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These three artefacts, made on pewter plates, are among the finest examples of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's works and are part of the Royal Photographic Society collection. It will enable participants a rare chance toclosely examine the surfaces and reverse of these unique photographic treasures. The plates, and their conserved frames, will be on display
throughout the conference in the Kraszna-Krausz Print Viewing Room, in the NMeM Research Centre.
Speaking to the BBC, Museum curator Philippa Wright said: "That they will all be on publicdisplay out of their frames for perhaps the last time is very special indeed."
The good news is that if you can't make it to the Conference, the plates can still be viewed by appointment at the museum until the end of October 2010.
Photos: Le Cardinal d'Amboise; Christ Carrying His Cross (Niépce heliographs)
Running until November 28th 2010, this stunning exhibition offers examples of how photographers between 1840 and 1870 began to explore the possibilities of the art form as a way of remembering moments. The technology being used at the time made recording the "changing aspects of nature" quite difficult, according to the venue, but photographers such as Roger Fenton and George Barnard found they could capture images of important landscapes.
Salted paper print from a wet collodion glass negative
H. 28,4 ; W. 35,7 cm; Paris, Musée d'Orsay
© RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
The National Media Museum appears on a leaked list of public bodies under review for closure by the government. Incorrectly named as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television the museum is directly funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport as part of the National Museum of Science and Industry. Other bodies which are under review include the National Archives and eighteen other museums and galleries in the UK. The British Library is to be retained.
The report is published here and the full leaked list published by the Daily Telegraph is here.
In 1890, he undertook a long trip which brought him to a WorldExhibition in Tashkent, the theme of this exhibition - From Turkey to Turkistan, 1890. Paul Nadar's "photo reportage" is one of the first in the history of photography.
He leftParis for Istanbul on a train and crossed the Black Sea. Having reached Batumi, he crosses the Caucasus through Tbilisi and Baku and arrives in Turkistan - present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He travels the region in two months and takes around 1,200 photos of crowds of people in the bazaars and markets of Asia, the great sandy spaces of deserts, mosques, mausoleums and all the majestic vestiges of the exotic Eastern influences.
Details of this exhibition can be found here, but must warn you that it is held all the way in Uzbekistan!
Oxfam said that this amount of money could buy safe water for 15,500 people or 560 goats to help families in developing countries. The lot description can be found here.
Photo: By French-born photographer Esteban Gonnet.
The evolution of photography from the 1840s to the present day can betraced through portraits of Swedish royalty. When calling cards became popular in the mid-19th century, Karl XV was not slow to allow images of himself to be distributed for propaganda purposes. The featured artists from that era include Mathias Hansen and Bertha Valerius, who were practising at the time when portrait photography was becoming established as an art form and means of expression. Since photography was an international medium whose practitioners moved freely across borders, works by the Parisian photographers Mayer & Pierson and by Ludwig Angerer’s studio in Vienna appear alongside those of Hansen, a Norwegian.
The emphasis of the exhibition is on photography. The National PortraitCollection includes photographs of Bernadottes from the mid-19th century onward. These not only show what members of the Swedish royal family looked like; they also show how the art of portrait photography has evolved over the past 150 years.
Further details of the exhibition can be found here.
Photo: Lennart Nilsson (b. 1922), Gustav V, King of Sweden, 1950. © Lennart Nilsson.
The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger (OMLJ) was a British trade monthly that appeared from 1889 to 1903 and had a remit covering the magic lantern and illumination through to photography and the world of early cinema. The OMLJ featured news and opinions from each of the worlds and through its correspondence and advertising pages provides a unique insight into each of these areas at an important point in their history.
The publication only survives in a few national libraries and this limited edition DVD offers a rare opportunity for collectors, researchers, educational institutions and libraries to acquire a digitised run which is searchable electronically. The OMLJ covers a key period in the history of photography and the cinema. It appeared when the hand camera was rapidly being taken up by amateur photographers and at a point shortly before the motion picture camera was introduced. By the time of the OMLJ's demise in 1903 photography was widely practiced by amateurs and snapshooters and the cinema had evolved from its origins into a form of mass entertainment. The OMLJ through its editorial pages and advertisements charts these changes in detail.
This DVD provides a high-quality facsimile of all 5000 pages together with a searching tool supported by additional information around the personalities, companies and products that made up the industry at the time and which appears in the OMLJ pages.
The DVD From Magic Lantern to Movies (ISBN 978-0-9523011-1-0) is published on 15 October by PhotoResearch and costs £60 including UK and international airmail postage. It is designed to run on both Windows-based PCs and Apple Macs with Adobe Acrobat.
For more information and an order form click here.
From now until the 27th September at the Bristol Central Library, there is an exhibition of 19th
century photographic prints of Bristol and the surrounding area, some of which are on loan from the Bristol Records Office and City Archive. The prints were produced using some of the very techniques and processes now being taught on workshops at the St. Paul’s Learning and Family Centre Darkrooms.
