Blogs

Loupe is a free photography magazine widely available across the UK. Launched in 2016 and now published on a bi-annual basis, it is best known for featuring a diverse range of contemporary photography. Over the years it has built a loyal following and has launched a Kickstarter funding call to to make Issue 10 the best and most widely available to date. 

Find out more and support here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loupemagazine/loupe-issue-10

September 2019 marks the 30th anniversary since the establishment of Street Level Photoworks. To celebrate this landmark anniversary it will be looking back on the history of those who have helped shape Street Level Photoworks. But it also means celebrating the present and in looking forward to the future of what photography offers diverse audiences and artists and all that this means for our ongoing partnerships and collaborations.

Since being founded in 1989 by Glasgow Photography Group, a collective of photographers and those passionate about the medium, Street Level's core aim has remained consistent in providing people with a range of opportunities to engage with photography, as artists, participants, audiences, and sector partners. Over our 30 year history we have worked with a considerable number of artists and facilitators to deliver exhibitions, community collaborations, workshops, talks, residency exchanges and all manner of events in between that champion the diversity and creativity of photography from Scotland and further afield.

Read more here: http://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/article/30-years

The Living Picture Craze: An Introduction to Victorian Film. Film takes a starring role in this free online course from the British Film Institute exploring the emergence of a new medium that was set to capture the world's imagination. 

Explore the birth of film and the end of Queen Victoria’s epic reign. Roll up! Roll up! Take your seats for the ‘Living Picture’ craze! In this course we journey back to the end of the Victorian era; a time of intense modernisation and unprecedented change. Using the BFI’s unique collection of surviving Victorian films we will debate common myths about the period and the materials, as well as examine what the films reveal about the society that produced them.

This year marks the centenary of the death of William Crookes. Journalist, chemist, photographer, spiritualist, businessman, sometime Secretary of the Royal Institution and President of the Royal Society of London, Crookes was a key figure in the science of the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. This meeting, which is part of the ChemFest celebrations of the sesquicentenary of the periodic table, will examine various aspects of Crookes's extraordinary career and his place in science. The AGM of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry will be held before the meeting at 13.15.

He edited the Journal of the photographic Society and Photographic News at various times. 

Programme

13.30     Registration

13:45     Welcome and Introduction: Frank James, (Royal Institution and Chair of SHAC)

First Session Chair: Anna Simmons (UCL)

13.50     Richard Noakes (Exeter University). 'Two Parallel Lines'? The Trajectories of Physical and Psychical Research in the Work of William Crookes

14:30     Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University, Leicester). William Crookes, a life in Photo-Chemistry

15.10     Refreshment Break 

Second Session Chair: Peter Morris (Chair of RSCHG)

15.30     Frank James (Royal Institution and UCL). William Crookes and Michael Faraday

16.10     Paul Ranford (UCL). Crookes’s “Invisible Helper” – George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903)

16.50     William Brock (University of Leicester). The key to the deepest mystery of nature: Crookes, periodicity and the genesis and evolution of the elements   

17.30     Close of meeting

There is no charge for this meeting, but prior registration is essential. Please email Robert Johnstone (robert.johnstone.14@ucl.ac.uk) if you would like to attend. If having registered, you are unable to attend, please notify Robert Johnstone.

William Crookes (1832-1919)

Saturday 19 October 2019, Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS

http://www.rigb.org/visit-us/find-us

The College of Optometrists has updated its museum website to provide a legacy page for its temporary exhibition on Victorian cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards of people wearing spectacles or showing signs of visual impairment.

We Called to See You featuring loan items from the Ron Cosens Collection alongside the College's own photographic collection, ran for two years until 16 September 2019. In common with all past exhibitions at the College, an edited version of the exhibition labelling has now replaced the online publicity page for the exhibition.

Inspired by Ron, the College Museum has also renewed its interest in collecting items in this particular field and would be pleased to receive offers to donate relevant material. Cards showing spectacles, monocles, pince-nez, or the eyes of blind people or those with strabismus or ocular injuries and disfigurement would all be suitable for this, as would cards on which the backs give details of photographers who were also opticians.

