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This major photography exhibition surveys the medium from an international perspective, and includes renowned photographers from across the globe, all working during two of the most memorable decades of the 20th Century. everything was moving: photography from the 60s and 70s tells a history of photography, through the photography of history. It brings together over 350 works, some rarely seen, others recently discovered and many shown in the UK for the first time. everything was moving opens at Barbican Art Gallery on 13 September 2012.

It features key figures of modern photography including Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, David Goldblatt, Graciela Iturbide, Boris Mikhailov and Shomei Tomatsu, as well as important practitioners whose lives were cut tragically short such as Ernest Cole and Raghubir Singh. Each contributor has, in different ways, advanced the aesthetic language of photography, as well as engagng with the world they inhabit in a profound and powerful way.

The exhibition is set in one of the defining periods of the modern age – a time that remains an inescapable reference point even today. The world changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, shaped by the forces of post-colonialism, and Cold War neo-colonialism. This momentous epoch in history coincided with a golden age in photography: the moment when the medium flowered as a modern art form.

Great auteur photographers emerged around the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world. Many, working increasingly independently from the illustrated press, and freed from the restraints of brief and commission, were able to approach the world on their own terms, and to introduce a new level of complexity to photographic imagery. Others, such as Li Zhensheng (China) and Ernest Cole (South Africa), found themselves living in situations of extreme repression, but devised inspiring strategies to create major works of photography in secrecy and at huge personal risk.

Back in the 1960s, many commentators viewed photography as inferior to painting or sculpture, because it simply recorded, mechanically, what could be seen, and was judged to be concerned primarily with reporting the facts (journalism) or campaigning for change (social documentary). Attitudes changed during this period, and the art museum slowly opened its doors to the medium. Less concerned to change the world, or to merely describe it, a new generation of photographers were driven to understand that world, as well as their place within it.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said: 'I am delighted to bring together an amazing group of photographers whose striking and powerful images of the 1960s and 1970s make us look at the world again. everything was moving explores a nspectrum of different photographic approaches, and asks if, in the early 21st century, we are finally prepared to erase the distinction between art photography and documentary photography.'

The exhibition presents a selection of works by the Chinese photographer, Li Zhensheng, some never before revealed in public. An aspiring artist and filmmaker, Li Zhensheng worked throughout the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966 –1976) for the Heilongjiang Daily, the local newspaper of Harbin in the far North East of China, on the border with Russia. He, like everyone else in the country found himself caught up in the mad spiral of indoctrination and violence that was Mao’s ‘revolution’– at times as a participant, at others as a victim. At great personal risk, Li Zhensheng photographed in secret, and then buried those photographs, some 30,000 negatives, under his mud floor. The material only came fully to light in the West at the end of the 20th century. It is the most complete visual record known of this extraordinary period of human history.

In a very different response to totalitarianism, acclaimed conceptual photographer, Boris Mikhailov lived and worked in Kharkhov at the height of Soviet domination of the Ukraine. Mikhailov developed a distinctive artistic approach, with which to evade the censors and to satirize Soviet occupation, as well as the tenets of socialist realism. The exhibition includes the first UK showing of his very first series, Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1968 –1975, a collection of radical, often hilarious montages.

A pioneer of colour, Indian artist Raghubir Singh (1942 –1999) was driven to create a photography that was emphatically modern and Indian. He broke abruptly with the colonial tradition of singlepoint perspective, picturesque, depopulated landscapes – to describe an India which was peopled, frenetic and luminous. His so-called theory of ‘Ganges modernism’ pitted colour and spirituality against the monochromatic angst and alienation of Western figures such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. The work of Singh has never been thoroughly evaluated in the UK, and this selection includes rarely seen images from the extraordinary archives of the early part of his career.

In stark contrast to Singh’s colourful exuberance, an unrelentingly black-and-white aesthetic emerged in Japan, exemplified by the work of Shomei Tomatsu who is widely considered the ‘godfather’ of modern Japanese photography and a major influence on Daido Moriyama. In Tomatsu’s first-ever British museum showing, life in 1960s and 1970s Japan is evoked in metaphoric, angry, uncompromisingly monochrome pictures. Tomatsu rails against continuing American military occupation at Okinawa (the base from which Vietnam was being bombed); the growing impact of American capitalism on Japanese culture; and the devastating psychological legacy of Nagasaki. 

