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The Lycée Champollion, in collaboration with Grenoble Alpes University and the Maison de l’Image in Grenoble, continues its series of international study days on various themes and techniques related to the photography of Michael Kenna (1953-...), a British photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world.

This second study day aims to highlight another major source of inspiration for his work: the representation of trees. Since the late 1970s, Kenna has been photographing trees assiduously: a first exhibition in 2011, organised by the KONG gallery that presents his work in Seoul, showed a selection of his photographs of trees, accompanied by the publication of a catalogue entitled Philosopher's Tree. The choice of the title to present his photographic practice on trees is characteristic of Kenna's approach. This name becomes the symbol of an entire body of work: trees allow the photographer to encounter nature in a way that is physical, sensitive, intellectual, aesthetic, but also metaphysical. 

Kenna explores the structuring power of trees in the landscape. The frequent wintry nature of his settings reveals the exceptional beauty of his subjects, the balance of their forms, and the harmonious, geometric development of their branches and trunks. Thanks to very long exposure times, which can last up to ten hours, his images reveal elements that the human eye usually ignores or cannot perceive. To quote Chantal Colleu-Dumond, who wrote the preface to Arbres in 2022, “as if through a synaesthetic effect, his images of trees are filled with a particular mystery and absolute silence that give them a sense of obviousness and universality” (2022, 4). Chantal Colleu-Dumond goes even further, making our experience with Kenna's tree photography a revelation of our relationship with time: “The time of trees is not that of humans; Michael Kenna emphasises their permanence as much as our finitude” (2022, 4). But Kenna's practice also brings us back to the notion of temporality, duration, and series. Kenna loves to photograph oak trees: he fell in love with a large oak tree in the town of Beaverton, near Portland, Oregon. In June 2021, Kenna began a series of portraits of the Beaverton oak. A year later, he had already assembled a selection of 83 photographs, taking advantage of the lockdown, which allowed him to stage this tree in a space emptied of its inhabitants. Kenna's photographs of this oak tree take us back to the early days of photography, with William Henry Fox Talbot's mid-19th century shots of oak trees, which made trees the ideal subjects at a time when photography required long exposure times that caused blurring for any non-static elements. 

We invite you to see these majestic beings in a new light, to listen to the lessons of these non-humans at a time marked by a necessary return to The Land, the title of Bill Brandt's exhibition that revealed Michael Kenna's vocation as a landscape photographer in 1976. 

The main themes covered:

1) Trees in the work of Michael Kenna

2) Trees in art history: possible links with 18th-century painters and 19th-century photographers

3) Trees on screen

4) Trees in literary creation

5) Trees as subjects of law, agency, or discourse

6) Trees as abstraction and natural minimalist architecture

7) Trees as political and ecological symbols

8) Trees as vertical axes/spiritual bridges between the visible and the invisible

9) Trees and their relationship to time: the concept of long exposure, series, and repetition

10) Trees and memory: local or universal symbols?

Papers may be published.

Call for papers: TREES IN THE ARTS AND LITERATURE. AROUND MICHAEL KENNA’S PHOTOGRAPHY

Date and venue: Friday, November 27 2026 at Lycée Champollion, Grenoble (France)
Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2026

https://www.lycee-champollion.fr/

Proposals should consist of a single file headed by the name of the lecturer; they should include a short biography (maximum one page) and the paper proposal (maximum 3,000 characters including spaces). They may be written in French or English.

Deadline for submission to jearbrekenna@gmail.com : May, 1st 2026.

The project is supported by Grenoble-Alpes University, axe transversal Création culturelle et territoire(s), ILCEA4 scientific laboratory EA 7356. 

 1Institut des langues et cultures d'Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie

We have now extended the deadline and invite you to submit a titled abstract (c.100 words) with your name and affiliation to phmgicon@gmail.com by Friday 25th November! The 5-minute presentations should include around five PowerPoint slides, which should be illustrative rather than textual. Please get in touch as soon as possible for further details or to discuss your idea.

