Does anyone have catalogues for City Sale and Exchange, period 1915-1920? I have bought a Murer camera badged Salex, similar to the one they called ’Sprite’ but larger - or were there several Sprites, I don’t know. If there is anything in their lists on the subject I’d be very interested! And an instruction manual??

Since the invention of photography in 1839, many of the contributions made by women have been forgotten, leaving their legacy on the margins of history. In recent times, this biased view has evolved thanks to the historiographical rescue of numerous amateur or professional women, regular participants in the different stages of the creative process (researchers, photographers, retouchers, assistants, etc.). In Retratadas, Stéphany Onfray offers a novel approach by analyzing the beginnings of the photographic medium from the perspective of gender. Thanks to a lucid reinterpretation of the relationship that women had with the camera, no longer as operators, but as portrayed, she proposes new lines of reflection to dismantle the hegemonic discourses that have historically confined them to a role of passive observers. Through an exhaustive examination of nineteenth-century visual and material culture, from painting, literature and theatre to the press and a nascent fashion industry, the author explores how, by capitalising on their own image and therefore their bodies, women displaced the boundaries between the sexes, becoming part of a cultural and social dialogue that not only redefined gender boundaries but also favoured a more contemporary, affective and artistic vision of the photographic object.

Retradas. Fotografía, género y modernidad en el siglo xix español [Portrayed. Photography, gender and modernity in 19th century Spain}
Stéphany Onfray
Cátedra, 2024, 360 pages
ISBN 978-84-376-4858-3
€29.95 (paper)
Details: https://catedra.com/libro/arte-grandes-temas/retratadas-stephany-onfray-9788437648583/

To coincide with the 150th anniversary of Thomas Annan's Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, photographer Frank McElhinney re-traces Annan's footsteps with a photo trail along the same streets where Annan made the original photographs. Annan's famous street studies of this historic area of Glasgow are shown in the windows of modern businesses along High Street and Saltmarket, taking the viewer on a journey through history.

One hundred and fifty years ago Thomas Annan published a series of thirty-one photographs of the old streets and closes of Glasgow. They are recognised as perhaps the world’s first attempt at what we now call social documentary photography. An 1866 act of parliament had approved the clearance of Glasgow’s overcrowded and epidemic prone slums. With the exception of one photograph made in the Gorbals, all of the rest were made in and around the High Street and Saltmarket. It was once assumed the photographs were commissioned by the City Improvement Trust, but there is no real evidence of this. It is more likely that Annan began the series on his own initiative motivated not just by a speculative commercial imperative but by a desire to highlight the slowly improving condition of Glasgow’s poorest residents. The title of the work suggests architecture was the principal subject but the photographs are teaming with life, full of men, women and children. Annan’s photographs give us a privileged insight into the living conditions of our forebears as no other city, with the possible exception of Paris, has a comparable archive from such an early period in the history of photography. - Frank McElhinney

Find out more and associated events here: https://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/event/thomas-annan-photo-trail

Gray Levett, who will be best known to many as the owner of Nikon specialists Grays of Westminster, has also had a long career as a photographer.  He is working on a project that covers life around Fitzrovia, in and around the Fitzroy area of London  between 1957 and 1960. and is  looking for images such as the transport, the pubs, the shops and the people.

He would welcome information concerning any any commercial photographers who may have been working in the area or collections of such images. 

Gray can be reached at: gray@graysofwestminster.co.uk  

Throughout September, I'll be blogging about a series of stereocards that I recently purchased as part of my ongoing research into the influence of 3D on early press photography.

The significance of the cards I'll be looking at is that they can be attributed to James Edward Ellam (1857-1920), an amateur stereographer from Yorkshire who enjoyed a successful career in London as a news agency photographer servicing Fleet Street.

He is best-known for his stereos for the Underwood & Underwood company of King Edward VII & Queen Alexandra in their Coronation robes, King Edward with his grandchildren at Balmoral (both in the National Portrait Gallery, London) and a set featuring Pope Pius X at the Vatican in Rome.

As I've obtained 30 of his amateur stereos, I thought I would write a blogpost-a-day this month about each of the cards.

In the process, I hope to shed further light on a period of James's career when he was making the transition, like other aspiring press photographers, from amateur to freelance/professional status.

You can follow the posts on my blog Click here

Credit: "The Cloisters, Durham Cathedral 1894" by J.E. Ellam.