Where most of Africa was – in theory at least – liberated from colonial domination by the early 1960s, in South Africa, a government – inspired by Nazi Germany and ignored by the West – was starting to build its heinous apartheid regime. Across the Atlantic, in another society dominated by white racism and racial segregation, the Southern states of America saw the stirrings of change as the civil rights movement gathered pace. The struggle for civil rights –from Selma to Soweto, the Amazon to Londonderry – was to define the spirit of the times: as did an increasingly angry global opposition to the neo-colonial war that America was waging in Vietnam.

Johannesburg-based David Goldblatt, is, perhaps more than any other photographer since Eugène Atget, linked inextricably with the country of his birth. Over five decades, Goldblatt has created arguably one of the most important bodies of documentary photography in the history of the medium. He has forged a complex, contradictory tableau of South Africa’s fractured society, during and after apartheid. For this exhibition, Goldblatt has personally revisited his major series of the 1960s and 1970s, from On the Mines (with Nadine Gordimer), to Some Afrikaners Photographed, and In Boksburg. The selection includes rarely exhibited works.

Long thought lost for ever, an incredible collection of vintage prints by the black South African Ernest Cole (1940–1990) was recently rediscovered and will be shown for the first time in Britain at Barbican Art Gallery. Cole somehow persuaded the Race Classification Board that he was not ‘black’ but ‘coloured’ (he changed his name from Kole to Cole) and was therefore able to practice as a photographer at a time when many black photographers were persecuted and imprisoned. Cole’s courage and determination were matched by his artistic talent. He escaped South Africa on 9 May 1966, and in exile in New York was to publish House of Bondage, 1967, an indelible record of what it was to be black under apartheid. Cole was never able to return home and he died in poverty, his negatives given away, it is believed, in lieu of an unpaid hotel bill.

South Africa’s extraordinary tradition of realist photography during this period is contrasted with major American contemporaries. Bruce Davidson and William Eggleston are two of the giants of 20th century photography. In many ways, they are diametrically opposed in philosophy and approach, and yet at points in the 1960s they shared subject matter: both were photographing people and places in the contested landscape of the Southern states as the struggle for equality unfolded.

Time of Change, 1961–1965, one of Bruce Davidson’s most powerful series, has never been exhibited in the UK. On May 25, 1961 the 28-year old photographer joined a group of Freedom Riders making a terrifying journey by bus from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. It was the starting point of a four-year project for Davidson, in which he captures the mood and the events of the civil rights struggle, in a series of poignant and empathetic pictures. Where Davidson was interested in the human reality of the south, in contrast, William Eggleston, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, perplexed the critics with his seeming lack of subject matter, lack of composition - and lack of a photographic agenda. Now, he is widely viewed as a brilliant innovator who revolutionized photography with his ‘democratic’, non-hierarchical vision, his ‘shotgun’ aesthetic and his radical use of colour. Eggleston’s classic pictures of the period – affectless, brooding images of the Deep South, saturated in vivid colour, and shot through with a sense of menace, equally conjure the mood of the time.

Also included: major contributions by Hasselblad-award winners Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) and Malick Sidibé (Mali); a little-seen allegorical work by Sigmar Polke (Germany) ; and a selection of Larry Burrows’ (UK) powerful Vietnam portraits.

Picture credit
© Raghubir Singh, Pilgrim and Ambassador Car, Prayag, Uttar Pradesh, 1977 © 2012 Succession Raghubir Singh

Public Information
0845 120 7550, www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery
Barbican Art Gallery, London
Daily 11am–8pm, Wed 11am–6pm, every Thurs LATE until 10pm
Tickets: Standard £10 online/£12 on the door, Concessions £7 online/£8 on the door
Secondary school (groups of ten or more) £6, Under 12s free
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I am writing to you about a book I have just completed after six years of research and writing. It is called the Catchers of the Light and is a History of Astrophotography and tells the story of the 46 men and women who did most to master the art of celestial photography as it was known during its early days; and whose pioneering efforts have made it possible for us to see (and indeed take), the many magnificent pictures of the heavens featured in books, magazines and on the internet.

It is the first fully researched book and the subject, since that of Gérard Henri de Vaucouleurs’s ‘Astronomical photography: from the daguerreotype to the electron camera’, published in 1961. It has been written for the many people who are interested in Photography, History, Astronomy, and interesting true stories.