The Icon Photographic Materials Group is delighted to announce its upcoming online event: Lightning-talks (following on from the group’s Round Table events) accompanied by the group’s 2022 Annual General Meeting.

The event will consist of a series of five-minute presentations followed by questions and discussion. As always the event is welcome to anyone with an interest in the care and preservation of photographic materials.

We invite abstract submissions from conservators and non-conservators, whether you work in public institutions, private practice or education. Subjects could include sustainability, education, career development, preventive conservation and storage, scientific and analytical research, documentation, treatment practices, theory, history and ethics, outreach and funding (among others!). 

The Lightning-Talks event will be followed by a brief update from the group committee.

Call for Papers: Icon PhMG Lightning Talks and AGM

Lightning Talks and AGM: Thursday 8^th December 2022, 10 am - 1 pm

phmgicon@gmail.com

‘Women from The AmberSide Collection, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh’ review, Studies in Photography Journal, Summer 2020, The Scottish Society for the History of Photography, National Galleries of Scotland. View Publication

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!

For those of you who might have missed the newsletter: E-Photo Newsletter Issue 185 11/4/2011

Fall auction coverage in New York, photo book reviews and more.

Professor Donna West Brett is the 2026 Oliver Smithies visiting lecturer, at Balliol College, Oxford. She will be delivering two lectures during her residence. The first looks at Zeppelins. 

‘Disaster, Sensation and the Zeppelin Sublime’.
Zeppelins played a significant role in shaping the British home front experience during the First World War, which Trudi Tate characterised as ‘a fantasmatic, infantile, and pleasurable relationship to the war and its objects.’ In September and October 1916, three German airships were shot down over Essex, events that drew tens of thousands of spectators, including journalists, who collected souvenirs or photographed the wreckage. Despite widespread disillusionment with the war, the presence of zeppelins elicited a paradoxical mix of intoxication, exhilaration, and horror (Freedman, 2004), a response reflected in the broader public imagination. Photographs and illustrations of burning airships and bombed houses, reproduced in the illustrated press, formed part of the burgeoning visual culture surrounding these spectacular events. This lecture examines the public emotional response, the extensive visual culture, including media narratives, and the mass consumption of wreckage souvenirs and postcards that emerged from these spectacles, thereby constituting what became known as the ‘Zeppelin Sublime.'
12 February 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/february/12/oliver-smithies-lecture

‘Stasi Surveillance: Photography’s Material and Residual Traces’.
This lecture examines the entanglement of photography with the past and its potential future within a post-archival context. Specifically, it examines photographs taken by the East German Stasi from the 1960s to 1989, highlighting the extensive material and photographic residue that serve as tangible traces of surveillance activities. Through key case studies, the lecture considers photography’s multiple registers as a tool for covert surveillance and as an evidential record, which nonetheless become haunting traces of unseen surveillance forces and a testament to photography’s unsettling potential.
5 March 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford. 
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/march/05/oliver-smithies-lecture

All are welcome. Please RSVP to the college: office@balliol.ox.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

In this exclusive talk Cally Blackman looks at fashion as it was represented through the autochrome. It is based on her new book The Colour of Clothes: Fashion and Dress in Autochromes 1907-1930 (Thames and Hudson, March, 2025) which celebrates the unique beauty of the autochrome in 370 images that reflect the broad sweep of its usage. Couturiers embraced the way the process showcased their exquisite designs to luminous perfection—among them Fortuny, Poiret, Doucet, Vionnet, Lucile, Chanel, and Lanvin. Beyond the sphere of fashion, there are also examples from the Salon du Goût Français, France’s 'virtual' autochrome exhibition of luxury items, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, a bold attempt to record the world’s cultures in autochrome

Cally Blackman studied Fashion Design at Central Saint Martin’s from 1972 to 1975 and returned to teach on BA Fashion History & Theory course in 2001. She is a fashion historian, lecturer, and author. Her research into autochromes is both original and extensive, with a large number of images she has sourced that have either never or very rarely been published since they were first made more than one hundred years ago. She has written several books including 100 Years of Fashion Illustration (2007), 100 Years of Menswear (2009), 100 Years of Fashion (2012) and co-author of A Portrait of Fashion (2015).