The British Library has published a guest blog titled Revisiting Early Photography: Ethics, Legal Constructs, and the Seligmans’ Legacy. It is written by Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra, Adjunct Professor at UNIMAS, Institute of Borneo Studies, Malaysia, and Associate Academic, History of Art, University of Oxford. It is an abbreviated form of a presentation at workshop held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, The British Empire in the Art Gallery: Practises, Discourses and Publics, 27 September, 2024. 

The use of photography in anthropology has a complex history, particularly when it comes to representing indigenous communities through early ethnographic research. When viewing collections such as the early 20th-century images of Sri Lanka’s Vedda community captured by Charles and Brenda Seligman, it is crucial to evaluate them not just for their historical significance but also through the ethical and legal frameworks that apply today...

Read the blog here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2024/11/revisiting-early-photography-ethics-legal-constructs-and-the-seligmans-legacy.html

Image: ‘The Vedda country, view from Bendiyagalge rocks’. Photograph from C.G. and B.Z. Seligmann, The Veddas (1911). British Library, T 11173, facing title page.

well I did my bit in Brisbane in 1989 to celebrate photography... and only had a dozen people show up at the studio.  Sandy Barrie

Grant Scott has put out a call for information on the 1967 exhibition Modfot One and the promotion of contemporary photography in the UK in the 1960s. Please get in touch if you think you have anything to contribute in the way of memories, facts and stuff. 

Contact: Dr Grant Scott e: gscott@brookes.ac.uk

For information on Modfot see: https://the-golden-fleece.co.uk/wp/modfot-one/

If any of you are in the NW of England, I'll be offering a limited number of tintype portrait sessions at our Open Studios at Leigh Spinners Mill this Saturday. Or maybe just pop along and say Hello. The kettle is always on. Sesions available via Eventbrite.

See: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/tintype-portraits-tickets-1082188959309?aff=ebdssbdestsearch&keep_tld=1

Thanks

Tony

Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road will present the first survey of Felice Beato's (British, born Italy, 1832-1909) long and varied photography career which covered a wide geographical area—from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. This exhibition will run concurrently with Photography from the New China. The official press release is as follows.

"In 2007, the Getty Museum acquired a substantial collection of more than 800 photographs by Beato, a partial gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography. This important acquisition is the impetus and foundation for this exhibition, which covers Beato's entire career from his war photography to his commercial studio work," said Judith Keller, senior curator of photographs.

The exhibition looks closely at the photographs Beato made during his peripatetic career that spanned four decades. Following in the wake of Britain's colonial empire, Beato was among the primary photographers to provide images of newly opened countries such as India, China, Japan, Korea, and Burma. A pioneer war photographer, Beato recorded several major conflicts, including the Crimean War in 1855-1856, the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny in 1858-1859, the Second Opium War in 1860, the Western punitive campaign to Shimonoseki, Japan, in 1864, and the American expedition to Korea in 1871. His photographs of battlefields, the first to show evidences of the dead, provided a new direction for war photography.

"Felice Beato was one of the first global photographers," explains Anne Lacoste, assistant curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition. "No one before him was present with a camera in so many
different countries to chronicle conflicts or to record their foreign cultures ranging from the Crimea, to India, to China, to Japan, to Korea, to Sudan and finally Burma."

Beato's experience in the Crimea was a decisive point in his career. There he learned to make photographs in extreme and unpredictable conditions. He insinuated himself into the world of the officers' mess and assiduously cultivated his connections with those men. Such relationships would serve him well throughout his career, particularly in covering military campaigns in India, China, and Burma.

Eager to take advantage of Western interest in the conflict in India, Beato arrived in 1858 to record the rebellion's aftermath. Guided by military officers, he made images of the mutiny's main sites—Delhi,
Cawnpore, and Lucknow—that he sequenced and captioned to re-create the primary events. In some views, he added enemy corpses to increase the dramatic effect.

Under the extreme wartime conditions of the Second Opium War, where Beato accompanied the French and British troops, he made a series of photographs that documented the progress of the military campaign, including gruesome scenes taken immediately after the ravages of battle.

Known in Beato's time as the Hermit Kingdom, Korea was one of the last countries still closed to the outside world. Beato was hired to document an American punitive expedition to Korea to seek a treaty and negotiate trade relations. However, violence broke out and retaliatory actions were taken by the Americans. From his trip, Beato brought back 47 photographs, including numerous portraits of military crews and views of the fleet and battlefields. Among these views of the local scenery and portraits were the first known photographs of Korean natives.

Details of the exhibition can be found here. After premiering at the Getty this winter, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road, will be on view at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, Japan, in Spring 2012.