In its 1556 pages and 1800 photographs/illustrations can be found much new information on all of the pioneers, and in many cases, the chapters represents the very first biographies on the pioneers featured.

These ‘first’ biographies include those on the photographic pioneers Frederick Scott Archer, Richard Leach Maddox and John Adams Whipple; as well as the astronomers themselves: Maurice Loewy & Pierre Henri Puiseux; William Usherwood; Paul Henry & Prosper Henry; William Edward Wilson; Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming; Herman Carl Vogel, Oswald Lohse & Julius Scheiner; Ernest Amedee Barthelemy Mouchez, Alfred Rordame, Eugen Von Gothard, etc.

Each chapter of the book is devoted to a particular Astrophotographer(s), and includes ‘Snippet Panels’ and over References/Notes, which contain background information on subjects and people relating to their life and the sources of information used in telling their story.

The book has been further divided into nine self-contained parts, each devoted to a particular aspect of the history of astrophotography and the pioneers who contributed to it. Each part ends with a ‘Summary’ chapter which brings together the ‘threads’ discussed in the chapters on the individual pioneers.

The parts cover every aspect of the subject from the early origins photography; the first astronomical photographs of the Moon, Sun and Planets; Deep Space Astrophotography of stars, cluster, nebulae and galaxies; Photographic Astronomical Spectroscopy; Photographic Sky Surveys; the development of the Astrograph (Photographic Telescope); and ending with role of the amateur in Astrophotography and the coming of the modern digital age.

A number of Appendices are included which contain more detailed information on topics such as the chemistry of photographic processes, telescope optical systems, and the Charge Coupled Device (CCD).

A timeline summarizing the historical development of Astrophotography is also to be found as an Appendix, as is an ‘A List’ of 109 of the most important astronomical photographs, and a number of simple but useful formulae used in Astrophotography.

A Glossary of Terms used in the book is included in an Appendix. Finally, a ‘Family Pedigree’ for each Astrophotographer is provided for those interested.

The Catchers of the Light is a collection of true tales of adventure, adversity and ultimate triumph.

Although it is about a technically difficult subject, it is not written in the style of a dull and dreary textbook; but presented as a family history that will have an appeal to a wide audience.

The style although scholarly is nevertheless equally suitable for the general laymen who wish to learn about the ‘Catchers of the Light’ the small band of ordinary men and women, who did such extraordinary things; overcoming obstacles as diverse as war, poverty, cholera, death, unfriendly cannibal natives and even exploding donkeys; succeeding against all the odds, to bring you the magnificent astronomical images you will see in its pages.

Yet it is not a work of hearsay and anecdotes, but tells the true stories of their lives, based on information obtained from genealogical research into original records, contemporary accounts of the people who knew them and important documents provided by their living descendants.

Read the story of a real ‘Downton Abbey’ and of William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, who married a rich English heiress for her money, but which eventually became a ‘match made in heaven’. During the Irish Potato famine, he was one of the few landlords who helped relieve the suffering and starvation of his tenants. So much so, that following his death, upwards of 5000 attended his funeral. Yet in all of this he still managed to build a Great Telescope, known as the ‘Leviathan of Parsonstown’, which showed for the very first time what the Universe really looked like;

Or of the Estonian optician, Bernhard Voldemar Schmidt who lost his right hand in a childhood accident when playing with gunpowder, but yet literally single-handedly (and the left one at that!) created a telescope design, which has recently been used aboard the Kepler Space Telescope, to detect two other ‘Earth’ like planets, orbiting a distant star;

Or of William Cranch Bond, who although he could not afford a telescope, climbed to the bottom of a well to accustom his eyes to the dark, and who in later life became the first Director of the famous Harvard College Observatory. And of his son George Phillips Bond, who tried to photograph the ‘Great Comet’ of 1858 and failed, but nevertheless suffered the tragic loss of his wife, baby daughter and father in the space of eleven months - thus adding weight to the ancient superstition that such objects are portents of doom and death;

Or of Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming who began life as a housekeeper to a great Harvard astronomer, but ended it as a great Harvard astronomer herself, and in doing so became the first person to see the iconic ‘Horsehead’ nebula, recently voted the finest and most famous object in the heavens;

