Blogs

The Rob Dickins Collection includes 3,500 photographs of over 1000 artists and leading personalities of the nineteenth century, together with 1,000 artist letters. After purchasing an archive collected over many years by Jeremy Maas, the London art dealer, one of the Watts Gallery’s trustees, Rob Dickins CBE added his own collection and generously donated it to the Watts Gallery in 2007. The Rob Dickins collection includes images of royalty and politicians, such as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, influential thinkers, writers and musicians including Ruskin, Darwin and Dickens, artist celebrities, including G. F. Watts and his circle. Also included are the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes including Holman Hunt, Rosetti, Burne- Jones and their muses.

The extent and value of this rich archive has yet to be fully researched and its importance is still in the process of being discovered. Treasures such as Holman Hunt’s family album can be found as well as “The Red Album”, made up of letters, photographs and biographies of artists.

This remarkable collection further develops the Watts Gallery’s centre for exploring Victorian art, social history and craft. A talk has been scheduled for next month focussing on how fame has been historically portrayed in painting and photography. Details can be found here.

I regret to inform you that my friend and member of this website José Luís Madeira died on April, 10th. He developed an important work in Portuguese photographic history, at several levels, and left unfinished books and exhibition projects, in particular those concerning Lisbon and Portuguese India photographic history. His death was a severe blow to the knowledge of these subjects in Portugal. I here pay my tribute to the friend and to his work.

As reported here (http://tinyurl.com/d3e4mbn) a benefit auction is being held to raise funds for the National Media Museum's Media Space. Just released are details and the first artist's concept drawing of the space located within the Science Museum, London.

In Spring 2013 the Science Museum and the National Media Museum will together open MEDIA SPACE: a bold and exciting new space in London that will present, celebrate and debate the past, present and future of media in its myriad forms.

Consisting of a breathtaking gallery surrounded by cultural spaces for display and participation, MEDIA SPACE will be a unique environment where artists and practitioners, independent thinkers, pioneers, innovators and agenda-setters will mix across the arts, sciences and creative industries.

MEDIA SPACE will be a showcase for the unrivalled National Media Collections in photography, as well as cinematography and broadcast technology, and an arena where audiences will experimentally and critically engage with how new technologies have impacted on today’s creative industries.

A new space for adult audiences at the Science Museum, MEDIA SPACE will contain:

■ A striking 640 m2 gallery space for major photography and media art exhibitions, both drawn from our own collections and international touring shows

■ A versatile studio space that will play host to screenings, conferences, live events and installations

■ A stylish contemporary destination café/bar MEDIA SPACE will:

...add to the current critical mass around photography in the capital, complementing the work of our peer institutions Tate, the V&A and The Photographers’ Gallery.

...make a profound contribution to the cultural landscape of London and the UK through its ambitious programme, creative partnerships and innovative online presence.

...increase access to the world-class National Media Collection, housed at the National Media Museum in Yorkshire.

...position the Science Museum at the forefront of creating and engaging with innovative ideas around science and new technologies in publishing, digital, broadcast, film, and lens-based media and photography.

MEDIA SPACE has already received generous support from Virgin Media, the Dana and Albert R Broccoli Foundation and a number of other donors.

BPH has just heard that Professor John Hannavy has been awarded a Harry Ransom Fellowship to undertake research studying the Thomas Keith and White photographs in the Gernsheim Collection. As part of his work Hannavy will try and determine which of the images in the Collection attributed to Keith are actually by Dr Thomas Keith.

Separately, news comes that Sara Stevenson, formerly of the Scottish National Photography Collection at the Scottish NPG and now in the Special Collections Department at the University of Glasgow, has been awarded a Getty Fellowship to spend time at the collection in Santa Monica to undertake research work. 

Google celebrates Eadweard Muybridge's 182nd birthday with an animated Google doodle which also links through to further information on this photographer:

See: www.google.co.uk and http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/09/google-doodle-eadweard-muybridge?newsfeed=true

Sixty years of Irish history including 2.6 million negatives and key events in Ireland such as the arrival of the Beatles, Princess Grace, Muhammad Ali and John F Kennedy has been preserved by a Dublin photo agency.

Lensmen Press and Public Relations Photographic Agency was set up in Dublin in 1952 by Andy Farren and Padraig MacBrien.  In 1995, Susan Kennedy took over the business and the archive.