The image, a detail from a carte-de-visite in the Ron Cosens Collection, shows the blind Member of Parliament Henry Fawcett, who lost his sight in a shooting accident but went on to invent the postal order. The College Museum also includes many other images on this subject, found in paintings, drawings, engravings and lithographs, and on coins, medals or postage stamps. It also has a camera collection, with a particular strength in products by J. Lizars, Opticians of Glasgow.

Photography in China is the dominant theme in Dominic Winter’s 320-lot photography sale on 3rd October.

Highlight among the 50 China lots is the notoriously rare Views on the North River (1870) by John Thomson (1837-1921), estimated at £15,000-20,000. But with only 4 copies in institutions and even fewer copies in private hands it may well exceed expectations. The copy, with 14 mounted albumen prints, is preserved in the original printed boards and carries the contemporary ownership signatures of George Dods MD (1836-1909), Acting Colonial Surgeon in Hong Kong, his son William Kane Dods, and another surgeon, Charles M. Normand. The book was recently unearthed by descendants of the Dods/Normand family along with a magnificent album of albumen print views of Hong Kong, c.1868-70, by Thomson (£10,000-15,000), and a similar album of views of Hong Kong and China by Thomson’s rival William Pryor Floyd (£7,000-10,000). A third Hong Kong album, including views by Lai Afong taken after the typhoon of 1874, (£1,000-1,500), and a group of Dods/Normand scrap albums with Chinese photographs, c.1860s-1880s, (£300-500), rounds off this small time capsule of a western family of collectors of photography in Hong Kong in the 1870s.

From other vendors there is a 4-volume first edition set of Thomson’s highly successful Illustrations of China and its People (1870), £20,000-30,000; and a rare 3-part albumen print panorama of Dalian Bay (1860) by Felice Beato, £5,000-7,000.

Other highlights of the sale include:

• Benjamin Brecknell Turner, The Willowsay, 1852-4, £6,000-8,000
• Roger Fenton, Photographic Art Treasures, Part I, 1856, £1,000-1,500
• Julia Margaret Cameron, The Dream, 1869, £15,000-20,000
• India. [Photographic biographies of Indian rulers], 2 parts in 1 volume, c.1880, £7,000-10,000
• Herbert Boucher Dobbie, New Zealand Ferns, 2 parts, Auckland, 1880, £7,000-10,000
• H.C. White & Co. A group of 188 half stereoviews of China, c.1900-10, £2,000-3,000
• Wilhelm von Gloeden, 5 lots of photographs of Sicilian youths, c. 1900
• Herbert Ponting, 7 lots of photographs from the Terra Nova Expedition, 1910-13
• Cottingley Fairies, 6 lots of photographs featuring a full set of this famous hoax, c.1920
• Martin Munkacsi, 28 lots of contacts prints, c.1960
• Photobooks (30 lots) including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first book Beautiful Jaipur (1948) and Helmut Newton’s Sumo (1999); Cameras and accessories (20 lots).

Finally, among the more intriguing early photography lots is a personal album with loosely inserted full-plate albumen print photogenic drawings of ferns by the very little-known William Henry Dupe (1824-1901), butler at Thenford, Northamptonshire. The album comprises a mixture of Dupe’s own photographs, seemingly dating back to Somerset in 1856, along with studio cartes de visite and some commercial photographs, and related news cuttings. Dupe photographed the local churches and area and being of humble origins was interested in photographing local people of all social strata, including the elderly. Seemingly Dupe left service at Thenford [now the home of Michael and Anne Heseltine] to become a full-time photographer, even winning prizes in Switzerland and New South Wales. If there is anyone with additional information about the mysterious Dupe we would be glad to hear and to share.

Printed catalogues available from the auction offices (£15 post inclusive). Public viewing daily from 1st October, 9am-6pm and morning of sale from 9am; other times strictly by appointment.

For further information and enquiries please contact Chris Albury chris@dominicwinter.co.uk / 01285 860006

Dominic Winter Auctioneers, Mallard House, Broadway Lane, South Cerney, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 5UQ

www.dominicwinter.co.uk

I am looking for any information on this stereo view, a street telescope, View Saturn and Jupiter! No information on the back. I have no Idea about the origin, England, France, Italy?

