Blogs

Gray Levett is researching London's camera shops for a future feature in Nikon Owner magazine and is looking for photographs of the exterior of the Fox Talbot shop which stood at 179 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1.

If you can help please post the image here and get in touch with Gray on 020 7828 4925 or email: gray@graysofwestminster.co.uk

The University of St Andrews has an outstanding collection of books, archives and photography, accumulated throughout the six hundred years since the University’s foundation.  The collection is especially rich in the History of Science, Theology and Church History, Literary Studies and Photography.  In addition to a substantial collection of incunabula and early printed books, the library has a significant eighteenth-century collection dating from its period as a Copyright Library (1710-1836).  The archives also include an exceptional collection of 15th -16th century materials relating to Fife and to the University and city of St Andrews.

What is a University of St Andrews Library Visiting Scholarship?

Visiting Scholarships are an opportunity for applicants external to the University of St Andrews to research a topic in the Library’s Special Collections.  The scholarships are open to all interested researchers, whether or not affiliated to a university, and at whatever level. This Scholarship gives the applicant the opportunity to visit the University of St Andrews and experience first-hand the Library’s unique collections which offer research potential across an exceptionally broad array of disciplines.

Assessment of applications

All applications are assessed by a panel of academics and Library staff.

Successful candidates will be in receipt of

• Financial support up to a maximum of £1,500 to cover travel and accommodation, but not subsistence, during the Scholarship
• Accommodation in a University hall of residence.  The cost of this will be paid directly by the University, which will also make all necessary arrangements for residency. 
• A warm welcome to Special Collections and invitations to take part in its activities, e.g. seminars and workshops
• Curatorial support during the Scholarship
• Reading Room provision
• Sponsored email account
• Scholarships can be taken at a mutually agreed time between 1 July and 31 August 2018.
• Scholarships will last for a period of between two and eight weeks.  

Essential Criteria

All activity must be based strongly on the Special Collections of the University of St Andrews Library. Of particular interest to BPH readers will be the outstanding photography collections and a list of the key collections can be found here; https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/imu/imu.php?request=browse&browsetype=about

Visiting Research Scholar Application Process

Further details can be found here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/specialcollections/researchandenquiries/visitingscholars/

The London-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in collaboration with the National Museum and Archaeological Survey of India will be presenting the exhibition: Imaging the Isle Across: Vintage Photography from Ceylon (see poster here: India.jpg). The exhibition will be inaugurated on Saturday, 26 September 2015 at 5pm at the National Museum Auditorium. The exhibition is a partner event of the Delhi Photo Festival, 2015.

The history of photography in South Asia is a story of itinerant practitioners, seeking to expand the eye of the lens by exposure to the farthest corners of the world. Though Ceylon came under British rule only in 1815, it followed the maritime expansion of the Portuguese, the Dutch, Danes and the French – the first of which identified it in their sea-charts as Zeilon, from which the modern name Ceylon was derived and maintained till 1972.  Featuring vintage photographs drawn primarily from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, this exhibition takes its viewers through a mapping of sites as well as visual tropes and themes emerging from early photography via diverse mediums of production such as albums, illustrated books and postcards. These traces remain foundational in generating a imagistic canon that etched the life of a swiftly transforming country, as did the coming of a modern, pictorial language instituted by Lionel Wendt, the art photographer and patron.

We are extendedly grateful to the contributions and support of the University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies; the India-Sri Lanka Foundation, Ismeth Raheem, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes, Dominic Sansoni and Anoli Perera.

Morphets of Harrogate is offering at an album of seventy albumen prints by Oscar Gustav Rejlander from the former estate of Surgeon Commander Herbert Ackland Browning RN on 11 September. The album is estimated at a modest £7000-10,000 and the complete album is to be re-created as a page turner pdf book on the Morphets website shortly, see:  www.morphets.co.uk. 