Fashion and Dress in Autochromes 
Cally Blackman
1 April 2025 at 1800 (BST)
Free. Register here:  https://tinyurl.com/mvpywvd4 

Image: Robert B Bird, Autochrome, c.1917. RPS, Bristol. 

On Tuesday, February 18, 2025, 4:00 - 5:30 pm GMT at the monthly meeting of the Consortium for History, Science, Technology and Medicine's working group - Color Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires, Dr. Hanin Hannouch (Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna) will present “I never understood his hate”: Arthur Traube’s Uvachrome in Europe and Beyond, dedicated to the memory of the late Mark Jacobs.  

In one of his letters to his colleague German photochemist and would-be Nazi historian Erich Stenger (1878-1957), German Jewish photochemist Arthur Traube (1852-1956) describes his relationship to his teacher Adolf Miethe (1862-1927) saying, “I never understood his hate”. Known for having co-patented panchromatic sensitization in 1902 together with Miethe, Traube seems to have all but swiftly disappeared from the history of colour photography. 
Relying on extant primary sources and photography collections scattered across Europe, Dr Hannouch's new research project not only centres on Traube’s oeuvre, positioning him as a photochemist and entrepreneur in his own right but also on his life as a Jewish scientist who only survived thanks to his hurried exile to the USA. Her talk starts by elucidating Traube’s life and studies in Berlin, seeing them through the prism of his Jewishness and the hate he faced. Dr Hannouch will also explicate his use of dye mordanting in two of his photographic processes, Diachromie as of 1906 and Uvachrome as of 1922, focusing on the three Uvachrome companies he was involved in various degrees (in Munich, Vienna, and Biel). Then, Dr Hannouch will reveal what happened to Uvachrome, both the technology and the brand, after Traube was forced to move to the other side of the Atlantic. 

It is easy to join for free; register with the CHSTM and join the group. Press the meeting link, and you will be in!

https://www.chstm.org/group/color-photography-19th-century-and-early-20th-century-sciences-technologies-empires

The inaugural exhibition in the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s photography gallery examines the first photographic studios in New South Wales, Australia and the characters who ran them. The way we visualise much of the 19th century is framed by the work of commercial photographic studios. The new technology of photography, invented in 1839, led to the rise of these new businesses which found commercial opportunities in sales of photographs, especially portraits. The Business of Photography turns the lens onto the commercial studio, exploring the stories behind particular New South Wales photographers. Original photographs drawn from the Macleay Collection of historic photography are featured.

A supporting online/in-person event is: 

If you haven't already, please consider taking the Photograph Preservation Initiatives survey or sharing it with colleagues who work with photographic materials, including those in other countries (the survey is available in five languages). The extended deadline to complete the survey is March 17, 2021.

Link to survey: utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_82GgIHMVqNpfF5Q

We very much appreciate your help in collecting this valuable information!

Thank you,

Debra Hess Norris, University of Delaware

Heather Brown, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Shannon Brogdon-Grantham, Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute

Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Marta Garcia Celma, M+ Museum, Hong Kong

Amber Kehoe, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Lee Price, Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, Philadelphia

Ioannis Vasallos, The National Archives, UK

The second year of membership of the Martin Parr Foundation begins on 12 November and includes a signed print of a Martin Parr photograph - the new print will be unveiled on the 12th.⁣ These change each year and are only available to members.