The contribution of women to the first century of photography has been overlooked across the world, including in New Zealand. With few exceptions, photographic histories have tended to focus on the male maker. This important book tilts the balance, unearthing a large and hitherto unknown number of women photographers, both professional and amateur, who operated in New Zealand from the 1860s to 1960, either as assistants in the early studios or later running studios in their own right.

It takes the reader on a journey through the backrooms of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic studios, into private homes, out onto the street and up into the mountains, and looks at the range of photographic practices in which women were involved. Through superb images and fascinating individual stories, it brings an important group of photographers into the light.

Publication date: June 2023
NZ RRP (incl. GST): $75
Extent: 368 pages
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-9951384-9-0

Book weblink

Exhibition: Through Shaded Glass Mā te Whakaata Kauruku, Te Papa, 7 June – 22 Oct 2023

Exhibition weblink

This proposal is for a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD which will focus on the records in photographs and film held by Imperial War Museums (IWM) of Black volunteers from the Caribbean in the UK during the Second World War. It will open up new perspectives and information on this largely unexplored collection by looking at how and why these images and footage were commissioned, the subjects chosen, the intended audiences and messages. It will also investigate how they have been used more recently in developing understanding and making memory.

During the Second World War, 10,000 Black men and women from the Caribbean served in the UK - in the armed forces, industry, forestry or the Merchant Navy. The majority of these volunteers responded to British recruitment drives in the Caribbean, while some, particularly early in the war, made their own way to Britain to join the fight. Although the Colour Bar had been officially lifted in 1939, many of them would experience discrimination during the recruitment process or in the course of their service.

The experiences of these people varied across the different areas where they contributed to the war effort. Many Caribbean volunteers served in the Royal Air Force, whereas the Army proved far less receptive to Black men and women serving in its ranks. Those involved in industry and agriculture experienced racial discrimination from employers, trade unions and government officials. Although the Colonial Office was keen to encourage recruitment of Caribbean men and women, it was mostly an exercise in public relations and an attempt to quell any dissent to ensure that those who served in Britain would return home ‘convinced Ambassadors of Empire’.

The PhD project will focus on the visual record – photographs and film – held in IWM’s collection showing Black volunteers from the Caribbean in the UK. That record was commissioned largely (though not exclusively) by government departments, including the Colonial Office, the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Supply, or by branches of the armed forces. It formed part of a wider propaganda campaign that showed Britain’s empire pulling together in a joint struggle, overlooking differences of race and ethnicity.

Our understanding of this material is, however, very limited. There is clearly much to uncover and more nuanced stories to tell. This CDP PhD will ensure that we can address this issue and bring IWM collections into critical dialogue with other national and international collections (official and unofficial), perspectives and knowledge bases external to IWM. By
way of wider context, the PhD student might also look at the official visual record of volunteers serving in the Caribbean itself, as well as in other parts of the world.

Key research questions to be addressed include:

• How and why were the photographs and film commissioned and circulated?
• What subjects did the photographers and film-makers choose and how were those subjects represented?
• Who were the intended and actual audiences?
• Where do the tensions lie between the official narrative and the actual experience of Black men and women from the Caribbean serving in the UK
• How have histories been obscured or excluded through the colonial context in which they were produced?
• How has this visual record shaped meaning making for families and communities today?
• How have these images and film been used more widely, in museums, and in education (including at IWM)?

In addition to research at IWM, the student will be expected to engage with sources held at such archives as:

• the UK National Archives
• Black Cultural Archives
• University of the West Indies
• Royal Air Force Museum
• National Army Museum
• Royal Museums Greenwich

‘Convinced ambassadors of Empire’?: exploring the visual record of Black Caribbean men and women serving in the UK during the Second World War
IWM co-supervisor: James Taylor, Principal Curator, Public History
Funded by AHRC
Read the full call here

This display explores how visual representations of Italy developed. These range from 15th-century woodcuts to 19th-century photography.

Books, travel guides and diaries from the Library's collections document the rise in visitors to Italy. You will see how book illustrators and photographers saw Italy, and how their work provided an impression of the country for British and European audiences. Early book illustrators usually presented a highly idealised, almost mythical, view of the country. They focussed on magnificent Roman ruins, imposing Renaissance buildings, and beautiful rural scenes.

The invention of photography in the 19th century provided a new way to record Italy. Early photographers continued the picturesque tradition of book illustrators. You can explore this in Robert Macpherson's photographs of Rome and examples from John Ruskin's collection of daguerreotypes (on loan from The Ruskin, Lancaster University).