The sixty years of Irish history captured there includes  many fascinating images of key events: The Beatles, Princess Grace, Muhammad Ali and John F. Kennedy all visited, many Presidents were inaugurated and many Football and Hurling finals were won and lost. 

The full news report can be found here, and the archive website here.

Early Photography of Japan is a virtual collection of more than 40 souvenir photograph albums and illustrated publications with over 2,000 images from Widener Library, the Fine Arts Library, and Harvard-Yenching Library. These images primarily document the early history of commercial photography in Japan and are representative of what is often called Japanese tourist photography or Yokohama shashin. They reflect the Western image of traditional Japanese culture before the dramatic transformation brought about by modernization during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Selected mostly from the E. G. Stillman Japanese Collection, Early Photography of Japan features many hand-colored albumen prints and collotypes by pioneering and influential photographers such as Felice Beato, Baron Raimund von Stillfried, Tamamura Kozaburo, Kusakabe Kimbei, and Ogawa Kazumasa. It also includes amateur black-and-white snapshots, probably taken by E. G. Stillman during a trip to Japan in 1905; hand-colored lantern slides produced in the late Meiji era by T. Enami and Takagi Teijiro, from the Etz-Trudell Collection of Hand-Colored Lantern Slides; and the 10-volume Imperial edition of Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, edited by Captain Francis Brinkley and published by J. B. Millet Company of Boston between 1897 and 1898.

A collaboration between the Harvard College Library’s Collections Digitization Program and the Weissman Preservation Center, Early Photography of Japanwas developed and produced to support and stimulate scholarly research and educational interest in the early history of photography in Japan. It represents a model system for enhancing access and preservation of historical photograph collections that integrates conservation, cataloging, and digital imaging.

The site was created by Robert Burton, Cataloger for Photographs, Weissman Preservation Center, with the assistance of Maggie Hale, Librarian for Collections Digitization; Enrique Diaz, Web Designer, and Laura Totten, Web Coordinator, HCL Communications. Digitization was done by Jenne Willis, Imaging Technician, Imaging Services. Funding for the project was provided by the Harvard College Library Collections Digitization Program.

BBC antiques programme Put Your Money where Your Mouth Is discovered a Richard Ellis photograph from c1887 and, for the first time, travelled outside the UK to Malta to reunite the print with the original negative held in the Ellis archive in Valetta, Malta. The Richard Ellis archive contains over 40,000 glass plate negatives each meticulously recorded in the company day books and housed in wooden box cases. 

As Katherine Higgins - who made the discovery and a former Christie's colleague of mine notes:

on the programme you will see the discovery of the Ellis photograph and the astonishing reunification of the image with the original photographic plate from the Richard Ellis archive. What was remarkable was that of all the 40,000 plates that record an astonishing array of photographic subjects from Edward VII (as Prince of Wales with his dogs and an un-named companion to military groups etc) only a few plates have suffered with age. One of those is the glass plate of the photograph I found – so bringing the image back to the archive meant they now have a clear copy of what the plate would have looked like. There’s a moment where I appear astonished as the lovely Ian Ellis, great grandson of Richard asked me to turn around and at that point he shows me the wooden cased camera that was used to take the photograph I have brought to Malta. The programme has never been abroad before and this turned out to be an astonishing adventure in the cause of recognising a great photographer.

The programme airs on BBC2 at 5.15pm on 12 April 2012. There will be more on the BBC website closer to transmission: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01g9hls

Images: Katherine with Ian Ellis – custodian of the Richard Ellis archive and great grandson of the Victorian photographer. Below: Richard’s camera, which he used to take all his portrait photographs

Much has been written between the pages of BPH of the National Media Museum's new Media Space within London's Science Museum.

But brewing in the background in the West Midlands is a building that will transform the skyline of Birmingham. It is the  revamped Library of Birmingham scheduled to reopen its doors to the public on Tuesday 3rd September 2013. It will showcase the institution's archives, rare books and photographs and will include a gallery space and a BFI Mediatheque, providing free access to the National Film Archive. The Library has been designed by Francine Houben. 

Central Library houses the city’s internationally important 6,000 or more archive collections, two million photographic stills, more than 150,000 items of music, and rare books. Over 8,000 of the Library’s rare books were printed before 1700 and include a Shakespeare First Folio, Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’, one of the world’s largest books, and three perfect copies of Cordiale or the Four Last Thinges printed in 1479 by William Caxton.