Details of the album are below: 

REJLANDER (OSCAR), AN ALBUM OF SEVENTY ALBUMEN PRINTS, CIRCA 1865-66

A rare and interesting folio of seventy portrait and figurative photographs by this pioneer, the albumen prints mounted on gilt-edged card leaves in a single volume with gilt and tooled black morocco bindings, the sitters including Rejlander himself, Mary Rejlander (nee Bull), Sir Henry Taylor, Hallam Tennyson (son of Lord Alfred Tennyson), John and Minnie Constable, the youngest of Lord Hawarden's children, possibly including Elphinstone 'Eppy' Maud and other unidentified subjects, album 30cm x 25cm, prints varying in size from 12cm oval up to 21cm x 15cm, some with titles or annotations in pencil. 

Provenance: This album was part of the estate of Surgeon Commander Herbert Ackland Browning RN and thence by descent to the vendor.  Commander Browning served throughout the First World War, never married and died at the family home in Dawlish in 1955.  Herbert's father, Captain George Browning RN, was a naval hydrographer and married Elizabeth (nee) Kendal, daughter of Dr Marsters Kendal of Kings Lynne, honorary surgeon to the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, at Sandringham.  It is possible that the album belonged to him and was thus lent to the Prince of Wales and others as annotations indicate. 

Footnote: Oscar Gustav Rejlander (1813-1875), known as the Father of Art Photography, was born in Sweden and studied art in Rome, settling in England in the 1840s.  He lived in Lincoln and later Wolverhampton, working as an artist and portrait miniaturist.  He took an active interest in photography, seeing its potential for assisting artists and in 1853 attended lessons in the London studio of Nicholas Henneman.  This inspired him to develop his own techniques experimenting with portraiture although it is his pioneering work in photo-montage, combining several negatives to form one image, that brought him to wider renown.   His best known work The Two Ways of Life comprised thirty-two negatives and took six weeks to produce.  Following its exhibition in Manchester in 1857 a copy was ordered by Queen Victoria for Prince Albert.  Rejlander became a member of the Royal Photographic Society, regularly lecturing and publishing on the subject and in 1862 he moved to London where he built a photographic studio designed to make the best use of natural light for his subjects.  During his work he came into contact with Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Lady Clementina (Maud) Hawarden and Charles Darwin.  In the early 1870s he worked with Darwin on illustrations for his treatise on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Although Rejlander sold volumes of his photography through book shops and art dealers it is unknown if the album in this lot was obtained thus by Captain Browning.  One pencil annotation suggests it may have been bought directly from the photographer as it reads 'Rejlander had refused to sell this copy (the only one obtained from the negative taken) at any price: but the offer of £2.2.0 for the Swedish poor was too much for his nerves and I obtained it DEO GRATIAS'.

A further annotation inside the front cover reads 'This album has the honour of being submitted in 1866 to HRH The Prince of Wales by Colonel Teesdale (3 weeks), in 1870 at the request of Cardinal Antorelli to HH Pope Pius IXth by Monsignor Pacca (1 week), into 1871 to Her Majesty by Lady Elgin (several weeks)'.  

Some of the prints herein are well known examples also held in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For more information contact: Fran Hazlewood on 01423 530030 or email enquiries@morphets.co.uk.

Images: courtesy Morphets of Harrogate

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War as well as to coincide with Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the George Eastman House will be presenting a selection of historical photographs of Civil War sites and circumstances by photographers including George Barnard, Mathew Brady, and Alexander Gardner. The exhibition emphasizes rare items in the George Eastman House collection and explores how photography was used during this period to record the war, promote popular causes, and commemorate those who sacrificed their lives.

The photographs of sweeping battlefields, soldiers, famous figures, fortress interiors, prisons, and post-Civil War memorial sites were captured in a variety of ways, such as portrait studios set up near encampments, lantern-slide artists traveling with troops, and photographers on the sidelines of battlefields (although images could only be taken after battle, since the technology at this time could not capture action). Many of the featured photographs are held only at Eastman House and this is the first time the museum’s Civil War imagery is comprehensively being displayed in its 64-year history.