Membership benefits also include guided tours of the Martin Parr Foundation, access to the MPF library and archive, priority booking, discount in the MPF shop and more.⁣ ⁣

Membership helps keep MPF exhibitions free to all, supports overlooked and emerging photographers, and preserves the Foundation's extraordinary collection.⁣

See more here: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/membership/

Could you use your creativity and clear-thinking to deliver marketing that brings thousands of visitors through the Museum's doors? We're looking for a Senior Marketing Executive to take the lead on marketing some of our most important and exciting projects. You'll have a really solid grounding in marketing with experience of digital and you'll have a track record for effectively delivering multiple projects at one time.

You'll work closely with our media buyers and design agencies to turn that knowledge into campaigns that pack a punch online, offline and on social media. You'll find the stories, images and ideas that bring out the science and technology in our collections, enhance our reputation and strengthen our brand.

Closing Date: 13 November 2016.

Interviews will be held w/c 21 November.

Details here: https://jobs.theguardian.com/job/6413205/senior-marketing-executive/

The shortlisted titles for the Best Photography Book are:

• Oil by Edward Burtynsky (Steidl)
• Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans by Robert Frank, edited by Sarah Greenough (Steidl)
• Paul Graham by Paul Graham (Steidl)
• Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s by Ryūichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian (Aperture Foundation)

The shortlisted titles for the Best Moving Image Book are:

• The Tactile Eye by Jennifer M. Barker (University of California Press)
• Being Hal Ashby: The Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson (The University Press of Kentucky)
• Eisenstein on the Audiovisual by Robert Robertson (I. B. Tauris)
• The New Yorker Theater by Toby Talbot (Columbia University Press)
• Michael Haneke’s Cinema by Catherine Wheatley (Berghahn Books)

Over 150 titles were submitted across the two categories for the awards, which have been narrowed down to a final nine books by the two judging panels chaired by Philippe Garner (Photography) and Francine Stock (Moving Image). The judges were looking for clearly written, well illustrated works, which make a significant contribution to the understanding of photography and/or the moving image.

The photography shortlist includes: an essay by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, chronicling the infrastructure of the oil industry and the implications of our dependence on the fuel; an expanded re-issue of legendary photographer Robert Frank’s seminal work The Americans; a retrospective of Paul Graham, the pioneering UK photographer and winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2009; a survey of the Japanese photographic print culture of the 60s and 70s, which has since had a profound influence on photographic publishing worldwide.

Philippe Garner comments:

The field was strong and the excellent shortlist reflects a wide range of approaches. They include: single-minded and engaging investigations of sometimes very narrow topics, made riveting by the passion of the authors; excellent monographs on or by photographers from all areas of photographic practice; and a number of quirky, category-defying projects.

The moving image shortlist includes: Jennifer M. Barker’s theory that the connection between film and viewer goes beyond the visual and aural, to become something visceral; a portrait of the life of the underappreciated rebel 1970s Hollywood Director, Hal Ashby; Robert Robertson’s revealing exploration of Eisenstein’s ideas about the audiovisual in cinema; memoirs by Toby Talbot, co-owner of Manhattan’s influential home of art-house film, the New Yorker Theatre; the first English language analysis of the films of Austrian Director, Michael Haneke, by UK film critic Catherine Wheatley.

Francine Stock comments:

The books that impressed us above all were the ones that inspired a deeper love of film. The shortlisted authors each combined passion and original research in a format that suited their subject. Whether it was intimate memoir, biography, history, critique or a call for a radical new understanding of the way we experience cinema, these books were both focussed and involving.

Associate Professor Donna West Brett will give a lecture on the collection of photobooks donated to the Bodleian Library in 2020 by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey. Conveying meaning through photos alone, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics. This lecture will take a closer look at the way photobooks portray the ‘everyday’ – the familiar, the practical, the ordinary – and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda.

Donna West Brett is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at The University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), and has published widely on photographic history. She is Research Leader for Photographic Cultures at Sydney, and Editorial Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury. Brett is a recipient of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Ernst and Rosemarie Keller Fund, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries for 2024.

Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda and the Everyday
In person, Tuesday, 27 February 2024, from 1300-1400 (UTC)
Weston Library, Oxford
Free or donation
Book here: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/feb24/modernist-photobooks

On April 8th, Poster House opened an exhibition featuring a portion of Dwight Cleveland's extensive vintage poster and lobby card collection. The collection focuses on all Underrepresented groups that are only now receiving the celebration they deserve. This exhibition highlights films where Women, in particular, played a significant role behind the camera during the silent film era. For more information on poster images see Dwight's book on https://cinemaonpaper.com/.  

This special exhibition will be up at Poster House in New York City through October 9, 2022:

Over the winter of 2019/2020 images from the archive at Sutton Hoo were digitised in their entirety for the first time. The images, captured by Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff, were taken during the summer of 1939 and provide a remarkable insight into the people and processes behind the excavation of the Great Ship Burial. The entire collection is now available to view online and at Sutton Hoo.

The image collection consists of 11 photograph albums, loose black and white images, contact prints and negatives. The collection includes one album of colour prints, an incredible survival from the very earliest days of the use of colour reversal film, and original 35mm Agfa Isopan F negative film. The colour prints, as far as research has shown so far, appear to be the earliest surviving original colour photographs of a major archaeological excavation. The significance of this collection has been reflected in a successful bid for internal funding as part of the National Trust’s Collections Conservation Prioritisation (CCP) programme to both conserve and digitise the images to ensure they survive for future generations.

Mercie Lack (1894–1985) and Barbara Wagstaff (1895–1973) were members of the Royal Photographic Society and happened to be passing the excavation. 

Read the full story and search the collection here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-hoo/features/conservation-in-action-at-sutton-hoo

For decades, renowned author and photo critic Vince Aletti has accumulated one of the largest private collections of fashion magazines in North America. Join Ryerson Imaging Centre Director Paul Roth and Aletti in conversation as they discuss his most recent publication, Issues (Phaidon, 2019), which features select seminal issues from his archive. He will speak about the history of photography within this medium, explore the intersection of art and commerce, and describe how photographers from outside of the fashion world influenced the magazines they appeared in.

Vince Aletti is a writer, curator, collector and critic whose work can be found in Aperture, Art + Auction, Photograph, Artforum and Vogue Italia. Formerly a music critic for Rolling Stone, Aletti went on to be the art editor of the Village Voice from 1994–2005 and the paper’s photo critic for twenty years, after which reviewed photography exhibitions for The New Yorker. He has published extensively on the impact of fashion magazines on the history of photography, and won the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award for writing in 2005. His most recent book is Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines (Phaidon, 2019).

Webinar
2 March 2022
1900 (EST) | 0000 (GMT)
Book here:  https://ryerson.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BtRaXaS9RiKiMH7t8jUrYQ

See details of the book here: https://www.phaidon.com/store/fashion-culture/issues-9780714876788/

Glasgow's Street Level Photoworks has released a series of online photographer/artist talks from recently events. They comprise: 

• Recording of an artist talk by Peter Kennard at the book launch of 'Visual Dissent', Street Level Photoworks 2nd October 2019. See: https://youtu.be/rrQE2boay0g
• the launch of Roger Palmer's latest photobook SPOOR in September last year. SPOOR comprises groups of colour photographs made by Roger Palmer while following rail routes between towns and settlements of South Africa. The photographs were accumulated between 2014 and 2018 as Palmer drove along mostly minor roads through the country's nine provinces.https://youtu.be/VHnl18uaiC8
• Close Up artist talks, joined by Colin Gray as he reflected on his diverse career as a photographer and told us how he is adapting his practice during lockdown. https://youtu.be/kRrnEduwwUg

The Scientific Instrument Society has placed its first eighty-one Bulletins online, to view and download for free (for personal and non-commercial use). These cover the time period June 1984 to June 2004. An index to these Bulletins is also available. The Bulletins contain mainly crossovers with British and wider photographic history, mainly through research into companies and optics.

See: http://www.sis.org.uk/resources/bulletin-back-issues