Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's Spacehopper hit Manhattan's Upper East Side last week as part of Madison Avenue Welcome Back Saturdays. This large window display and exhibition inside will be up through the end of the month. To all those in or passing through New York, we hope you have the chance to see it!
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The National Science and Media Museum, Bradford new Sound and Vision galleries development is underway .A tender has been issued for to the value of £430,000 by the Science Museum Group for a team to develop the gallery designs for Sound and Vision. The design team must include the lead spatial designer, graphic designer and lighting designer, structural, acoustic and Mechanical Engineering design specialists. The work will include architectural base build and exhibition design. This lead consultant will be responsible for co-ordinating all disciplines involved in the design.
Separately, the museum is recruit a part-time Project Coordinator to support the project.
The museum recently secured a National Heritage Lottery Fund first pass grant of £318,963 for the development phase of the project.
The ‘galleries will include collections of photography, radio, film, TV, sound and digital technologies, and has been created in consultation with local communities. Jo Quinton-Tulloch, Director of the National Science and Media Museum, said its aim was to “realise the Science Museum Group’s mission of making STEM education open for all”. She added, “[they] will explore the relevance and impact of image and audio technology throughout history, connecting the museum’s collections not only to this global communications age, but also directly to our home city.”
For the tender: https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/tenders/view/1236
For the role see: https://bit.ly/3mp5lCr
Thomas Sharp was Somerset’s first professional photographer, setting up a studio at the Royal Victoria Park, Bath in November 1841. My colleague Allan Collier has previously commented (February 2014) on his career, or as much as we knew at the time, and this update records our efforts to have Thomas Sharp recognised as the photographer responsible for a portrait which until now has been credited to Roger Fenton.
In the course of researching Sharp’s life and career, we came across a portrait of Major-General Charles Ashe Windham, the ‘hero of the Redan’. An engraving made from the photograph was published in the Illustrated London News on 6 October 1855, four weeks after Windham led the charge on the Great Redan at Sebastopol. The acknowledgements stated that the engraving was “from a photograph taken by Messrs Sharp and Melville at their establishment in Old Bond Street, the day before Colonel Windham [as he was then] left England for the Crimea” – Windham’s diary and letters show that he embarked at Southampton on 9 August 1854 https://archive.org/details/crimeandiaryand00windgoog/page/n33/mode/2up?view=theater
Windham’s bravery was mentioned in a despatch of 9 September 1855 by General James Simpson, commander of the British forces, and was swiftly recognised by the British press. So, the photograph taken a year earlier by Thomas Sharp, and engraved by his colleague Alexander Melville (1823-1892), became more prominent than they might have expected. The Illustrated London News followed up the publication of the engraving with a further article on 3 November 1855 : “since its publication, the artists have completed a life size portrait of the original in oils …. The talent bestowed on all the works of portraiture at this establishment is of a superior nature; Mr Sharp being a photographist of many years’ reputation, and Mr Melville an artist of considerable merit, and whose abilities have obtained for him the patronage of her Majesty on several occasions …. This fine portrait of General Windham has been purchased by Mr Agnew of Manchester, with a view to publication …”
Agnew’s purchase, combined with his sponsorship of Roger Fenton’s Crimea photographs, is what we now believe led to the credit for the photograph being given to Fenton, rather than to Sharp and Melville. The copies of the matching photograph, clearly the basis for the engraving, in several major photographic collections were credited to Fenton – those in the National Gallery, the Library of Congress in Washington, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Following our representation, all three have now amended their records for this photograph and changed the attribution to Sharp & Melville. We now feel that the reputation of Somerset’s first photographer has been somewhat restored, although we appreciate that the attribution to Fenton continues in many other sources. Notes : the copies shown here are the engraving as published in 1855, and the photograph of 1854, the latter courtesy of the Look & Learn History Picture Archive, which now has a corrected attribution.
Our book, published in 2018, is “Secure the shadow : Somerset photographers, 1839-1939” https://sdfhs.org/shop/publications/somerset-books/secure-the-shadow-somerset-photographers-1839-1939/
As part of Birmingham Heritage Week there will be a display Taking and displaying the photograph which will show one hundred years of cameras made in Birmingham, and how the city manufactured ways to show and display the resulting images. It will be an opportunity to see mahogany wood and brass plate cameras through to cheap plastic snapshot cameras as well as the magic lanterns, projectors, photograph albums, frames and the images themselves that the cameras would have taken.