Or of William Usherwood, a miniature artist and ‘wedding & baby’ photographer, from the village of Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey, England, who much to the embarrassment of the astronomical community, became the first person to successfully photograph a Comet, beating all the ‘Great’ astronomers of the day with their mighty telescopes, including the ‘Great Harvard Refractor’;

Or the young boy, Edward Emerson Barnard brought up in the cholera riddled slums of Nashville, Tennessee during the American Civil War, who despite having no father, possessing little education and even less hope, grew up to be one of the greatest astronomers of all time, taking a series of magnificent images of our ‘Milky Way’ galaxy;

Or of Albert Taylor, a School Inspector from Birmingham, England, who in 1889 travelled to Angola in West Africa to photograph a Total Eclipse of the Sun. The trip was considered so dangerous, that his expedition had to be accompanied by British Royal Navy Gunboats and an escort of soldiers, due to the presence of unfriendly cannibals;

Or an account, of how a modern digital camera works, by way of a fairy tale, about an Irish Leprechaun called Freckles O’Gold who had his revenge on an eccentric scientist called Seamus Parsons - who had stolen his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! Parsons invented an LCD (Leek Coupled Device) which he made from square Irish buckets, and operated by an army of pixies called pixels. He used it to collect the rain water (sent courtesy of Freckles), which was ruining his prize leeks; and with it he first saw the iconic ‘Horsehead Nebula’ by making a drawing of it based on the amount of water collected in the buckets.

It is now available as a whole or as individual chapters and parts as eBooks.

A 146 page introduction can be read at:

http://budurl.com/q2r4

Extracts can be read on Google Books at:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iZk5OOf7fVYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

It can be bought at:

http://www.catchersofthelight.com/shop/category.aspx/0-history-of-astrophotography/10/

Stefan Hughes

Instant Coffees Photography Screening has published its latest catalogue with the highlights of its seventh season including an essay by Gavin Maitland MA titled: ‘These Museumy Emblems of Others’: Against the Colonial Museum, Toward Commemoration. writing about photography archives as alive museums. Maitland uses a Bristol archive of photographs from a black immigrant community as the basis of his excellent text.

See: http://issuu.com/instant-coffeesphotography-projecti/docs/session7_ic

The sad news is being  reported - and now confirmed by AP wire services - that Martine Franck, second wife of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and a Magnum photographer in her own right died yesterday afternoon. Franck was President of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. There are some biographical details on the Magnum Photos website: http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3R14HF4K

It seems that the camera my grandfather gave to me only a few month ago is about to mean more to me than a camera ever should. It is a second model Leica and it used to belong to my great grandfather, Alexander Wienerberger.  The photographs he took on this camera were not only published but are said to be the only verified images to come out of Ukraine during the man-made famine of 1932-33, named Holodomor and reported as killing up to 10 million people.

Now this is of great interest to me as I am about to go into my final year of my Fine Art Photography Degree.  Normally this is not my area, I lean more towards the experimental and scientific but I cannot let this amazing opportunity pass me by.  This means starting my research from scratch, so I will apologise in advance for my initial naivety on the sensitive yet personal subject I am about to embark on.

Something I already know:

1. There was talk on wiki about the copy right to my great grandfathers images, I believe if the author dies before 1955 then the copyright would no longer exist however in true style my great grandfather died 5th Jan 1955, meaning (I think as the law is so hard to decipher) that the copy right is still in place for all of his work.

2. Alexander spent some years as a political prisoner of war and in total spent 19 years in Ukraine, the reason he was not killed was due to his knowledge of explosives but to what extent he helped is unknown at the moment.

3. He published Hart auf Hart in Germany 1939 and had work published in other books around the same period (all work in German unless translated and released later)

This is interesting due to his connection to Germany at this time.

What next?

I am in the process of receiving some of his unpublished work that will need translating from German.  I am in the process of planning a trip to Austria (where he was born and his images are archived in the main library) Germany (where his books and images are archived in the main library.  I will look at getting the camera serviced at by the main Leica office but I imagine this is just a dream that could never happen) and Ukraine (to use his camera once again to document the change over the past 79 years.) This will not be done till the end of the year and has many financial hurdles to overcome.

