All Posts (38)
Sort by
Presented by Dr Luke Gartlan (School of Art History, University of St Andrews). In 1876 at the height of his career, the Yokohama-based photographer Baron Raimund von Stillfried travelled to Shanghai to undertake a portfolio of 'Chinese characters'. All but forgotten since its completion, this paper argues that the commercial failure of this portfolio highlights the potential schisms that could emerge between the work of nineteenth-century expatriate photographers and the expectations of their international clientele. By importing the aesthetic conventions of Yokohama souvenir photography—or Yokohama shashin—to the Chinese context, Stillfried destabilised many of the prevailing imperialist codes that conceived of the two nations in diametrical terms.
This seminar is co-sponsored with the History of Photography journal.
The History of Photography research seminar series aims to be a discursive platform for the discussion and dissemination of current research on photography. From art as photography and early photographic technology to ethnographic photographs and contemporary photography as art, the seminar welcomes contributions from researchers across the board, whether independent or affiliated with museums, galleries, archives, libraries or higher education, and endeavours to provide scholars with a challenging opportunity to present work in progress and test out new ideas.
The seminars usually take place once a term, on Wednesday evenings at 5.30pm in the Research Forum, unless otherwise stated. The papers, and formal discussion, are followed by informal discussion over a glass of wine.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
5.30pm, Research Forum South Room
Open to all, free admission
Contacts:
Alexandra Moschovi (alexandra.moschovi@courtauld.ac.uk )
Julian Stallabrass (julian.stallabrass@courtauld.ac.uk)
Britain's flagship photography institution will lose 15% in Government grants over the next four years as a result of the Comprehensive Spending Review, Amateur Photographer has revealed.
Last week the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced £81 billion pounds worth of public spending cutbacks.
A spokesman for the National Media Museum (NMM), which is based in Bradford, West Yorkshire told Amateur Photographer today: 'We know that our grant-in-aid will be reduced by around 15% in real terms in stages over the next four years, starting in April.
'We have already been working to prepare for a range of scenarios and to seek efficiencies that can serve to minimise the impact of the cuts. The museum's London presence in not under threat.
'Over the next few weeks we will confirm our plans for accommodating this reduction.'
See the full report here: http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Flagship_photography_museum_faces_15_cuts_news_303151.html
The Photographers’ Gallery is the largest public gallery dedicated to photography. This is a very exciting time for the Gallery. Construction work has recently begun on a major redevelopment project to expand and transform the Gallery’s premises on Ramillies Street, just off Oxford Street. Scheduled to reopen late 2011 it will include three galleries, an education floor, enhanced retail spaces, a ground floor café and full disabled access.
The Development Officer (Admin) will be primarily responsible for administration of the Development Department, including administration of the Patrons’ and Associate Members’ schemes; recording and processing donations, managing the department’s budget, and providing support to the Head of Development and Head of Business Development. This is a period of growth for The Photographers’ Gallery and we seek an enthusiastic individual who will use their initiative to grow in the role and take on more responsibility as needed.
Details of the application process can be found here: http://photonet.new.mindunit.co.uk/index.php?pid=243
The app allows iPhone users to freeze-frame the movingworld around them just as Muybridge did with subjects ranging from running horses to leapfrogging boys. In homage to the analogue Victorian beauty of the originals, users can Muybridge-ize their frames with grids and sepia tones, transforming their moving images into striking vintage-style pictures.
So, if you are inspired to take pictures similar to the iconic works of this early photographer, the app is available to download for free for the duration of the exhibition. 21st century works can be seen here.
Wondered what the great man would have thought of all this?
Well,the honour bestows on a Newcastle industrialist by the name of Hugh Lee Pattinson in April 1840. At
Apparently, in the 1920's his descendants gave the Daguerreotypes to the University of Newcastle, where Pattinson was from. The University library kept them on a shelf in Special Collections but sometime after that, for whatever reason, they were thought to have been lost or destroyed. However in 1997 while looking through some store rooms in the library, the University came across an old dust covered carton marked “Daguerrotypes”, which lo and behold, contained the lost images!
The Niagara Parks Commission has reproduced and enlarged one of the170 year old pictures which it plans to prominently display near the entrance to the Maid Of The Mist boat tour as part of the Commission's 125th Anniversary celebration. It plans to display the rest of Pattinson's images on its web site. You can watch a video report here.
Photo: 1840 Daguerreotype of Niagara Falls (Robinson Library Special Collections, Newcastle University)
The term from the French author Henri Murger's 1851 novel, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, became
The span of the work covered here extends from the earliest daguerreotypes to the striking portraits by Nadar and the opulent artists’ banquets of the 1920s. For example, Louis Alphonse de Brébisson staged around 1842 a group of friends painting and playing instruments as the quintessence of a romantic artists’ association in Bohemia. Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar, was not only a leading member of the Parisian Bohemians, he also created legendary portraits of his friends and contemporaries.