The Eastman House display will also feature two cameras to illustrate equipment used during the Civil War - a stereo camera (1864) owned by the Mathew Brady Studio and a Lewis wet-plate camera (1862).

Details of the exhibition can be found here.

Photo:  Alexander Gardner. LEWIS PAYNE, ONE OF THE LINCOLN CONSPIRATORS BEFORE HIS EXECUTION.
From The Lincoln Conspiracy Album, 1865. George Eastman House Collection

.

"Sleeping beauty"

When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten.
When this you see remember me Lest I should be forgotten.”

This is the first posting on Art Blart on the phenomenon of postmortem photography for exhibitions on this subject are few and far between.

Any photograph is a “little death” which “refers to the concept of “la petite mort” or “the little death,” a French idiom and euphemism for the momentary loss of consciousness or breath, often associated with orgasm, but also used to describe the act of freezing a moment in time through photography. This concept suggests that photography, by capturing a specific moment, essentially stops time and thus, in a way, creates a small, contained death of that moment.” (Google AI Overview)

All photographs (and especially postmortem photography where the deceased are memorialised through images) can be seen as “memento mori”, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” reminding us that of the impermanence of life – for photographs “capture a moment in time, forever preserving a fleeting instant and highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of death.” (Google AI Overview)

As Susan Sontag observed, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (On Photography)

Victorians were faced with the vicissitudes of fortune, and death at any age was a common occurrence due to illness with no antibiotics available to treat the many lethal diseases. They became stoic in the face of the impermanence of life, stoic in the face of death and through photography, sought to record into permanence the likenesses of the departed (the beloved), so that they could remember and honour them. Photographs thus became symbols of mortality which encouraged reflection on the meaning and fleetingness of life…

But unlike a photographic self-portrait, where a human looks at their image (in which they are dead) which reminds them about their physical death in the future, an anterior future of which death is the stake (and the prick of discovery of this equivalence)1 - in postmortem photography the little death and the actual death are as one for the anterior future can never be viewed by the subject of the photograph (they are dead), a separation only revived in the heart and mind of another.

Through postmortem photography the deceased live in an interstitial space, forever brought back to life in the eyes of the viewer as we reawaken and reactivate their spirit in the world. I was once here and I am again. Remember me.

Thus the euphemism “sleeping” is appropriate (sleeping beauty awakened once more with a kiss), as the viewer transcends time bringing past dead back into living world – where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – their death and our death connected through the gaze and the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.2

In this expanded-specific moment in time, through an awareness of our own dis/continuity, what we are doing is talking about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

‘Remember Me. Postmortems from the M. G. Jacob Collection’ and
‘Through Light. The First 20 Years of Photography in the Photo Library Collections’ at Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, Italy

24th April – 5th July, 2025

SEE THE FULL POSTING AT https://wp.me/pn2J2-v6N

1/ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire), Section 39, 1980
2/ Marcus Bunyan. "This is not my favourite photograph," part of What makes a great photograph? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Wednesday 5th December 2012 [Online] Cited 27/06/2025

Many thankx to the Biblioteca Panizzi and Michael G. Jacob for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Main image:

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping man (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping girl
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Art curators will be able to recover images on daguerreotypes, the earliest form of photography that used silver plates, after a team of scientists led by Western University learned how to use light to see through degradation that has occurred over time.

Research published in Scientific Reports – Nature includes two images from the National Gallery of Canada’s photography research unit that show photographs that were taken, perhaps as early as 1850, but were no longer visible because of tarnish and other damage. The retrieved images, one of a woman and the other of a man, were beyond recognition.