The final aim is to publish a piece of work that not only highlights Holodomor but expresses who my great grandfather was and how important he was in proving Holodomor actually happened.

If you are interested in the field of Japanese photographs as a collector, researcher, dealer, curator or auction house then this book is, quite simply, indispensable. The author has written on and researched the subject for many years and has brought together in one volume the results of exciting new research and also data which has been gathered from long-forgotten and largely inaccessible nineteenth-century sources. Souvenir photographs of Japan, mostly hand-coloured, are extremely collectible today. However, it is usually very difficult to identify the photographer or studio from where they originated. Provided here is a list of more than 4000 such photographs which greatly assists the identification process. Finally, a unique index of over 350 photographers and publishers of Japan-related stereoviews is also included.

£10.99
Available on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
Category: Asia
Published: 02 March 2012
Publisher: Quaritch
Print Length: 309 Pages
Language: English

Requirements:This book requires iBooks 1.3.1 or later and iOS 4.3.3 or later. Books can only be viewed using iBooks on an iPad, iPhone (3G or later) or iPod touch (2nd generation or later).

See: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/old-japanese-photographs-collectors/id507516507?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

We are all participants in an increasingly visual culture, yet we rarely give thought to the ways that photographs shape our experience and understanding of the world and historical past. This book looks at a range of New Zealand photographs up to 1918 and analyses them as photo-objects, considering how they were made, who made them, what they show and how our understanding of them can vary or change over time.

This emphasis on the materiality of the photograph is a new direction in scholarship on colonial photographs. The writers include photographers, museum curators, academics and other researchers. Their essays are not intended as definitive readings but rather offer a variety of ways in which to read the images they have chosen. In the course of the book, they explore a host of issues related to the development of photography in New Zealand. World War I is the end point, as it coincided with profound cultural shifts with the expansion of the mass illustrated press and the rise of consumer photography, as well as a change in New Zealand's place in the world.

Contributors: Wayne Barrar, Roger Blackley, Gary Blackman, Chris Brickell, Barbara Brookes, Sandy Callister, Simon Dench, Jocelyne Dudding, Keith Giles, Jill Haley, Ken Hall, Ruth Harvey, Kerry Hines, Antje Lübcke, Brian Moloughney, Max Quanchi, Rebecca Rice, Cathy Tuato'o Ross, Simon Ryan, Angela Wanhalla, Christine Whybrew and Erika Wolf.

During the month of February 2013 a Heritage Trail for the public around four major archives in Glasgow and the River-side Museum has been organised by participating partners in the Blueprint project. These visits will complement three coordinated exhibitions at Glasgow’s Trongate 103 visual art centre which focus on historical and contemporary practice in ‘alternative’ photographic technologies as well as lens based imagery in printmaking.

With the co-operation of Glasgow University Library Archives, the Glasgow City Archives and Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, the Heritage Trail will be referenced by a number of blueprints featuring engineering, botanical and architectural subjects, specially made for display at Trongate 103 by the project’s originators, Roger Farnham and Harry Magee.

At this stage the planned list of exhibits drawn from the above archives will include blueprints of the Class 15F locomotive at the Riverside Museum, the Queen Mary (pictured), the Russian Pavilion at the 1901 Glasgow Interna-tional Exhibition and reproduction cyanotypes of some of Anna Atkins’ images from her volume on British Algae, fa-mously recognised as the first ‘photographic’ book. Visitors on the Heritage Trail to the archives will have the opportunity to see the originals and other selected items, while Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department will be offering their visitors the sight of some prime examples of the early use of photography in printed books.

The project allows for many varied interpretations of the word ‘blueprint’, one of which will highlight the extraordinary number of associa-tions between engineering and the key alumni in the development of photography. Thomas Wedgwood, an early explorer of light sensitive materials, corresponded with James Watt about his discoveries, while Niépce, cred-ited with the first fixed image made in a camera, had previ-ously developed and patented an early internal combustion engine. The cyanotype process, invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842, became the preferred method of replicat-ing engineering line drawings well in to the twentieth cen-tury, the characteristic colour of the resulting copies leading to their designation as ‘blueprints’. Besides cyanotype, a range of other non-silver processes will also feature in the exhibitions.