Today the Library of Birmingham publicly launched Reference Works: a major photography commission in which four leading photographers will make visual responses to the current Central Library building and to the build, transition and relocation to the new Library of Birmingham. You can read the article in their blog here.
.

The technological upheaval in photography has not only called into question the definition of photography, but also fundamentally altered the profession of photographer and the use of the medium. 

The complete digitalization of the medium, its production and distribution of images, has shaken - at least in the perception of the broad public - a fundamental understanding of photography as authentic. It has clearly transformed traditional documentary and photojournalism working methods and forced their “migration” into an artistic context. 

On the other hand, new actors are entering into play; activists and “citizens’ journalists”, who comment on events with their digital photos and videos on their blogs.

The Museum Folkwang and the Wüstenrot Stiftung are together organizing a symposium in order to discuss, for the first time, the future prospects of photography in a transnational perspective. The questions about the future of photography, which will be produced almost exclusively digitally, is therefore also directed at the curators of existing collections which value not only artistically motivated photographs. Which photos from the area of applied photography are left from the digital production process? What does it mean to collect photographic originals – the original file, the total of its publication, a large framed print? Is our cultural infrastructure prepared for this change, or will applied photographic practice – which, looking back to the 20th century, has always inspired artistic production – no longer help to define the collective pictorial memory?

For more information and to register see: http://www.museum-folkwang.de/en/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/der-mensch-und-seine-objekte/symposium.html

Speakers
- Rahaab Allana, Alkazi Collection, New Delhi
- Charlotte Cotton, National Media Museum, Bradford
- Heba Farid, Kairo/Cairo
- Katharina Garbers-von Boehm, CMS Hasche Sigle, Berlin
- Maryam Jafri, New York/Copenhagen
- Aglaia Konrad, Brüssel
- Adrian Sauer, Leipzig
- Clare Strand, London
- Guy Tillim, Johannesburg
- Artur Walther, The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm/New York

Terms
April 27, 2012, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m
April 28, 2012, 10 a.m. – 3.30 p.m. 

Please find detailled information on the programme here.

Admission free. 
Registration required  before April 20th, 2012.
Please contact: photography@museum-folkwang.essen.de. 
The conference languages will be English and German.

Kindly supported by Wüstenrot Stiftung. 

Christie's is offering in an auction of Travel, Science and Natural History on 25 April 2012 a camera obscura 'associated with' Nevil Story-Maskelyne, an early photographer who was close to Henry Fox Talbot and his circle.  The catalogue text reads: 

A CAMERA OBSCURA ASSOCIATED WITH NEVIL STORY-MASKELYNE, 
Jones, mid 19th century 
reflex model, the mahogany body of dovetail construction, with hinged lid, lens in wooden mount and 'push-pull' focusing front section, signed JONES Artist LONDON ; BY HIS MAJESTY'S SPECIAL APPOINTMENT No. 4, Wells Street Oxford Street. 12½in. (32cm.) long 

Provenance:

Nevil Story Maskelyne (1823-1911).

Thence by descent. 

Notes:

Nevil Story-Maskelyne (1823-1911) left law for the Natural Sciences in 1847, and was soon lecturing on mineralogy, a field he would come to lead. His research ran from the petrology of Stonehenge to developing the collection of minerals and meteorites at the British Museum into the 'largest and best arranged series ... in existence' (ODNB online). He and his wife Thereza May Llewelyn were both involved in the pioneering of photography. He was close friends of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) -- whose own camera obscura is held at the Science Museum London. 

There is more on Story-Maskelyne here: Lassam, Robert E, 1980, ‘Nevil Story-Maskelyne, 1823-1911‘, History of Photography, vol.4, no.2, pp.85-93. As Luminous-Lint notes: He was a part of the social circle surrounding Henry Fox Talbot who gave him permission to learn the calotype process and he was taught by Talbot's operator Nicolaas Henneman. 

Click here for more information: http://tinyurl.com/cszlhxq

Recently I watched Silver Footprint a film about legendary black & white printer Robin Bell. The film provides a great opportunity to see this master craftsman demonstrate his skill and vision in the darkroom. Bell has printed for many well-know photographers and so many iconic images have had his expert eye and technical proficiency added to them.

It is available at £19.50 (including postage) bought via the RPS website (https://www.rps.org/store/index.php?view=product&path=41&product_id=138). For those of you who have been in a darkroom or appreciated the additional level of creativity that a skillful printer can bring then this is for you. If you are a lover of lens based media and appreciate fine photography then this is money well spent.