Library of Birmingham, Level 4, Heritage Learning Space Centenary Square, B1 2ND
16-18 September, from 1100-1700 daily
Free
https://birminghamheritageweek.co.uk/
One of the great pleasures in collecting old negatives is finding the odd 'ruby in a mountain of rock'. Whilst recently scanning a group of glass negatives I had recently purchased and had loosely titled 'Camberwell, Southwark and Richmond Collection' I came across the image of a middle-aged gentleman sitting with a young girl in the back garden of a house somewhere in the outskirts of London.
A not uncommon picture of Edwardian life found in similar collections of informal middle-class family portraits, but for some reason this gentleman looked familiar. A quick look at the list of captions found on the inside of the negative box lid revealed that the subjects were, 'Mr Cobham & Vera with hat', dated May 27th, 1906.
I instantly recognised him to be Sir Alan Cobham, the intrepid aviator and entrepreneur, but then immediately realised that it couldn't be him as he would surely have been a much younger man than the one in my picture, taken in 1906. A quick check on the internet of images of Sir Alan indicated that he did indeed resemble the image of the man in my negative, and after further research it turned out that the man in the garden was Frederick Cobham, father of Alan, so the young girl must have been Vera, Alan's younger sister.
I subsequently discovered further images of the Cobham family in the collection, including the one attached of the whole family, with dog. Possibly this has been published before, but I would doubt it. I haven't been able to ascertain who took the photograph but I am currently researching the collection, so hopefully I will discover their identity, or at least the name of the family at whose residence the Cobhams visited in the late spring of 1906.
Little could any of them have known then, just how this young boy would begin to influence the development of commercial aviation some 15 or 20 years hence.
Newcastle's Side Gallery which closed last year after losing its Arts Council England NPO status (see here) is seeking the views of supporters and the public as it looks to the future. In an email from Laura Laffler, Director at Amber Film & Photographty Collective she said:
Thanks to your support, we can continue to digitise our archive, take part in exhibitions nationwide and support the next generation of North East documentary artists. We will find out about several major funding opportunities in the next few weeks, and you’ll be the first to receive an update. But right now, more than anything, we need your feedback. Galleries should exist for everyone, and we believe the best way to relaunch our space is with community and collaboration at its core. Our next steps are to take survey responses and turn them into an in-person event where, together, we can co-create the next chapter of the Side Gallery.
To share your views click here
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
Mid-century comics on both sides of the Atlantic portrayed children as camera users through product advertisements, photography competitions, and—especially—fictional depictions of heroic child photographers. In the illustrated hands of comic characters like “Kid Click” and “Snapshot Susie,” cameras could figure as tools for conquest (paralleling weaponry and surveillance devices) or operate as metaphorical moral compasses for personal development, decency, and altruism. In this lecture, Annebella Pollen explores how these comic adventures, particularly when triangulated with the camera promotions and children’s photographs on parallel pages, offer a productive space for understanding children’s media production and the mediation of their world.
From Kid Click to Snapshot Susie
Annebella Pollen
20 March 2024, at 1800 (EST)
Neew York, Bard Graduate Center
https://www.bgc.bard.edu/events/1489/20-mar-2024-from-kid
The University of Brighton's Centre for Design History is hosting a double professorial book launch on 17 April at M2. The event will launch Cold War Photographic Diplomacy: The U.S. Information Agency and Africa, by Darren Newbury and Art without Frontiers: The Story of the British Council, Visual Arts and a Changing World, by Annebella Pollen. It will be an opportunity to hear from the authors and celebrate the publication of their books.