See recently acquired 1840s calotype negatives, probably by James Calder MacPhail and James Dunlop. These are the earliest surviving photographs of Italy by Scots.

You can also enjoy James Craig Annan's 1890s photogravures of Venice and Lombardy. These showed how handheld cameras could record street scenes and everyday life in Italy.

Images of Italy (1480 to 1900)
until 2 November 2024
National Library of Scotland
See: https://www.nls.uk/whats-on/images-of-italy-1480-to-1900/

This is the first exhibition in England of photographs of 19th century China taken by the legendary Scottish photographer and travel writer John Thomson (1837-1921). Thomson's collection of 650 glass plate negatives is now housed in the Wellcome Collection Library, London. This exhibition of almost 150 prints from the collection was shown in venues across China in 2009 before coming to Liverpool. Following the Merseyside Maritime Museum it will tour to Hartlepool in late 2010 and The Burrell Collection in early 2011.

John Thomson (1837–1921) was born in Edinburgh two years before the invention of the daguerreotype was announced to the world in 1839. This discovery was the beginning of photography. That same year Fox Talbot introduced the calotype process, and with this new medium David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, two remarkable Scottish photographers living in Edinburgh, produced nearly 3,000 images, including city views, landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Their work undoubtedly had a profound influence on Thomson. In the years leading up to Thomsonbecoming a professional photographer, the technology of photographyalso developed at an incredible speed. The invention of thewet-collodian process in 1850 is regarded as the watershed: it reducedthe exposure time and the cost of making photographs; it also producedsharper images. The wet-collodian process quickly replaceddaguerreotype and calotype. As Thomson remarked: ‘the detail inwet-collodian negatives was of microscopic minuteness whilst presentingthe finest gradation and printing quality which had never indeed beensurpassed by any known method’. But this in itself added to hisdifficulties: it was necessary to make the negatives on glass platesthat had to be coated with wet-collodian emulsion before the exposurewas made, thus there was a large amount of cumbersome equipment thathad to be carried from place to place.

Yet Thomson persevered. To endure hardship was part of his Victorian education. He showed enormous energy and stamina. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, he was excited by the opening up of Africa and Asia to the West, and he shared in the enthusiasm for exploring exotic places. He believed that by using photography, ‘the explorer may add not only to the interest, but to the permanent value of his work’. And ‘the camera should be a power in this age of instruction to instruct the age’.

In 1862, Thomson set out for Singapore, where he opened a studio and established himself as a professional portrait photographer. Meanwhile, he also became increasingly interested in the local culture and people. From Singapore he travelled into Malaya and Sumatra and took a number of photographs of local landscapes and people. In 1866, after moving to Bangkok, he made his first photographic expedition into Cambodia and Indo-China (Vietnam). His photographs of Cambodia and Siam (Thailand) established him as a serious travel photographer, and gained himmembership of both the Ethnographic Society of London and the RoyalGeographic Society.

During his second trip to Asia, Thomson based himself at the thriving British Crown Colony of Hong Kong in 1868. There he studied Chinese and Chinese culture while making a few short trips into Guangdong. Thomson’s major China expedition began in 1870. For two years he travelled extensively from Guangdong to Fujian, and then to eastern and northern China, including the imperial capital Beijing, before heading down to the River Yangtse, altogether covering nearly 5000 miles. In China, Thomson excelled as a photographer in quality,depth and breadth, and also in artistic sensibility. The experience hegained, and the techniques he developed, on the streets of Beijing laidthe foundation for his Street Life in London, compiled five yearslater. This established him as the pioneer of photojournalism and oneof the most influential photographers of his generation.

After returning to Britain, Thomson took up an active role informing the public about China. Besides giving illustrated presentations, he continuously published photographic and written works on China. He sensed that a profound transformation was taking place in the world, and ‘through the agency of steam and telegraphy, [China] is being brought day by day into closer relationship with ourselves … China cannot much longer lie undisturbed in statii quo.’ Undoubtedly his photographs contributed greatly to 19th-century Europe’s view of Asiaand filled the visual gap between East and West. He became known as‘China’ Thomson.

Yet what marked Thomson’s work out was not simply the massive amount of visual information he offered. His uniqueness was his zeal to present a faithful and precise, though not always agreeable, account of China and Chinese people. He wanted his audiences to witness China’s floods, famines, pestilences and civil wars; but even more so, he wanted share them the human aspect of life in China. He wanted his work to transcend that of the casual illustration of idiosyncratic types, to portray human beings as individuals full of peculiarities.