Does anyone recognize this image or telescope?

many thanks in advance,

David

Lindy Grant, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Reading and Tom Nickson, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, have created an online exhibition of images of Notre-Dame de Paris from the collections of the Conway Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art.

This exhibition consists of texts and engravings by British artists showing the cathedral before the 19th century restorations and photographs taken during the restorations of Viollet-le-Duc. It is completed by photos taken by a British tourist in 1911 and by the famous architectural photographer A.F. Kersting (1916-2008) in 1958 and 1964. Finally, photographs of the Macmillan Commission, created during the Second World War to record damage to buildings in Europe, are presented.

Thanks to Lindy Grant and Tom Nickson for this initiative to discover the images of Notre-Dame in the collections of the Conway Library. Link to the exhibition: https://courtauld.ac.uk/study/resources/image-libraries/notre-dame

"This online exhibition features images of the cathedral of Notre-Dame taken from the Conway Library at The Courtauld. We have chosen images that help to tell the story of the cathedral. Many of them are photographs taken in the 19th century, during the restoration of the cathedral by Viollet-le-Duc. We have included some prints made by English artists which show the cathedral before the restoration. Evocative images of the cathedral in its cityscape are found in photographs by a British tourist, taken around 1911, and by the great architectural photographer A. F. Kersting in the third quarter of the 20th century. The early post-war city captured by Kersting now seems almost as remote as that of 1911. Photographs from the Macmillan Commission recording war damage in Europe during the Second World War show the emotive power of the cathedral and its ability to survive.

The Conway Library at The Courtauld is a collection of approximately one million photographic and printed images of architecture, sculpture and medieval painting. It was founded by the journalist, mountaineer, politician and pioneering art historian, Martin Conway, Lord Conway of Allington. Conway began collecting images of works of art as a student in the 1880s, and bequeathed his collection to The Courtauld Institute of Art when it was founded in 1932. The collection has been augmented since then by gifts from several other photographers and collectors (including Kersting and the Macmillan Collection), and by an active programme of photography in the second half of the 20th century. A project to provide a digitised version of the entire collection is currently underway."

Taken (and in part translated from) Société française d'Archéologie <sfa.lettreinfo@gmail.com>
SFA. Lettre d'information N ° 32

This albumen print is a portrait of captain WH Barten. Identified on a separate paper. 

Does someone know more about this type of uniform? I bought it with UK provenance. 

Print ca. 16 x 12,8 cm. 

(wouter.lambrechts@kdg.be)

Until now, the Netherlands lacked a meeting point for Vintage Photography.

Inspired by the famous Frido Troost (1960-2013), whose Institute of Concrete Matter, offered a space where collectors, curators and photographers could meet and have extraordinary encounters and dialogues on photography, two curators and three collectors joined forces and initiated Dialogue.

Events:

Short film program Color Moods at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Thursday to Sunday, Nov. 07 to 10, 2019

Special guided tour with Barbara Flueckiger, professor for film studies (University of Zurich), and book launch Color Mania, Saturday, Nov 9, 2019, 2 pm

The interplay between scientific studies and the photographic medium is the theme for this year's St Andrew's Photography Festival. The programme includes a symposium, exhibitions and public events all taking science and photography which draw on the rich collections of the University of St Andrews. A number are of particular interest to those interested in photographic history, including: 

• The Moon; Nasmith & Carpenter
• Tracing Movement: Animal Locomotion, Photography and the Emergence of Cinema
• Animal Locomotion; Edweard Muybridge
• Images of Knowledge: Karl Blossfeldt’s Originary Forms of Art
• Seeing the Past: Digitally Reconstructing and Recording Historic Sites
• Chemistry of Colour
• Shooting Stars: 19th Century Astronomical Photography

Download the full programme here (PDF).

Investigate the fascinating history and theories of photography in this weekend-long course hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and delivered by Professor Mark  Rawlinson. 

In 1859, Charles Baudelaire famously described photography as “art’s mortal enemy” and argued its proper function was to be the “very humble servant” of the sciences and arts. For Baudelaire, photography’s ability to reproduce nature exactly was its genius but also its fatal flaw. Unlike art, for Baudelaire, photographic representation could not elevate its subject – the sitter of a portrait or the view of a landscape – because it simply mirrored them and made a copy and photography should be to art what the printing press was to literature: a tool.