Details of the exhibition can be found here.
It features images of the royal family, ceremonies, temples, palaces, fashion, transportation, Chao Praya river, scenes of daily life and the ethnic diversity found in the Kingdom at that time. Many of these photographs have never been displayed in public before, and are estimated to have been compiled around the time of Crown Prince Maha Vajirunhis, who was approaching his teens before his death in 1895.
The book entitled "Siam Days of Glory: 19th Century Photographs of Thailand" by Athada Khoman is available, priced 2,310 baht, at Kinokuniya, Asia Books, Naiin and B2S. Or you can try the Amazon link on the right.
Further information can be found here on the exhibition, launch and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Entitled "London Street Photography", it showcases how street photography has changed over the years from 1860-2010. The collection offers a fascinating visual record of this great city - a true snapshot through time.
Drawing from about 200 photographs from the Collection, it includes works by notable photographers such as John Thomson, Henry Grant and Roger Mayne. All the photographs in the exhibition contain an element of chance - a defining characteristic of street photography. This is the first time street photography is explored exclusively in relation to London.
Photo: Copyright Wolfgang Suschitzky/Museum of London.
One of them is the UK History Photo Finder which allows one to search and view digitised historical photographs of the UK and Ireland. They have started with the Dixon-Scott collection which holds more than 14,000 photographs taken in the 1920s-1940s. You can search by location and view images for free.
GIve it a try!
Considered by many photo historians to be one of photography’s early masters, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) is one of the best-known photographers of the Victorian era. The majority of the 70 photographs in the Mia album are by her, which contains mages of family, friends, neighbours and portraits of luminaries like her Isle of Wight neighbor Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt.
However, the album also includes a number of photographs attributed to others, most significantly among them pioneering photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–1875) of a startlingly fresh image of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his family from 1862. It was included in the section of the Mia album which Cameron devoted to other photographers and peers she admired.
In Rejlander’s family portrait, Tennyson the patriarch is the star, the center of his adoring family, who
hold onto him as he moves with confidence through a park-like setting, rendered romantic and evocative because of its soft focus. The quality of light framing the figures and dancing off the greenery feels like a blessing or validation of this most esteemed of Victorian poets. Rejlander is a significant figure in the history of photography. Like Julia Margaret Cameron, Rejlander worked to establish photography as an art form in its own right and experimented with both the technical aspects of the medium and subject matter. The Mia album contains a number of examples of his work and even prints likely made in collaboration with Cameron.
Photos: "The Kiss of Peace," was made in 1869 by Cameron. At left is Mary Hillier, one of the photographer's servants, and Elizabeth Koewen, a local woman from the town of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. The scene was inspired by the Biblical story of the Visitation.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Swedish, 1813–1875), Lionel, Emily, Alfred and Hallam Tennyson, circa 1862. Albumen print from wet plate collodion negative, 6 3/8 x 5 ½ inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, courtesy art2art Circulating Exhibitions.
Call for Papers: The Versatile Image 24-26 June 2011, University of Sunderland. The 21st century digital universe is undoubtedly a “hypervisual” environment with photographic images dominating every aspect of our life. The “digital revolution”, as professed with awe and skepticism some twenty years ago, has come to stay, and, together with the developments in mobile-phone technology and the overwhelming possibilities of Web 2.0, has ushered in a rapid transformation of photographic practice across the board.
Far from being “over”, as was the central hypothesis in a recent conference about the current state of the art, photography, a slippery medium by definition, has expanded, transgressing anew set boundaries between media and disciplines, practices and functions. In this “expanded” (and still expanding) field, what has been most appositely called “Photography 2.0” has revolutionized image making. Being more ubiquitous and accessible, some say even “democratic”, than ever, the new photographic technology, paired with micro-publishing platforms and social networking media, has introduced a whole different culture of producing and consuming photographs. It is the diverse manifestations of this new and significantly larger in scale second phase of photography’s so-called “democratization” that this conference endeavours to examine.
Cutting across disciplinary borders, we welcome papers from researchers, visual artists and curators working in the areas of art history, visual culture studies, museology, media studies, visual anthropology and sociology that may reflect upon the following questions:
Are these developments purely a case of technological expediency?
What are the ontological, conceptual or other commonalities and/or differences with photography as we knew it?
What novel currency does the photographic vernacular acquire against the new contexts of viewing and (re)distribution that social networking media and photo-sharing platforms offer? Where is the line between the private and the public drawn and what is the social currency of such private imagery?