Book launch
Wednesday, 17 April 2024 at 1800-2000
M2 at Grand Parade Building, Brighton
Details here: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/centrefordesignhistory/2024/03/01/event-book-launch-with-darren-newbury-and-annebella-pollen-april-17-2024/
When early photographic pioneers Robert Adamson (1821 – 1848) and David Octavius Hill (1802 – 1870) were busy producing their pathbreaking calotypes in 1840s Edinburgh, a rallying call was heard on the streets of the Scottish capital: ‘Send back the money!’ Leading the call was American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, in 1846, had embarked on a tour of Britain and Ireland. He directed his aim at the Free Church of Scotland, which had accepted funds from the profits of enslavement in the American South. Douglass demanded the ministers send it back
Read more in this blog from Caroline Douglas at the V&A Museum: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/pictures-and-progress-frederick-douglass-and-early-scottish-photography
The UK government has announced a £1.57bn package of support for cultural organisations to be delivered through grants and loans, and funding for capital projects. How much is new money, how much will need to be repaid and how much has come from previously announced commitments to the national infrastructure is unclear.
The package announced includes funding for national cultural institutions in England and investment in cultural and heritage sites to restart construction work paused as a result of the pandemic. The government claims 'this will be a big step forward to help rebuild our cultural infrastructure'.
The package includes:
- £1.15 billion support pot for cultural organisations in England delivered through a mix of grants and loans. This will be made up of £270 million of repayable finance and £880 million grants.
- £100 million of targeted support for the national cultural institutions in England and the English Heritage Trust.
- £120 million capital investment to restart construction on cultural infrastructure and for heritage construction projects in England which was paused due to the coronavirus pandemic.
- The new funding will also mean an extra £188 million for the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland (£33 million), Scotland (£97 million) and Wales (£59 million).
Decisions on awards will be made working alongside expert independent figures from the sector including the Arts Council England and other specialist bodies such as Historic England, National Lottery Heritage Fund and the British Film Institute.
Repayable finance will be issued on generous terms tailored for cultural institutions to ensure they are affordable. Further details will be set out when the scheme opens for applications in the coming weeks.
Although welcomed across the board by leading arts administrators and bodies such as the Royal Opera House, it is unclear whether the funding will actually support smaller organisations not already in receipt of public funding, those outside of London in the same way that London's national bodies look set to benefit, individual artists and freelancers, and venues that have been impacted by social distancing restrictions that are set to be in place for many months. The funding of capital projects may be premature when it is unclear that audiences will return.
Read the government announcement here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/157-billion-investment-to-protect-britains-world-class-cultural-arts-and-heritage-institutions?utm_source=27015a4b-f940-411c-b482-81dceba88625&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications&utm_content=immediate
Autograph, the London venue with a mission to champion the work of artists who use photography and film to highlight questions of race, representation, human rights and social justice, has added artwork to Art UK's website. Included is work from Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Syd Shelton and Roti Fani-Kayode. Some 123 artworks have been added. Separately, Bindi Vora has been appointed senior curator.
Autograph currently holds approximately 5,000 prints, 10,000+ negatives, 5,000 slides, as well as several thousand contact sheets and a small amount of archival film and ephemera, and the collection continues to grow.
Art UK is the online home for every public art collection in the United Kingdom. It brings together art from over 3400 British institutions and shows over 300,000 works by over 50,000 artists.
We are pleased to announce that the gallery will be re-opening to the public on Thursday 10th September, with our Oscar Marzaroli exhibition extended to 20th December 2020.
Social distancing procedures will be in place for all within the gallery, including restrictions on the number of visitors allowed in at any one time and we request that visitors wear a face covering for the duration of their visit. Hand sanitising stations will be present throughout the gallery. For full information on our re-opening & Covid-19 safety precautions please click here
Please note our revised gallery opening hours are Thursday through Sunday from 12pm - 5pm. The production facilities remain closed at present and we will announce their re-opening in due course.
Sport in its modern form developed contemporaneously with photography, and the growth of sport into a global phenomenon has been decisively influenced by its mediation in visual culture and photography. Photographs of sport, and of its most popular athletes, have long been essential not only to sports reporting but also to the commercial exploitation of professional sport as a form of spectacle and entertainment. Just as sport itself is open to a wide range of symbolic and political interpretations, certain sports photographs have transcended the ephemeral nature of daily reports to enter the popular imagination and collective memory. Equally, private photographs of junior and grassroots sport are increasingly valued as part of sporting heritage. Even in the age of television and the internet, the still photograph remains an essential element of sport as a cultural phenomenon.