Such criticisms require us to ask some important questions about photography: what is it? why does it exist? what is it for? And, of course, is photography art? It also asks us to consider the relationship between photography and the arts more widely. For example, how has non-photographic art and architecture influenced photography, and vice-versa?

Photography’s aspiration to be considered equal to painting is obvious in images from the 19th and early 20th centuries which echo and mimic painterly compositions and artistic styles. The emergence of painterly abstraction was paralleled in photography, but rather than simply copy painting, photography explored new visual territory, and on its own terms becoming avant-garde. The 20th century witnessed the birth of self-conscious modes of photography: straight, staged, abstract, collaged, and camera-less photographic techniques were reinvented. So too were the processes of making, printing, and exhibiting photography. Even the truth claims of documentary photography – the genre best aligned to ‘copying’ reality – continue to be reasserted and challenged.

To better understand these questions and relationships, this course explores photographic histories in relation to art history’s own complicated relationship with the medium. Sessions will consider a variety of historical moments where art and photography collide, points in time where art, photography and criticism were irrevocably altered.

From the 19th Century Eadweard Muybridge’s work in photographic studies of motion to the contemporary David Hockney's artworks, the course traces and illuminates the productive relationship between photographic practices and art.

London: Royal Academy
8-9 November, 2019
£420 
See more and book here.

Kresen Kernow holds hundreds of thousands of historic images of Cornwall and of people and events connected to Cornwall. Some of these images are glass negatives, others are engravings, prints and postcards. Some are glued into albums, others are loose in wallets and envelopes. 

Many of the pictures have came through individual family collections. We also have the collection of press photographer George Ellis which contains over 100,000 glass negatives.  Ellis came to Bodmin from London at the outbreak of World War II and stayed, photographing north and east Cornwall and its people throughout the war and into the 1970s.

The Historic Environment Record also contains thousands of images of the historic buildings and features which dot the Cornish landscape. These include images of bridges, windows, bunkers and crosses, as well as an extensive collection of aerial photographs.

Digitising our image collection is an on-going project, mostly carried out by volunteers. We have prioritised digitising glass negatives to make them more accessible. You can browse digitised images here.

Image: Photograph,Cooks Kitchen Mine, 1893.

This one-day symposium at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter invites conversations on photography and photographic collections in the South West and wider UK in relation to aspects of place. Photographs relate to place in various ways including their documenting capacity and the direct inscription of the world on their surface. Therefore, photographs directly inform our imagination of a place. How do collections like this develop? In turn, a specific place can also inspire the work of photographers and photographic artists: the symposium includes a focus on Dartmoor, in particular.

Speakers include Liz Wells (curator, writer and Professor in Photographic Culture at Plymouth University), Garry Fabian Miller (Dartmoor-based photographic artist), Bronwen Colquhoun (Senior Curator of Photography, National Museum Wales), Jo Bradford (Dartmoor-based photographic artist and founder of Green Island Studios), Emma Down (Hidden Histories Project Archivist, Beaford Archive), Catherine Troiano (Curator, National Photography Collections, National Trust), Brendan Barry (Exeter-based photographer, lecturer and educator, founder & director of Positive Light Projects) and Mark Haworth-Booth (former Senior Curator of Photography at the V&A).

The symposium will coincide with a small photography display at RAMM on ‘Rivers, Trees and Landmarks’.

Collecting regions - Photography and a sense of place
Wednesday, 18 September 2019
1000 - 1700 
Further information here: https://exeterramm.admit-one.eu/?p=tickets&perfCode=3498&ev=4189

I would welcome any information about this company, set up around 1890 in Athens by Mr Shirley Clifford Atchley. Its photographs of architectural and archaeological sites were  commercially available via the firm of Beck and Barth, who had a shop in Syntagma Square and a link to the booksellers Eleftheroudakis (founded 1898). 