“It’s somewhat haunting because they are anonymous and yet it is striking at the same time,” said Madalena Kozachuk, a PhD student in Western’s Department of Chemistry and lead author of the scientific paper. The image is totally unexpected because you don’t see it on the plate at all. It’s hidden behind time,” continues Kozachuk. “But then we see it and we can see such fine details: the eyes, the folds of the clothing, the detailed embroidered patterns of the table cloth.”

The identities of the woman and the man are not known. It’s possible that the plates were produced in the United States, but they could be from Europe.

For the past three years, Kozachuk and an interdisciplinary team of scientists have been exploring how to use synchrotron technology to learn more about chemical changes that damage daguerreotypes.

Invented in 1839, daguerreotype images were created using a highly polished silver-coated copper plate that was sensitive to light when exposed to an iodine vapour. Subjects had to pose without moving for two to three minutes for the image to imprint on the plate, which was then developed as a photograph using a mercury vapour that was heated.

Kozachuk conducts much of her research at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) and previously published results in scientific journals in 2017 and earlier this year. In those articles, the team members identified the chemical composition of the tarnish and how it changed from one point to another on a daguerreotype.

“We compared degradation that looked like corrosion versus a cloudiness from the residue from products used during the rinsing of the photographs during production versus degradation from the cover glass. When you look at these degraded photographs, you don’t see one type of degradation,” said Ian Coulthard, a senior scientist at the CLS and one of Kozachuk’s co-supervisors. He is also a co- author on the research papers.

This preliminary research at the CLS led to today’s paper and the images Kozachuk collected at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source where she was able to analyze the daguerreotypes in their entirety.

Kozachuk used rapid-scanning micro-X-ray fluorescence imaging to analyze the plates, which are about 7.5 cm wide, and identified where mercury was distributed on the plates. With an X-ray beam as small as 10×10 microns (a human scalp hair averages 75 microns across) and at an energy most sensitive to mercury absorption, the scan of each daguerreotype took about eight hours.

“Mercury is the major element that contributes to the imagery captured in these photographs. Even though the surface is tarnished, those image particles remain intact. By looking at the mercury, we can retrieve the image in great detail,” said Tsun-Kong (T.K.) Sham, Western’s Canada Research Chair in Materials and Synchrotron Radiation. He also is a co-author of the research and Kozachuk’s supervisor.

This research will contribute to improving how daguerreotype images are recovered when cleaning is possible and will provide a way to seeing what’s below the tarnish if cleaning is not possible. The prospect of improved conservation methods intrigues John P. McElhone, recently retired as the chief of Conservation and Technical Research branch at the Canadian Photography Institute of National Gallery of Canada. He provided the daguerreotypes from the Institute’s research collection.

“There are a lot of interesting questions that at this stage of our knowledge can only be answered by a sophisticated scientific approach,” said McElhone, another of the co-authors of today’s paper. “A conservator’s first step is to have a full and complete understanding of what the material is and how it is assembled on a microscopic and even nanoscale level. We want to find out how the chemicals are arranged on the surface and that understanding gives us access to theories about how degradation happens and how that degradation can possibly or possibly not be reversed.”

As the first commercialized photographic process, the daguerreotype is thought to be the first “true” visual representation of history. Unlike painters who could use “poetic licence” in their work, the daguerreotype reflected precisely what was photographed.

Thousands and perhaps millions of daguerreotypes were created over 20 years in the 19th century before the process was replaced. The Canadian Photography Institute collection numbers more than 2,700, not including the daguerreotypes in the institute’s research collection.

By improving the process of restoring these centuries-old images, the scientists are contributing to the historical record. What was thought to be lost that showed the life and times of people from the 19th century can now be found.

Image (top right): National Gallery of Canada//Western University.  An image of a woman is recovered from a 19th-century daguerreotype that had tarnished almost beyond recognition. A novel process, developed at Western University and Canadian Light Source Inc, mapped its mercury content and brought the 'ghost' back to life.