An educational programme will include planned lectures by the Scottish Society for the History of Photography and demonstrations by participating artists and photographers will provide an historical and practical context. It is hoped the combination of visits to galleries showing contemporary photography and printmaking with the opportunity to view counterpart historical images in archives will attract new audiences to the richness of the resources held in care for the public and stimulate ways in which those resources can inform contemporary practice in the visual arts.

Roger Farnham and Harry Magee have been members of Glasgow Print Studio since 1978. Roger is a Consultant Sys-tems Engineer and has exhibited his photographs and prints internation-ally. He is currently a member of the Board of Glasgow Print Studio and a former board member of Street Level Photoworks. Harry was a Lecturer in Graphics before retiral and his prints are in corporate, public and private collections. He has served as Chair of the Glasgow Print Studio Board.

There is information here: http://tinyurl.com/c4otmfv and BPH will report on the programme as details become available. 

Image: Anna Atkins, Cyanotype

The following is an article by Graeme Brown that appeared in the Birmingham Mail which may be of interest to some of you BPH members out there. You can read the rest of it in this link here.

"Sir Benjamin Stone, born 174 years ago, collected and took photographs to create a historical record for generations to come as the world went through drastic changes during the rapid industrialisation of the late 19th century.

His passion took him from festivals in Abbots Bromley and Sutton Coldfield to Australia and China. Sir Benjamin spent more than £1 million in today’s money in a quest to create a vast visual encyclopaedia of the ancient and modern world.

It led him to amass 22,000 photographs, 2,500 lantern slides, 17,000 glass negatives and more than 100 albums and scrapbooks, which will soon be housed at the new Library of Birmingham – and earned him the nickname ‘Sir Snapshot’......... "

Anyone know much about Joan Craven? She shared studios with Walter Bird at Kinocrat House on the Cromwell Road, London. Below is a picture of Pamela Green by her. I run the Pamela Green website and before I post something I wanted to find out a bit more information. This picture was taken in the early '50s.

A special exhibition to mark the 75th anniversary of the Hampstead Photographic Society is being held at Burgh House, New End Square, Hampstead this month. The club, founded in 1937, will be exhibiting members’ work as well as a display on the history of the society.

The exhibition will be on until 27th August, and details can be found here.

Photo: Members of Hampstead Photographic Society at the opening of their exhibition at Burgh House 01.08.12. Copyright: Ham and High

Your confidence, customer focus and excellent presentation skills could help visitors get even more out of their day at the National Media Museum!  Working across ten galleries, including our changing temporary exhibitions, you'll deliver a range of engaging and educational presentations and activities to visitors.  You'll be asked to develop and devise a few presentations of your own too.  So this is a great opportunity to be creative!

With over 750,000 visitors visiting the Museum every year, you'll be giving presentations to a diverse audience.  So experience of working with the public in a similar role, supported by excellent communication, customer service and performance skills, is a must.  You should also have the ability to remember and present factual information, with a good understanding of photography, film, television, radio and/or new media, as well as an interest in science and technology.

Award winning, visionary and truely unique, the National Media Museum embraces photography, film, television, radio and the web.  Part of the SMG family of museum, we aim to engage, inspire and educate through comprehensive collections, innovative education programmes and a powerful yet sensitive approach to contemporary issues.  

JOB PURPOSE

Explainer’s educate, entertain and inspire visitors, interpreting and communicating information about the museum’s subject matter in unique, engaging ways.

Two roles:

full time: https://vacancies.nmsi.ac.uk/VacancyDetails.aspx?FromSearch=True&MenuID=6Dqy3cKIDOg=&VacancyID=216

part-time: https://vacancies.nmsi.ac.uk/VacancyDetails.aspx?FromSearch=True&MenuID=6Dqy3cKIDOg=&VacancyID=217

As update to an earlier BPH post here: 800 of the 4500 delicate glass plate negatives, located by a media team from the Seven network and purchased by Seven boss Kerry Stokes, have today been donated to the Australian War Memorial. They will form the basis of a new exhibition that opens on November 2.

Apparently about 3,000 of those plates are of British troops, as well as some Gurkhas, Indians, American and Chinese labourers. The future of these is still being determined.

These plates form part of the Louis and Antoinette Thuillier Collection uncovered in 2011 after sitting undisturbed for nearly a century in the attic of a farmhouse in the French town of Vignacourt. These glass-plate negatives feature Australian soldiers in informal settings. The discovery of these photographs represents one of the most important recent finds of material from the First World War. The donation is among the most significant to have been made to a cultural institution.