A recent grant of £14,525 from the Heritage Lottery Fund helped to revive and preserve some Photographic processes, dating back to the very origins of photography. The award to St Paul’s Learning and Family Centre Darkrooms in Bristol was to enable teachers, tutors and arts facilitators to learn the processes first created by Sir William Henry Fox-Talbot and Sir John Herschel, the Astronomer Royal, in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition, Justin Quinnell, the world-renowned practitioner of pinhole photography, presented workshops in the making and use of pinhole cameras. With this grant St Paul’s Darkrooms, the biggest and most extensively equipped public-access darkrooms in the South West, presented a series of workshops in albumen, gum-bichromate, cyanotype and salt-printing.
Alongside these photographs will be examples of work produced by attendees of these Heritage Lottery funded workshops.
Further details can be found in the BPH Events section.
On time and in budget, it is expected to reopen in November 2011 with a newgallery that will house 50% more exhibition space. It hopes to boost visitor numbers by 50% to 300,000 a year or more.
The opening shows will include Romantic Camera, a survey of Scotland through the lens, from pioneering images by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson to giant Scottish landscapes commissioned by German photographer Michael Reisch. Three photography exhibitions a year will draw on the national collection of 40,000 photographs.
Photo: National Galleries of Scotland director general John Leighton and gallery director James Holloway.
Copyright: Jane Barlow, Scotsman.
Entitled 'Cheltenham - Past and Present', it includes about 90 photographs from this period, with about 60 of them never seen before. The author, David Hanks, completed the book earlier this year for the History Press's national series, Britain in Old Photographs. The 61 year-old author who is also a member of the Cheltenham Local History Society said "The first portrait studio in the world was based in New York, and by August 1841 there was one here in Cheltenham."
One of the rarest photos is of the Old or Royal Well in 1849/1850. Which is believed to be the only photograph depicting this historic site.
The book is available for purchase by clicking and searching on the Amazon link on the right.
Muybridge Revolutions (18 Sept- 12 Feb 2011) opens almost exactly a century after the first ever Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at Kingston Museum. Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and other partners, this exhibition focuses on Muybridge’s unique projection device, the Zoöpraxiscope, and its relation to the history of the moving and projected image. It is privileged to be able to draw on Kingston Museums’ world class collection of Muybridge material bequeathed by the artist himself, which includes 68 of the 71 known Zoöpraxiscope discs worldwide - a stunning collection never before exhibited as the focus of a major exhibition and rarely seen by the public.
Contemporary Commissions at the Stanley Picker Gallery celebrates Muybridge’s lifetime's achievements through the eyes of two contemporary artists who have been given privileged access to rare material held at the Kingston Museum archives.
Please go to www.muybridgeinkingston.com for full details and lecture programme
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, has selected artist Michal Heiman to receive the first Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. Created in partnership with the Israel Museum, the new biannual prize aims to catalyze and support international research projects exploring theoretical and practical issues in photography. Ms. Heiman was selected from a pool of thirty-five finalist candidates from nine countries by a jury of leaders in the field—including Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Marta Gili, Director of the Jeu de Paume, Paris. Ms. Heiman will receive $40,000 to support her newly conceived project investigating the contribution of art to psychoanalysis, and vice versa.
Michal Heiman (b. 1954) is one of the most prolific artists in Israel today, presenting exhibitions of photography, painting, installation, and video, drawing on her extensive research in the fields of psychology and philosophy. The Shpilman Prize will support new research exploring the interaction between art and psychoanalysis, concentrating on the role of photography and visual imagery as frequently used diagnostic tools. Ms. Heiman will follow steps of the creators of visual psychological tests and investigate aspects of photography—among them portraiture, stereoscope, and World War I documentary imagery—that influenced and were influenced by such tests and consequently her own work too. Ms. Heiman plans to build two test boxes, ‘The Unthinkable I’ – For the People of the 21st Century and ‘The Unthinkable II’ – The Archive of Simultaneous Movement, to be presented and “performed” in an exhibition that will conclude the project. The Israel Museum will also produce a publication documenting this work.
“Ms. Heiman’s project is at once innovative and cross disciplinary. It is grounded in photography, but also touches upon psychology, sociology, and perception, with a solid theoretical basis and background,”
said Nissan N. Perez, Horace and Grace Goldsmith Senior Curator of the Israel Museum’s Noel and Harriette Levine Department of Photography. “We are proud to recognize Ms. Heiman with this first Shpilman Prize, particularly because of the groundbreaking nature of her project.”
Shpilman Prize submissions were reviewed by a pre-selection committee from the srael Museum to ensure that applications complied with the prize regulations and to assess the validity of the projects proposed. Seventeen applications were brought to the consideration of a jury of international experts in the field of photography, including, in addition to Mr. Perez:
- Dr. Shlomo Lee Abrahmov (Yakum, Israel) – Artist, Researcher, and Lecturer, Holon Institute of Technology andShenkar College of Engineering and Design, representing the Shpilman family;
- Mr. Peter Galassi (New York) – Chief Curator of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art; New York;
- Ms. Marta Gili (Paris) – Director, Jeu de Paume;
- Prof. Hanan Laskin (Tel Aviv) – Founder, Photography Department, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and academic advisor to art schools and other cultural institutions in Israel.