(Below): Left:  An image of a man is hidden in this tarnished 19th-century daguerreotype. A novel process, developed at Western University and Canadian Light Source Inc, mapped its mercury content and brought the 'ghost' back to life. Right:  An image of a man is recovered from a 19th-century daguerreotype that had tarnished beyond recognition. A novel process, developed at Western University and Canadian Light Source Inc, mapped its mercury content and brought the 'ghost' back to life.

With thanks to Joan M. Schwartz. 

 Ramires, Alexandre (2014) The Voyage of the Daguerreotype. On the Daguerreotypes and Physionotypes of the Oriental Hydrographe, Coimbra: author's edition. This text provides documental support for the first daguerreotype experience in Portugal, in October 1939, and the probable daguerreotype practice in islands of Madeira and Canarias latter in the same month. It also provides further documental evidence of the daguerreotype practice in Brasil.

For copies of the book we will provide the author's contact.

According to the Yorkshire Film Archive, the magic lantern manufacturer, Riley Brothers, operated out of 55 & 57 Godwin Street, Bradford. They produced a machine called the Kineoptoscope in 1896 using a design patented by Cecil Wray.  This was advertised at the time in The Era as, 'Steady as Lumière's. No breakdowns. Most portable and the most perfect known'.  This was modified into the Kineoptoscope camera in June 1897, and it may be this which is being used in this film. The Riley Brothers put on the first cinema performance in Bradford at the People’s Palace on 6th April 1896, now the site of the National Media Museum.

Hundred of images of old Ireland and the globe-trotting adventures of affluent West Cork Methodists are among the subjects in an extraordinary collection of 19th century photography recently discovered in a house clearance. This also includes an important late 19th century magic lantern made by The Riley Bros of Bradford.

With an estimate of €1,500-€2,500, details of tomorrow's auction in Cork can be found here.

Attitudes to photography have undergone a radical shift in recent times. Partly in response to these contemporary changes, historians, curators and photographic practitioners have begun to re-examine older forms of photography: exploring the wide variety of historical technologies and techniques, finding surprising ways in which images were manipulated and determining how an ideology of photographic realism was maintained. Yet there remains a need for scholars to explore questions of early photographic ‘authorship’, singularity and objectivity in much greater detail.

Scholarly studies of nineteenth-century photography have been heavily influenced by later theoretical constructions. As an alternative, Daniel Novak has posited a ‘Victorian theory of photography’. Yet this theory remains unelaborated. Similarly, Elizabeth Edwards and others have called for a move away from the traditional Art History model of analysing photography. This interdisciplinary conference will explore the question of what such an analysis, and such a theory, might look like. 

Possible questions and areas of interest for the conference include:

•           How do technological narratives influence our understanding of photography?

•           Photography as a business; photographers as workers.

•           The hegemony of nineteenth-century photographic realism, and resistances to it.

•           Can/should we do away with the Art History model of photography?

•           Alternatives to the photographer-as-author model of photographic exhibition and analysis.

•           To what extent can we think of photography as being separate to other print and visual media?

•           The role of photography in the creation of nineteenth-century celebrity.

•           Early photography as represented in literature, art and film.

•           Photographs as networks; photographs as objects.

•           When does ‘early’ photography end?

•           Does digital photography allow us to ‘read back’ the performativity of images from earlier periods? How might the revival of Victorian photographic techniques by current practitioners influence historians?

Keynotes: Kate Flint, Lindsay Smith, Kelley Wilder

Organisers: Owen Clayton, Jim Cheshire, and Hannah Field.

To submit proposals for 20 minute papers, please send an abstract of 200-250 words to rethinkingphotography@gmail.com. The deadline is 12^th Jan 2015, 5pm (GMT).

One of Britain's best known and loved photographers, Brian Griffin died on 26th January in his sleep at his Rotherhithe, London home. Many fullsome tributes have been paid already that reflect his exceptional career and unique approach to photography. Here he is with his long-time friend, Martin Parr - they attended the same photography course at Manchester Polytechnic in the 1970s - at Chatsworth House when they were running a photography workshlop for me in Derbyshire in1982.