The Memorial has been working hard behind the scenes in preparation for the arrival of the Lost Diggers photograph collection. The collection of glass plate negatives provides a significant insight into the lives of troops in France while on rest from the front line.

Planned for November 2012, and followed by a national tour, the exhibition ‘Remember Me: the lost diggers of Vignacourt’ will showcase a selection of photographs from the large collection, along with stories and items from some of the men themselves. Whilst the photographs in the collection are largely unidentified the Memorial, and Channel Seven, have been busy researching and working closely with the public to shed light on who some of these men might be, and what their stories might reveal.

Currently, you can see the Lost Diggers photos on the Channel Seven Facebook page or on the Sunday Night program website. 

Photo: An unknown soldier with Robert Thuillier, the photographer's son.

I'm working with the Library of Congress on an exciting co-curation project which focuses on the photographic collections that are available on the Library's Flickr Commons account. Further details and ways in which to contribute to the project are outlined below:

The Library of Congress is asking for your help to curate a new set of photographs for Flickr Commons.

We’re eager to find out what interests you and would love for you to express yourselves visually by creating a personal gallery. The most popular pictures will form a new set on Flickr that reflects your diverse interests and expertise. Your input will help us select more gems from our collections that you would like to see uploaded in the future.

Here's how:

• First, create a new gallery in your Flickr account with the title My LOC Favorites.

• Add ten of your favorite images from the Library of Congress sets on Flickr. (Top ten only, please!).

• It would be great if you could explain the reasons for your choices beside each image. More detail can help guide our future selections for Flickr.

You have until Friday, August 31^st to create your gallery.  Once we have looked at everyone’s galleries, we will post a new Flickr set highlighting the top selections.

We have also started a discussion in the Flickr Commons Group and would love for you to tell us more about your interests and motivations for participating in the co-curation project in more detail.

This project is being coordinated by Prints and Photographs Division staff and Bronwen Colquhoun, a British PhD student from Newcastle University whose research focuses on how cultural institutions are using Flickr Commons to promote their photographic collections and support community engagement. She is carrying out a fellowship at the Library until September 2012 and has been doing similar projects with other UK-based Flickr Commons institutions including the National Maritime Museum and Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums.

More information can be found on the Library of Congress Picture This blog. We have also started a discussion in the Flickr Commons Group and would love for you to tell us more about your interests and motivations for participating in the co-curation project in more detail.

If you have any questions please make a comment on this post or contact us at flickrpilot@loc.gov.


We look forward to seeing your selections!

As mentioned in an earlier posting, details of this European exhibition is now available.

The birth of photography is now seen for the first time and exclusively for half a century back on European soil: the first photographic exterior shot of the world, the photogravure "View from the Window at Le Gras" by the Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826 . After her last presentation at an exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham 1898, the factory was more than five decades to be lost. Only after many years of investigative search Helmut Gernsheim felt the image stored in a 1952 steamer trunk in London again. This sensational discovery Gernsheim dated before the birth of photography to thirteen years, but until that time was the year 1839 as its official invention year.

Visitors will journey through the photographic trends of the 19th Century: from the artistically oriented pictorialism of the early war reportage to the time in this emerging travel photography. In addition to images from the early days of the photograph shows the presentation of thematically organized numerous icons of contemporary photography: On display are works from the fields of the act, architecture, travel, urban, landscape and portrait photography as well as experimental and journalistic images of world-famous photographers. The unique combination of the works from the historical and the contemporary part of the Gernsheim collection into a comprehensive overall view of the exhibition allows visitors a fascinating insight into the almost two hundred years of history of photography.

(Sorry, but blame the above on Google translation!). Details of the exhibition can be found here.

Christopher Penn writes...There is an interesting and beautifully displayed exhibition of photography - largely portraiture - from India in the nineteenth century running now in the Art Library for Photography in Berlin. Among other works it includes four Samuel Bournes, nine Bourne and Shepherds and eight Penns including 'Toda Man (Nicholas/Penn 48)' and 'Toda Woman (Nicholas/Penn 49)', as you will also see in the photo here. Some of the attributions are a bit weak, including three other Penns and two photographs attributed to Nicholas; but that is a small criticism of the first exhibition to dig deep into the extensive collection of ethnographic prints in Berlin.