Yet, as Mike O’Mahony observes in Photography and Sport (Reaktion, 2018), definitions of ‘sports photography’ have tended to be narrow, and the history of photographs of sport has only recently begun to receive the academic attention accorded to other photographic genres. Only rarely are sports photographs taken seriously in their own right. ‘Photographs taken during key sporting events […] are assumed […] to derive their value and meaning from an awareness of the event rather than the intrinsic values of the image itself’ (O’Mahony 11).
This colloquium aims to contribute to an ongoing process of challenging these assumptions through scholarly and critical engagement with the relationship between photography and sport. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on neglected or original aspects of this relationship, and welcome approaches that take an historical, theoretical or practical approach. Transnational and comparative approaches are very welcome. Possible topics might include:
- Definitions of sports photography
- Sports photography as historical source
- Sports photography and aesthetics
- Assessments of the work of individual photographers
- Critical readings of particular photographs
- Photography and sports heritage
- Photography and fan culture
- Sports photography and race / gender
- Sports photography in the digital age
- Sports photography and place
Colloquium: 'Beyond the Back Page: Readings of Sports Photography'
Centre for Visual Cultures, Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
Date: Friday 5 June 2020
Organiser: Dr Jon Hughes, Dept of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway (jon.hughes@rhul.ac.uk)
Keynote Speaker: Professor Mike O’Mahony, University of Bristol
Deadline for proposals: 28 February 2020
Please send abstracts of 200-250 words for 20-minute papers to Jon Hughes (jon.hughes@rhul.ac.uk) by not later than Friday 28 February 2020. Please also include full contact details and a short bio-text or link to an online profile.
This short talk presents research on a rare early photograph album from mid-1860s Natal, South Africa, which contains around 50 portraits of African subjects, with inscriptions by its owner, representing the first few years of studio output in Natal in the new affordable format of cartes-de-visite. The talk will explore the album's contents and present some of the tantalising research findings that have emerged so far.
Monday 30 January, 14.30
With Dr Christopher Morton
Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
Details: https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/research-on-an-early-photograph-album-from-natal-south-africa
The Museum of Gloucester is celebrating the two hundred and twenty-first anniversary of the birth of polymath Charles Wheatstone in Barnwood, near Gloucester. Although his name is still remembered all over the world, Wheatstone never got the credit he really deserves. This prolific inventor, musical instrument maker and professor of experimental philosophy was a shy person and, unlike some of his contemporaries and their modern equivalents, never blew his own trumpet.
Whilst some inventions which he helped promote have been wrongly attributed to him, others have been credited to somebody else and history has not been kind in honouring him. There are no monuments to him, no statues to remember his achievements by, and even his grave in Bethnal Green is so undistinctive that it is difficult to find.
Photo historian Denis Pellerin, from the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy, will take you on a three dimensional journey to discover the inventor of Stereoscopy (which we now call 3D) and show how this invention, which, strangely enough, Wheatstone never considered as his most important, changed the way the Victorians perceived the world around them. Stereoscopy gave birth to a craze which may not have lasted very long but produced millions of amazing images and has been through several revivals since it first started back in the 1850s.
Nearly two hundred years after its discovery, Stereoscopy is not only the magic carpet it was for Wheatstone’s contemporaries, taking them to far away places without leaving their fireside; it has also become a wonderful time machine, showing us the Victorians, famous or anonymous, as they really were, in a way no traditional photographs can.
Details and booking: https://www.museumofgloucester.co.uk/events/celebrating-charles-wheatstone-in-glorious-3d
The Reece Winstone Archive is searching for 400 lantern slides taken by Kuner of Bristol, which formed the basis of lectures he gave throughout the west, on historic and natural subjects, as far away as Cornwall, the Rivers Wye, Somerset Chew etc.- he was a keen cyclist and one-time secretary of Bristol Photographic Society.
The slides were of sufficient interest to become the Kuner Memorial slides and were added to the BPS permanent collection after his death in 1923. We now know they were not lost when the BPS rooms were destroyed in the blitz and were brought to Reece 'to sort' by William J Foster ARPS, acting either for himself, the BPS, WCPF or PAGB, in 1954. Reece may have been gifted 28 duplicate slides, including hand-coloured ones for his own collection, although they were not added to his accession list in common with other gifts of slides from colleagues. He preserved Kuner's printed labels of lectures stuck on broken slide box lids, whilst renewing the slide boxes. These slides have now been digitised.