What is the new urgency that the eye-witness record taken by “citizen journalists” has acquired in reporting news events among peers and targeting a wider public?
How are issues of objectivity, subjectivity, authenticity and originality relating to the document being challenged anew?
How can this predominantly non-art imagery be appropriated in material and conceptual terms in contemporary art practices?
Can these amateur practices be conventionalized and/or institutionalized in the mass media and the art scene?
All papers will be considered for publication.
Please send abstracts of ca. 250 words for twenty-minute papers to alexandra.moschovi@sunderland.ac.uk with the indication ‘The Versatile Image’ by 30 November 2010. For further information you may visit the conference website at http://www.photography-at-sunderland.co.uk /.
A British Life in a Mountain Kingdom: Early Photographs of Sikkim and Bhutan is the first exhibition of photographs by John Claude White (1853-1918), presented in original prints and large-scale reproductions from two important albums on view. White, a British government officer and civil engineer, spent much of his career stationed in places that one hundred years ago were, and to an extent still remain, shrouded in a certain veil of mystery: India, Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet and Bhutan.
White travelled extensively in the region on surveying expeditions and where he indulged his passion for photography, in so doing leaving behind one of the richest and most detailed accounts of the scenery and culture of the Himalayas. He published his memoir Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-one Years on the North-East Frontier in London in 1909.
For those who cannot quite make it to NYC for the exhibition, there is a book covering his life and works by Kurt Meyer and Pamela Deuel entitled "In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet - Bhutan - Nepal - Sikkim A Photographic Record by John Claude White 1883-1908". (Click on the Amazon link on the right for more information.)
Details of the exhibition can be found here.
The first is entitled "Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road". Establishing premier photographic studios in Yokohama, Japan, and Mandalay, Burma, Beato produced topographical and architectural views, portraits and studies of local life intended for Western audiences. The Museum's 2007 acquisition of more than 800 Beato photographs is the impetus and foundation for this exhibition—the first devoted to his oeuvre—represented through a selection of about 130 works.
The second exhibit includes images ranging from an 1859 portrait of a Chinese family made near Shanghai to glass slides of revolutionary soldiers created in 1911 in Shanxi province. Entitled "Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China", the collection features works by largely unknown Chinese photographers, hand-painted photographs, expansive panoramas, and rare gouache and oil paintings made for export.
Further details including exhibition dates etc will be posted in this BPH blog as soon as they are available. So do keep checking!
In 1861, John Pelham withdrew from West Point just weeks short of graduation to offer his services to the Confederacy. He was assigned as a lieutenant of artillery in Joseph E. Johnston’s army. This circa 1858 image by Mathew Brady was produced in Brady’s New York studio when Pelham was on leave from West Point. Brady is one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his documentation of the American Civil War and also credited with being the father of photojournalism.
Our very own 19th century Scottish photographer, Andrew Gardner, oversaw Brady's Washington DC studio until 1862 before he decided to go on his own.
Brian May & Elena Vidal are just two of a range of artists who have been delighted to create works especially to fit within the limited confines of the gallery. The gallery’s many exhibitions cover a variety of themes, ranging from children’s art, to interior
studies of writer’s rooms, winter landscapes by textile artists, poetry by Word Birds, and magical images of moths from Ottawa. Currently on show are a series of photographs taken of village crafts in Vietnam by local photographer Tessa Bunney, who joins Eamonn McCabe, and Jim des Rivieres to give the programme a truly international flavour.
The Gallery on the Green is especially delighted to host “A Village Lost and Found” as their
first 3D exhibition. It is an exhibition that will allow visitors to travel back in time to the 1850s through the optical magic of the specially-designed stereoscopic viewer that will be the main feature of the display.
Photo historian & author, David Mattison, from the B.C. Archives has identified 15 early British photographers who spent enough time in British Columbia to make important contributions to their historic record. This include Edward Dossetter who once worked as a photographer at the South Kensington Museum, where royal engineers who came to B.C. as part of the 1858 North American Boundary Commission were also trained in photography. His glass negatives ended up at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Other Victorian photographers covered include Charles Macmunn and Richard Maynard who both photographed the Canadian Pacific Railway contruction in early 1880s; George Robinson Fardon, one of the first commercial photographers; Frederick Dally, one of the finest 19th century photographers in B.C., and Francis George Claudet.
In total, Mattison will show around 40 photographs of early B.C. taken by the 15 British photographers, including some of the first photographs taken in Victoria. Since his retirement, Mattison manages www.MemoryBC.ca, a database of archival materials from repositories throughout B.C. He also writes for Searcher, a magazine for database professionals.
Details of the talk is here, but as you would probably appreciate, is held in B.C. (!), but hopefully it will provide you with links for further research into this area.