The fine catalogue, in which a large number of the photographs are reproduced, includes an article by John Falconer, based he says on early research, which provides a good lead into the exhibition, and other articles largely related to the colonial theme.  The exhibition is well worth a visit.

The exhibition runs until 21st October.

Museum für Fotografie, Berlin
Fri 20 July - Sun 21 October 2012

http://www.smb.museum/smb/standorte/index.php?p=2&objID=6124&n=12

The Colonial Eye.
Early Portrait Photography in India

One of the world's most comprehensive and significant collections of portrait photography from India is on exhibit for the first time. The collection was originally thought to be lost during World War II, only gradually returning to Berlin's National Museums beginning in the 1990s.

Now, around 300 photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century offer a comprehensive overview of portrait photography from the Indian subcontinent. In addition to pictures by renowned photographers and studios such as Samuel Bourne, Sheperd & Robertson, A.T.W. Penn, and John Burke, works by lesser known artists are also on display. Popular and unexpectedly diverse ethnographic photography of the time stands in contrast to stylised street shots of artisans, as well as portraits of nobility, including Islamic princes and princesses, Maharajas, and clan leaders, taken in their own palaces or in artfully set studio scenes. 

One unifying aspect of many early portraits is a particularly European view - "The Colonial Eye". In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the name of science and colonialism, the land and its inhabitants were to be apprehended through observation and cataloguing, analysation and measurement. The fascination with India was especially evoked by the strange-looking indigenous peoples and the caste-system, as well as the splendour of the Indian nobility and the austere life of ascetics. 

Photo: Christopher Penn with two of his ancestor's photographs in the exhibition.

The National Media Museum held a conference in 2010 to present new research into three Niépce plates dating from c1826 from The Royal Photographic Society's Collection which is held at the museum (see: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/events/niepce-in-europe) The conference revealed new information about the plates and through scientific analysis by the Getty Conservation Institute began to explain the origins of the plates and how they were made.

The museum, with conservator Susie Clark and the GCI, has developed an oxygen-free display case and special lighting which will allow the plates to be shown to the public. The prototype case which is being funded by The Society, was shown to it recently.

The finished case, along with the conference proceedings, should be ready early in 2013.

Image: Philippa Wright, Curator of Photographs and conservator Susie Clark with the prototype case.   

In partnership with Bradford University and Bradford College, we are seeking to appoint a photographer, or artist working with photography as the 2012-13 Bradford Fellow in Photography.

We are looking for a mid-career photographer with experience of teaching, publishing and producing work for exhibition. The successful candidate would deliver an agreed number of lectures to the students at both Bradford College and Bradford University. They would also work with Museum staff to produce a gallery exhibition and associated events around the new or ongoing work to show in late autumn 2013. The exhibition will be part of the Ways of Looking photography festival in Bradford.

The Bradford Fellowship is a partnership between this Museum, Bradford College and Bradford University. Established in 1985, the Fellowship supports established photographers to develop their professional practice, while working with the institutional partners to enhance the cultures, practice and knowledge of photography.

The commitment of the partners to the Fellowship has resulted in significant legacies, both in allowing photographers to create important new bodies of work, and enriching the National Photography Collection through the acquisition of Fellow's work.

The Fellowship seeks to deliver the following outcomes:

1. To enable a photographer/artist to explore their personal artistry and ideas to produce a new body of work.
2. Production of an exhibition to be shown at the National Media Museum during autumn 2013. The exhibition may travel to other venues.
3. Work with students at Bradford College and University to give an insight into the artist's working practice and to encourage the development of the students own practice.
4. To enrich the Fellowship Collection held within the National Photography Collection with prints acquired from the commission.

The closing date for applications is Monday 3 September 2012. Interviews will be held on Tuesday 18 September 2012 at the National Media Museum, Bradford. Full details, including application etc, can be found here.

I have an old slide projector, probably from a school, and a couple of boxes of glass slides The slides seem to be in sets, covering 'London' ' Windsor Castle' etc, and are about 3'' square,. The quality of the black-and-white images is amazing, especially the interior scenes at Windsor Castle. However, I have no way of projecting them, so I am wondering if anybody would be interested in them.
Terry Pattison

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