A full obituary is here and othesr appears in the The Guardian and wider press: https://www.1854.photography/2024/02/brian-griffin-obituary-martin-parr-anne-braybon-francois-hebel/

An extremely rare and important album of photographs by the celebrated early Victorian photographer, Oscar Gustav Rejlander, most of which have never been exhibited before, has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, it was announced today, Monday, 9 May 2016. BPH reported on the original auction sale and export ban here.

The album was acquired in November 2015 following receipt of a grant from the Art Fund after a temporary Export Bar was placed on it in March 2015. This prevented the album from leaving the UK after it was sold to an overseas buyer last year.

The scarcity and remarkable condition of the album, which was sold by a Yorkshire auction house after lying undiscovered in a family collection for more than 140 years, make it one of the most significant 19th century British photographic objects to have come to light in recent decades.

Rejlander is best known for his pionering work combining multiple negatives in the darkroom to create new, articifial compostions. He was also a portraitist of extraordinary skill who influenced famous photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll and who also collaborated with Charles Darwin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The National Portrait Gallery album is one of a small set of private albums Rejlander put together to showcase his portrait work.

Previously unseen photographs include several self-portraits, comprising one of Rejlander himself, taken in the 1850s, as well as a previously unknown portrait of Rejlander and his wife Mary Bull (a frequent collaborator and model for her husband).

Rejlander photographed numerous illustrious sitters during his career, several of which feature in the album. They include the poet and dramatist Sir Henry Taylor and the Hon. Lionel Tennyson, grandson of the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson. The album also features a small number of well-known genre photographs, including ‘Trying to Catch a Fly’, ‘The Infant Photography Gives Painting a New Brush’ and ‘Head of St John the Baptist in a Charger’.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London says: “We are delighted to welcome this album into the Gallery’s Collection, not least because it will provide access to important examples of portraiture from the history of photography. We also hope it will enable visitors to engage with Victorian photography in a new way and make comparisons with later developments.”

Dr Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “The Rejlander album becomes one of the jewels in the crown of our already impressive collection of 19th century photographs. It transforms the way we think about one of Britain’s great artists. And it contains some of the most beautiful and expressive portraits of the Victorian era.”

Stephen Deuchar, Art Fund director, says, “This is an excellent addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s 19th-century collections and displays and we’re delighted to have helped make the acquisition happen.”

The Rejlander album will be on display in the Gallery in October 2016.

Background

Oscar Gustav Rejlander is believed to have been born in Sweden and studied art in Rome, working there as both a photographer and as a portrait painter and copyist of old master paintings. He established a photographic studio in Wolverhampton around 1846, moving to London in 1862 where he would work for the rest of his career.

The precise dates at which Rejlander began to exhibit his photographs is unclear, however it was no later than 1855, since he won a bronze medal at the Paris Universal Exhibition that same year. From that time until his death in 1875, his work was regularly exhibited and reviewed in the photographic and periodical press, earning him a reputation as one of Britain’s leading photographers. The range of his work includes portraits, landscapes, nude and anatomical studies and genre subjects.

The National Portrait Gallery holds 15 photographs by Rejlander. Nearly all are small carte-de-viste-albumen prints.

Funding package for the album - total cost £74,651.This is made up of: 

• £26,862 grant from the Art Fund
• £35,153 from the Gallery’s own resources (Grant in Aid)
• £12,600 from individual Gallery supporters

The Royal Collection has two cataloguing vacancies available both of which involve working with photographs held in the Collection.

• Cataloguer Twentieth Century Photographs.
• Based in the Royal Photograph Collection the role will entail working under the direction of the curator on cataloguing the remaining material in the collection, which is primarily 20th century. This ranges from official works by leading British photographers like Beaton, Snowdon and Lichfield, to press photographs and to personal snapshots taken by members of the Royal Family. . The role is for a fixed term of two years.
  Required: A broad knowledge of 20th-century British history and the history of photography;  relevant graduate or post-graduate qualification or equivalent experience; sound IT skills and a familiarity with art-collection databases.
  