Heiman’s interdisciplinary practice includes installation, painting, photography, and video. Her work is often based on extensive research in the fields of psychology and philosophy and centers on the themes of psychoanalysis, clinical research, the history of art, politics, and the gender debate. Among her major works are the series Photo Rape (2003) and I was There (2005), as well as the video series Daughtertype (2006-2008) and Attacks on Linking (2003-2006). In 1997, Ms. Heiman represented Israel at Documenta X in Germany, where she first operated Michal Heiman Test (MHT) No. 1, arranged along the lines of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)—a personality test used by psychologists in which viewers react to images presented in a box. Ms. Heiman continued her testing series with Michal Heiman Test (MHT) No. 2 – My Mother-in-Law – Test for Women, presented in France, Israel, and Japan. She is also recognized for her lectures on the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) and on the French artists Claude Cahun, Christian Boltanski, and Sophie Calle.
Michal Heiman was nominated for the Shpilman Prize by Professor Hannah Naveh, Dean of The Faculty of Arts, Tel Aviv University.
Recognizing photography as a leading contemporary cultural medium, the Shpilman Prize was initiated by the Shpilman family and the Shpilman Art and Culture Foundation together with the Israel Museum with the joint objectives of stimulating, encouraging, and cultivating international research projects in photography and of broadening the range of photographic investigations which integrate theoretical issues with practical ones. The $40,000 prize is awarded by an international jury once every two years, resulting in a publication by the Israel Museum, and if suitable, an exhibition. Nominations for the 2012 prize will be accepted beginning October 1, 2011.
Prospective candidates include artists and scholars in photography with a proven record of past achievement who intend to undertake a research project of consequence in the field of photography. Candidates for the prize must be nominated by experienced professionals in art and/or photography affiliated with non-commercial artistic, cultural, or academic institutions. The projects submitted are reviewed and judged by an independent jury of internationally recognized experts. Prize regulations are available online at www.imj.org.il/shpilmanprize.
The Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography is supported by an endowment gift of $1 million from the Shpilman Art and Culture Foundation, with the goal of expanding the core activities of the Museum’s Noel and Harriette Levine Department of Photography. Mr. Shalom Shpilman, a philanthropist and businessman based in Tel Aviv, with a long-standing interest in the promotion of photographic scholarship and discovery has also recently founded the Shpilman Institute for Photography (SIP), dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of photographic knowledge.
Award winning, visionary and truly unique, the National Media Museum embraces photography, film, television, radio and the web. Part of the NMSI family of museums, we aim to engage, inspire and educate through comprehensive collections, innovative education programmes and a powerful yet sensitive approach to contemporary issues.
Audience Researcher – Internet Gallery Project
Bradford
£17,500 - £18,500
It’s vital to the continued success of the organisation that our exhibitions, websites, programmes and products are appealing to as wide an audience as possible; and that our continued development is always done in an audience centred and customer focused way. This is why this role is vital, ensuring that through thorough research techniques, audience feedback and comprehensive reporting, we understand the direction we need to go, what we do right and possibly wrong. Reporting to the Senior Audience Researcher based at the Science Museum, we need a team player with proven research skills in data collection, analysis, interpretation, report creation and presentation. An appreciation of new media would be an advantage as would experience gained within an audience-focused and/or learning environment. The pace is fast. You need to be able to work independently, display excellent communication skills and have a passion for your subject. Overall, this is an exciting role for a talented research professional who wants to make a deep and lasting contribution to a very popular national ‘iconic’ visitor experience.
Required Skills: |
For a full job description please email recruitment@nationalmediamuseum.org.uk |
Application Instructions: |
Interested? Please send your CV and covering letter to recruitment@nationalmediamuseum.org.uk clearly stating which role you wish to apply for. Closing date 22nd September at noon We welcome applications from all sections of the community in which we work. We particularly welcome applications from disabled people and we guarantee interviews to suitably qualified disabled applicants. |
The Yorkshire Post reports that there is increasing speculation that the the National Media Museum may have to start charging admission. It reports that: The organisation which runs York's National Railway Museum and Bradford's National Media Museum is also "planning for a range of scenarios" and has refused to rule out changes to opening times as it waits to find out how badly the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) budget is cut in the Comprehensive Spending Review.
Institutions categorised as national museums – which includes the National Coal Mining Museum, National Railway Museum, National Media Museum and the Royal Armouries in Yorkshire – offer free admission, and Ministers have been keen to insist that will continue.
They receive grants directly from Government but DCMS officials have written to them enquiring about the possible impact of funding cuts of 25 to 30 per cent.
The department itself is threatened with cuts of up to 40 per cent.
Read the full story here.