Email: Chris Stray  c.a.stray@swan.ac.uk

In a new blog post 'from the vaults' Rachel Nordstrom, Photographic Collections Manager, at St Andrews University's special collections discusses the restoration of two daguerreotypes in the collections using the new technique of electro-cleaning which was first described in 2016. Two daguerreotypes subjected to the technique: one showing a man with a scientific instrument, now identified as a ‘spark generator’; the second, was a group of four men (J D Forbes, Rev. William Brown, Hugh Lyon Playfair and Dr George Buist), by Antoine Claudet.

The before and after photographs show the effectiveness of  the technique. The work was undertaken by Dr Mike Robinson.  

You will be able to see the results  during the St Andrews Photography Festival as the theme for this year is Science & Photography. Check the festival website events line up for further details, specifically on the ‘Science Treasure from Special Collections’ visit on 22 October at Martyrs Kirk.

Read the full blog here: https://standrewsrarebooks.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/electrifying-daguerreotypes/

Dr Mike Robinson is taking his highly acclaimed daguerreotype workshop to St Andrews, the birthplace of Scottish photography. Co-hosted by the University of St Andrews, the three-day daguerreotype workshop is the first time a mercury-based daguerreotype workshop has been held in the country.

The course is limited to six participants and each participant will have two finished and housed daguerreotypes to take with them at the end of the workshop. 

The course fee is $1250 and all equipment and materials are provided. Early booking is advised. 

Delivered in partnership with the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock. 

To book: https://centurydarkroom.com/education

The V&A’s acquisition of the Royal Photographic Society collection from the Science Museum in 2017 has raised major questions about the place, role and nature of photography in museums, the shape of ‘collections’, the role and status of ‘non-collections’ of photographs, the practices and styles of history of photography, and the assumptions of museology.

The conference explores the dynamics of such themes across analogue and digital media, and considers the sprawling practices and deposits of photography in museums and galleries.  It will focus on the mass of photographs in museum holdings that fall outside formal ‘collections of photographs’, and explore the epistemic force and hierarchies of value to which photographs contribute as they remake, reproduce and solidify institutional values. What is ‘collected’ and what is not?  What are the shifting boundaries between ‘collections’ and ‘non-collections’?  How do ‘collections’ emerge and how are category shifts realised? How are photographs put to work within museums?  How do photographs form and cohere institutions and their practices? How are museum meanings made through photography? Finally, what are the interdisciplinary implications of these debates across, for instance, museum studies, history, art history, history of science and anthropology? 

With distinguished international speakers, including Dr Geoff Belknap (NSMM), Dr Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institute, Florence) and  Dr David Odo (Harvard University Collections) the conference gathers curators, conservators, academics and other specialists to consider the saturating role of photographs in museums, changing practices, and broader implications.

The conference is organised by the V&A Research Institute (VARI) and generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Institutional Life of Photographs

Victoria and Albert Museum, Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre

December 6-7, 2019

To book see: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/Vvq9oLvj/the-institutional-lives-of-photographs-dec-2019

David Johnson was a Blackburn based amateur, later professional, photographer who was active in the 1850s and 1860s. Whilst examples of his later studio work survive as carte de visites, I’m interested in establishing whether more examples of his earlier topographical studies have survived the intervening years.

Some of his photographs were exhibited at the 1855 exhibition in Amsterdam. I know from reports in the local press that he obtained an “honorable mention”, but not which prints were exhibited; does anyone know if a catalogue exists?

Eight of his photographs were exhibited at the Photographic Society’s exhibition in London in 1856. Five came from a trip to North Wales, three were taken closer to home.

Some of these Welsh views were also exhibited that May in Manchester. A report of the Manchester Exhibition appeared in the Journal of the Photographic Society, which said that “Some of Johnson’s are first rate specimens, Aberglaslyn Pass and the American Barque, Conway Bay, are perhaps the best; the latter stands really alone as a coast scene.” A salted paper print of his photograph of that ship, the Jane Tudor, survives in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

These Welsh scenes also attracted the attention of Thomas Sutton and we know from advertisements in his Photographic Notes that in 1856 one of Johnson’s photographs was included in issues 2 and 4 of Sutton’s short-lived publication “The Amateur’s Photographic Album”. Again, I would be interested to know if, and where, copies of that publication exist and can be consulted.

I hope that other members of BPH may be able to enlighten me. Many thanks.