  This is a fixed term post from April 2011 to April 2013. At a salary of £19,100. Details here: http://tinyurl.com/6klg6zp The deadline for entries is 13 February 2011.
  
  
• Raphael Collection Cataloguer
• The Print Room is part of the Royal Library section of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. It is responsible for the works of art on paper in the Royal Collection, including old master drawings, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century watercolours, and prints – over 150,000 items in all. Among this material is the Prince Consort’s Raphael Collection, a unique assemblage of over 5,000 prints and photographs begun by Prince Albert in 1853 and intended to record every work by or after Raphael and his workshop.
  
  Although the Raphael Collection was catalogued in 1876 it has never been widely accessible, and the intention is now to record it on the Royal Collection’s Collections Management System (CMS) and make it available on the Royal Collection’s website. We are therefore seeking a cataloguer on a fixed-term basis, who will be responsible for entering information about each item to a uniform scholarly standard on the CMS.
  
  This is a fixed term post from April 2011 to April 2013. At a salary of £19,100. Details here: http://tinyurl.com/63zng4a Download a job description here: http://tinyurl.com/5tcq3gl

Professor Steve Edwards has been appointed Manton Professor of British Art. Beginning in April, he will serve as the inaugural Director of The Courtauld’s new Manton Centre for British Art, the new home for The Courtauld’s research and teaching on British art. Edwards is currently Professor of the History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, and before that had been at the Open University. 

Named after British art collectors and philanthropists Sir Edwin Manton and Florence, Lady Manton, The Manton Centre for British Art will serve as an intellectual hub for art historians, curators, artists, and students nationally and internationally, providing a platform for sharing world-leading research and teaching the next generation of British art specialists. It will be located initially at The Courtauld’s current campus at Vernon Square and will later be housed in purpose-designed premises at Somerset House.

The Manton Centre was established by the Corutauld in 2024 with a $12 million donation. The Centre, named after British art collectors and philanthropists, Sir Edwin Manton and Florence, Lady Manton, will help secure The Courtauld’s ambition of becoming a world leader in the field of British art, and marks the continued commitment of the Manton family to arts education. The Manton Centre for British Art will serve as an intellectual hub for art historians, curators, critics, artists and students nationally and internationally, providing a platform for sharing world-leading research and for teaching the next generation of British art specialists.

Located initially at The Courtauld’s current campus at Vernon Square, King's Cross, the Manton Centre will later be housed in the purpose-designed premises at Somerset House, providing the physical and intellectual home for The Courtauld’s research and teaching on British art. The Courtauld’s specialists in British art will become members of the Centre and help shape its activities and development. The Centre will operate as the base for students taking modules in British art as part of their MA degree and also provide a home for The Courtauld’s PhD students researching British art.

The Centre will present an ambitious and dynamic programme of events including:

• An annual lecture in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton
• An annual international conference devoted to a major topic in the field
• Regular workshops devoted to specific areas of British art
• An annual programme of seminars and lectures enabling scholars, curators, critics and artists to share their thinking and research
• An annual ‘scholar in residence’ programme, designed to host a leading figure in the field of British art.

The Manton Centre for British Art will also pursue collaborations with other scholarly and artistic institutions both in the UK and around the world. In pursing these collaborations and partnerships, the Centre will engage with all areas and periods of British art, and with a wide range of partners and interlocutors.

