporary artists.”
Allen Rosenbaum, who Bunnell hired as Assistant Director of the Museum in 1974 and who succeeded him as Director, similarly recalls his generosity, noting that “there was no ego or vanity in his directorship.” Rosenbaum vividly recalls having been invited to a class led by Bunnell and Gowin and having come away with “a sense of the great gifts of these men as thinkers and communicators, and with the revelation—at least for me—that there was such a thing as connoisseurship in photography.”
In addition to the expansive and carefully selected collection that Bunnell built for the Museum, spanning the history of the medium, he secured two important archives—those of Pictorialist photographer Clarence H. White, the subject of his Master’s thesis at Ohio University, and Minor White, Bunnell’s own mentor as a photographer and interpreter of the medium. He met Minor White as an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where classes taught by White nurtured his burgeoning interest in photography. “I took his classes, and, as was his practice, he drew a group of students around him outside the Institute,” recalled Bunnell. “These were informal sessions where he explored in more depth his philosophy and attitudes toward photographing.” Bunnell went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Ohio University in 1961 under the tutelage of Clarence H. White Jr., as well as an M.A. in art history from Yale University in 1965, where he began a doctoral dissertation on the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz.
Immediately before joining the Princeton faculty in 1972, Peter Bunnell served as curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he had joined the staff in 1960 as a collection cataloguer and risen to associate curator in 1968 and curator in 1970. At MoMA, Bunnell’s achievements included ground-breaking exhibitions that offered innovative new avenues to analyze and understand photography: Photography as Printmaking (1968), and Photography into Sculpture (1970), as well as an exhibition of the work of Clarence H. White (1971). In addition to exhibitions at Princeton in subsequent years, including a continuous series of installations designed for students in his courses, Bunnell organized the Harry Callahan exhibition for the United States Pavilion at the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978.
Beyond his role as teacher and curator, Bunnell served the field in various capacities—as national chair of the Society for Photographic Education and chair of the board of The Friends of Photography—and was the recipient of numerous honors and awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1979) and the Asian Cultural Council (1984). He was also named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
Peter Bunnell wrote extensively on topics across the history of photography, though primarily about American artists, and most often about living photographers, many of whom he knew personally. His numerous essays have been anthologized in Degrees of Guidance: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Photography (1993) and Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2006). His book Minor White: The Eye That Shapes, which accompanied a retrospective exhibition of White’s photographs that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, won the George Wittenborn Memorial Award of the Art Libraries Society of North America. He also authored three monographs on Jerry N. Uelsmann, his undergraduate roommate at Rochester Institute of Technology and a lifelong friend. In addition, he edited several anthologies—A Photographic Vision: Pictorial Photography, 1889–1923 (1980); Edward Weston on Photography (1983); and Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976 (2012); and co-edited two Arno Press reprint series, The Literature of Photography and The Sources of Modern Photography.
Long into retirement, Bunnell happily remained an invaluable source for researchers in the history of photography who called upon his recollections of firsthand encounters with twentieth-century photographers, recollections aided by file cabinets filled with decades of carefully taken notes, newspaper clippings, and other seldom-saved ephemera—an invaluable resource that will become available to future scholars at Princeton’s Art Museum and Firestone Library.
Peter Curtis Bunnell was born in 1937 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of Harold C. Bunnell and Ruth L. Buckhout. He is not survived by immediate family but is held dear in the memory of the many students, scholars, artists, and curators who benefited immensely from his wisdom and deep generosity of spirit. Following his wishes, no funeral service will be held, but friends, colleagues, and protégés will gather at a later date to celebrate his life.
Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Picture: Princeton University
Another obituary is available here: https://planetprinceton.com/2021/09/21/photography-scholar-and-former-princeton-university-art-museum-director-peter-bunnell-dies-at-83/
Photographic Digital Heritage: Institutions, Communities and The Political intends to explore how uses of digital technology, and digitisation in particular, have transformed the ways in which historical photographs of value to perceived inherited cultural legacies are collected, deployed and identified as such. It will specifically investigate what has led formal heritage and memory institutions to drive this process, how heritage communities might have navigated their aspirations around it, and how political interest groups have taken advantage of it to promote their causes.
Photographic Digital Heritage: Institutions, Communities and The Political
Online:19-20 October 2021
Registration is free
See: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/photographic-digital-heritage-institutions-communities-and-the-political-registration-172665576387
Forum Auctions, London, is offering a copy of John Thomson's Illustrations of China and its People which dates from 1873-74. The volumes include 96 photographic plates. The lot is estimated at £15,000-20,000.
If you're interested check out the lot here.
UPDATED: The lot sold for £16,000 plus buyer's premium.
This year marks the centenary of Thomson's death and later this week a plaque will be unveiled at his childhood in Edinburgh. Thomson was an alumnus of Heriot Watt's predecessor body and an exhibition of his photography opens at Heriot-Watt's Riccarton campus until 22 March 2022.
See:https://www.hw.ac.uk/uk/services/is/heritage/china-through-the-lens-of-john-thomson.htm
Colour Fever is a two-week celebration of colour photography. Through a series of online talks and ‘in conversations’, it will consider a range of processes, exhibitions, inventors and artists, spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. Hear from photographers, artists, academics, curators and researchers working with colour photography, historically and today.
The programme includes conversations with Susan Meiselas, James Barnor, and Anton Custers; and some 25 separate papers across multiple sessions that range broadly across colour, its photographers and applications. The full programme can be seen at the link below.
Colour Fever
Monday, 25 October 2021 – Friday, 5 November 2021
Free, online via Zoom
Details and booking https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/xeWKGkej/colour-fever-conference-2021
The event has been organised by Catlin Langford from the V&A Museum. It is Supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation and hosted in association with the V&A Research Institute.
In its development the panoramic photograph was to exceed the limits of the human field of vision to encompass what we can only see by turning on our heads; could it make art? In addition to a blog post discussing the creative and documentary scope of the Kodak Panoram and Cirkut cameras, I've also created a Wikipedia page on it here
Follow my other discussion of the panoramic format here, here and with other Panoram prints here
Rhonda Wilson MBE (17 August 1953 - 6 November 2014) was a women's activist, photographer, writer, editor, and educator in British contemporary photography, best known for her initiation of the Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival of the Image.
I've just recently been researching the energetic promoter of photography Rhonda Wilson of Birmingham, and have created a Wikipedia biography, and a blog post, on her, comparing her with John Blakemore.
Have you encountered the passionate photography of Edith Tudor-Hart and her remarkable life story? Let me introduce you to her here
https://onthisdateinphotography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/edith_tudor_moving-and-growing-web-2.jpg?w=150 150w, https://onthisdateinphotography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/edith_tudor_moving-and-growing-web-2.jpg?w=300 300w, https://onthisdateinphotography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/edith_tudor_moving-and-growing-web-2.jpg?w=1024 1024w, https://onthisdateinphotography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/edith_tudor_moving-and-growing-web-2.jpg 1400w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" />.
Hello, I am looking for information about this late1850's photo of a British Boy's School. What is that strange metal contraption on the stump? Any guesses most appreciated.
The study of women photographers continues to attract new research and the V&A's Parasol and new curatorial post is the latest example from the UK (see BPH last week). Different ways of looking at existing data are also providing new insights. This piece by Kim Biel for Lapham's Quarterly looks at new work by Library of Congress conservator, Adrienne Lundgren, which shows the strength of women in the American MidWest..
Read the full report here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/midwestern-exposure/?ca_key_code=FB9LQA3