In 1920, Thomson decided to sell his 650 glass negatives, including those of China, to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, but died before the transaction could be completed. Eventually Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853–1936), the American-born pharmacist and philanthropist, bought the negatives from Thomson’s heirs.

Although Wellcome’s museum had a medical and historical theme, Wellcome was a cosmopolitan, and, in some aspects, compulsive collector. He also had an anthropological approach to history, and his ultimate aim was to create a Museum of Man, although this dream was never realised. After his death much of his collection, including Thomson’s negatives in three wooden crates, ended up in the Wellcome Library in London, where they remain today.

The 150 images included in this exhibition are all from the Wellcome Library’s collection. While a few images were reproduced in Thomson’s published works and shown in exhibitions, the great majority of his photographs have never been exhibited. Take, for example, the stereoscopes. Each of these negatives comprises two photographs taken from slightly different angles. Previously, due to the cost of photo-publishing, only one of the exposures was printed.

The images included for this exhibition have been chosen mainly for their locations, namely those of Beijing, Guangdong and Fujian. The photographs Thomson took in Fujian and Guangdong are his strongest series of landscapes. But they also show his sensitivity. The human aspect of his work was even more evident in his photos of the poor. In Guangdong and Fujian, he became increasingly concerned with the lives and conditions of ordinary Chinese. As he travelled further, this concern developed. In the imperial capital of Beijing, Thomson not onlydisplayed his talent as professional portrait photographer, his streetscenes of Beijing showed that he was ahead of his time. These deeplymoving images are sometimes compared to street photographs by the great20th-century masters like Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson orRobert Doisneau. But more importantly, they will remain as incrediblyvaluable historical material for anyone wishing to understand19th-century China and its people in their struggle to become modern.

Further information on John Thomson can be found here : http://www.nls.uk/thomson/china.html

I have just posted a new Blog Post: THE RAMBLINGS of a Darkroom Dinosaur...Inspired by the current edition of PhotoResearcher Journal No 41, 'The Darkroom: Chemical, Cultural, Industrial', published by European Society for the History of Photography.

Dr Katayoun Dowlatshahi / Silverwood Art Studio & Darkroom

Impressions Gallery, Open Eye Gallery and Side Gallery are looking for a Network Coordinator to work to establish a new pilot network across the North for photographers and organisations that are working with photography.

Specifically, the Photo Connect network aims to support those interested in amplifying or expanding photography provision across the North. It is open to anyone wishing to collaborate – individuals, community groups, organisations and educational institutions – and will provide mechanisms to:

• Share information about photography exhibitions, workshops, and events, across the North.
• Manage Photo Connect communications, e.g. Instagram account.
• Share information from photography courses in the north.
• Share photography related news and opportunities.
• Support bespoke carbon literacy training for photographers.
• Provide at least one Photo Connect networking event in each of the 3 north areas North West, Yorkshire and North East.
• Champion the benefits of collaborating to increase reach and impact.
• Better understand the current photography ecology and demand for increased provision.

We know that photography is under-funded in the north, with just two organisations receiving core support from Arts Council England – Impressions Gallery and Open Eye Gallery – which is at odds with the public’s engagement and interest in photography. The Network Coordinator role is critical to establishing the Photo Connect network and driving forward this ambitious 12 month year-long pilot. The Network Coordinator will provide managerial capacity to identify the photography ecology across the North, connect with potential collaborators, and play a key part in planning and delivering the aims and objectives of Photo Connect.

The deadline for expressing interest is 12pm noon on 31 December 2024.

See: https://www.impressions-gallery.com/opportunity/photo-connect-network-coordinator/

Photo Connect is made possible by Arts Council England project funding

The contribution of women to the first century of photography has been overlooked across the world, including in New Zealand. With few exceptions, photographic histories have tended to focus on the male maker.

This important book tilts the balance, unearthing a large and hitherto unknown number of women photographers, both professional and amateur, who operated in New Zealand from the 1860s to 1960, either as assistants in the early studios or later running studios in their own right.

It takes the reader on a journey through the backrooms of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic studios, into private homes, out onto the street and up into the mountains, and looks at the range of photographic practices in which women were involved. Through superb images and fascinating individual stories, it brings an important group of photographers into the light.

Publication date: June 2023
NZ RRP (incl. GST): $75
Extent: 368 pages
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-9951384-9-0

Book weblink

Exhibition: Through Shaded Glass Mā te
Whakaata Kauruku, Te Papa, 7 June – 22 Oct 2023

Exhibition weblink