See: https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2025/executive-dean-and-deputy-director-and-manton-professor-for-british-art-announcement/ and https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2024/the-manton-centre-for-british-art-announcement/

https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/#overview

Edwards' Birkbeck biography notes:  Steve grew up on a council estate and he was a manual worker before going to art school with the intention of becoming a great artist, instead he found politics and theory. He studied the MA in Social History of Art at the University of Leeds with John Tagg and Griselda Pollock, receiving a Distinction, and then did PhD research at Portsmouth Polytechnic and the University of Leeds with Adrian Rifkin (and for a short while with the late Robbie Grey). Between 1991 and 1997 he was Head of Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography at the University of Derby. In 1997 he was a visiting scholar at the Victoria & Albert Museum; the same year he moved to the Open University, where he contributed teaching material on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art to a variety of courses and edited three Open University textbooks. In 2006 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. Steve was made Professor at the OU in 2013 and, between 2012 and 2016, he was the Head of the Department of Art History. He joined the Department of Art History at Birkbeck in 2016 as Professor of History & Theory of Photography.
Administrative responsibilities: Research Director and REF lead; Co-Director History and Theory of Photography Research Centre
Visiting posts: Visiting Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 01-2016 to 03-2006; Visiting Professor, Université Bordeaux-Montagne, 10-2018 to 12-2018
Professional activities: Senior Teaching Fellow HEA; Editorial Board: Oxford Art Journal; Editorial Collective Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill/Haymarket); Co-convenor Research Seminar Series 'Marxism in Culture', Institute of Advanced Studies, Senate House
Professional membership: Senior Teaching Fellow HEA; AHRC Peer Review College
He has published extensively on photography and is currently working on the book looking at the early business of photography. 

Image: © Michael Pritchard. Steve Edwards delivering a paper at A New Power symposium, Bodleian Libraries in March 2023. 

Tate Modern, London, has given advance notice of a new exhibition Global Pictorialism which will run from 4 December 2025-25 May 2026. It is being developed and researched by the Tate's new photography curator Charmaine Toh.  Discover how pictorialism, the first international art photography movement, developed across the world from the 1880s to the 1960s.

Bringing together over fifty artists from Shanghai to Sydney, New York to Cape Town and Brazil to Singapore, this truly international exhibition takes a fresh and inclusive look at the history of art photography. Featuring never-before seen works from around the world alongside pieces from Tate’s Collection, Global Pictorialism highlights the vast and varied artistic possibilities of photography as a medium.

Global Pictorialism
4 December 2025-25 May 2026
London, Tate Modern
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/global-pictorialism

Image: Luo Bonian, Drawing Water from a Well series, May 1932 ©️Luo Bonian, Courtesy of Luo Bonian Art Foundation and Three Shadows +3 Gallery

For those who didn't quite manage to make it to Paris for this exhibition earlier in the year, the accompanying book is now available through Amazon UK, by using the link on the right.

Richly illustrated, this monograph reference brings together some 180 works from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French Society photography, the Musée d'Orsay, the Museum of Decorative Arts, Library of the Institut de France ... and who are the important calotype in the history of the photographic medium, the dictionary of over 350 photographers who practiced in France calotype etc.

Janet Mary Burnett Brown the great, great, granddaughter of William Henry Fox Talbot and the last of the Talbot family to live at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, Talbot's home  died peacefully on Wednesday 14th December 2011, aged 84. The funeral service will take place at St Cyriac's, Lacock on Thursday 29 December at 2.30pm. No flowers but donations to St Cyriac's Church, Lacock PCC.

The Times newspaper carried a death notice on 21 December. 

The V&A holds a set of stunning 20x16-inch transparencies by Arthur H. Downes of models wearing African fashions.  The  transparencies seem to have been made in Manchester in the 1960s and one them is labelled 'Model from Warri No. 5'. Warri is a city in Nigeria and also the name of a Nigerian modelling agency.

They are part of the Royal Photographic Society Collection and Downes was president of the RPS 1986-1988.  He specialised in colour and began self-processing colour transparencies in the 1950s, including large-scale display transparencies such as these.

My colleagues and I are eager to uncover anything we can about these photographs: Why were they made?  Were they ever displayed or published?  Who were the models?  Where did the fashions come from?  Any information will be gratefully received!