Foster was well known to Reece and had attended one of his 1931 rambles to Wells organised for the BPS (left) All efforts to locate the glass slides have drawn a blank in local, club, national and archived collections, leaving only private collections unchecked. Foster lived latterly at 63 Ashley Hill, Bristol and had run a successful builders merchants of the same name, originally sited adjacent the Bristol River Frome which had been the subject of a source-to-mouth ramble by Kuner, repeated in reverse 50 years later by Reece for BPS. Foster died in 1966, aged 86 and a letter of 1980 from his great-grandson in the Archive written from Bedford says he gave away many photographs following his wife's death in the 1960s.
Holders of any Kuner's glass slides (usually not bearing his name, but spotted with title on top edge in black caps. - see photo of lecture labels) would be most welcome to partake in this digitising project. We may be able to identify Kuner slides by handwritten titles, if you are uncertain - please contact us at reecewinstonearchive@gmail.com.
Our search for 308 lantern slides by Reece covering the history of photographic clubs in the South-west found a successful conclusion in the WCPF's collection last year, held under the heading 'Fed(eration) Faces', and have now been digitised.
Grateful thanks to all involved in the search.
Images:
Top right: Kuner with moustache, on left, in the field.
Centre: Foster in light suit.
This month, Photoworks begins a year of activities marking twenty-five years of Photoworks. To mark its anniversary year it commissioned Ibrahim Azab to create (PW)_H3RE N0W)//_SINCE TH3N, 2020, re-imagining the Photoworks archive by (re)using copies of its magazines.
Photoworks says: "These are difficult times, and a time to rethink the world around us. Our programme for 2020 - Alternative Narratives - reflects this. We look forward to you joining us as we journey into our next 25 years. We'll be back this time next month with another Check In. Keep your eyes peeled for other updates from us in the meantime, including new digital content and news of opportunities for you, our community."
Dr Sara Dominici, Senior Lecturer in Photographic History and Visual Culture, at the University of Westminster, has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to support her research project on The Photographic Darkroom in the Northern Transatlantic World, 1850s-1910s.
The project explores the development and use of the photographic darkroom in Britain and North America between the 1850s and 1910s. From portable dark-tents to dedicated structures, the darkroom was central to photographers’ lives as simultaneously a site of often unruly physical conditions and social relations, and a modern laboratory of memories and the imagination kindled by processing photographs. By reconstructing how people across the English-speaking world responded to the challenges and opportunities of operating the darkroom in vastly different environments, this study is the first to provide a comprehensive account of how this space affected photographers’ relationship to their practice and identity. In doing so, it elaborates a conceptual framework for historical studies of the darkroom globally.
The grant will support the archival research into photographic journals, images, and darkroom equipment held in the UK and USA, and the dissemination of its results.
The work builds on last year's conference on the darkroom convened by Dominci and a special issue of the ESHP's PhotoResearcher
See: http://www.eshph.org/journal/photoresearcher-no-41-2024/
This book tells the story of Stephen Markson who rose from messenger boy at The Times to the top of his profession as senior staff photojournalist for that paper. The book tells the stories behind the pictures, images and anecdotes that give a tantalising glimpse of the danger and glamour, tragedy and celebrity, seen through the lens of a talented photographer for whom every day was different and every frame counted.
Stephen has compiled an intriguing collection of stories and images from the golden era of Fleet Street, when budgets were limitless, deadlines were tight and getting the film from the camera to the darkroom was often a challenge in itself. His determination saw him and his resourcefulness is apparent in many of the notes that accompany his iconic photographs.
His life was far from ordinary, with experiences ranging from being shadowed by the KGB and threatened by the IRA to hoodwinking Maggie Thatcher and dancing with Elton John. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in recent history, journalism or photography and particularly in the drama and atmosphere of images shot on black and white film.
Fleet Street Exposures: Diary of a photojournalist
Stephen Markeson
ArtCircus Books, 2021
£30.00, 168pp
ISBN 978-1-914424-16-8
See: www.stephenmarkeson.com
