Blogs

The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership will be awarding 410 PhD studentships over a five year period to excellent research students in the arts and humanities. The DTP, a collaboration between De Montfort University and the universities of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Leicester, Birmingham and Birmingham City, provides research candidates with cross-institutional mentoring, expert supervision including cross-institutional supervision where appropriate, subject-specific and generic training, and professional support in preparing for a career.

The Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort is inviting applications from students whose research interests include:

• Social and Cultural Practices of Photography
• Practising Photography in the Sciences
• History of Photographic Technology
• Historiographical Studies in Photography
• Industrial and Business History of Photography
• Cross-cultural Histories of Photography
• Amateur Photography
• Photography, Nationhood and Identity

The deadline for AHRC funding applications is 9 January 2014, by which time students must have applied for a place to study and have provided two references to a university within the DTP. For full details of eligibility, funding and research supervision areas, please visit www.midlands3cities.ac.uk or contact enquiries@midlands3cities.ac.uk

2013 marks the 125th anniversary of the Wolverhampton Photographic Society. To celebrate the occasion, an exhibition traces the rich and influential history of photography in Wolverhampton from the mid-19th century to the present day.

The exhibition has been generously supported by Heritage Lottery Fund.

On Saturday 16 November 2013 at 10.30am the RPS Historical Group has a special event arranged. Group members Roy Hawthorne and David Kingston will take attendees round the exhibition. Roy and David have also compiled an AV relating to Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life and their research into how he might have constructed it.

Lunch will be available at the nearby Bantock House Museum cafeteria and for those who wish to join us in the afternoon, viewings of photographic archives of Wolverhampton may be arranged by the Curator (depending on numbers).  For others, this is also an ideal opportunity to visit nearby Wightwick Manor (See National Trust website for details).There is no charge for the Gallery visit but booking is essential.  Please contact Geoff Blackwell, not later than 7th November 2013 if you wish to attend. (gblackwell@fastmail.fm or 0114 266 8655)

See: http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/events/wolverhampton-photographic-society-presents-darkroom-digital/

Image:Oscar G. Rejlander - The Two Ways of Life, 1857. The Royal Photographic Society Collection © National Media Museum, Bradford / SSPL 

Beelden van een vergeten ontmoeting. De Belgische missie in India, 1850-1950. (Images of a forgotten meeting. Belgian missionaries in India, 1850-1950).  KADOC presents its archive of 150 years of Belgian presence in India. This collection not only includes traditional archive materials (letters, notes...), but also photographs and films. Together, they form a fascinating chronicle of a forgotten history and provide insights into the Belgian vision of Indian culture.   

From:  9 November 2013 - 25 January 2014

More info: kadoc.kuleuven.be, Tel : 016 32 35 00

Where? KADOC, Vlamingenstraat 39, 3000 Leuven (free entrance)

When? 9.11.2013 > 25.01.2014 (excluding 11.11, 24.12 > 2.1) Monday > Friday: 9.00 > 17.00 ; Saturday: 9.00 > 12.30 , closed on Sunday

Vernissage: 9.11.2013, 19.00

More info: kadoc.kuleuven.be, 016 323 500

See: http://www.indiahouseleuven.be/en/activities/images-forgotten-meeting-1850-1950

The latest issue of The Royal Photographic Society's Imaging Science Journal carries three papers from the 2010 Niépce conference. The majority of the conference papers are published in two special issues of the ISJ (includes those in the issue shown right) and PhotoHistorian and can be purchased as a set from The Society's online shop here: http://www.rps.org/group/Historical/Niepce-conference

The Art Fund's Art Quarterly magazine publishes a great feature by Charles Darwent about the history of photography at the Science Museum ending up it's new London Media Space.

The article is available to download here: http://www.artfund.org/about-us/art-quarterly

On Wednesday, 30 October Tate Britain is hosting a live hang-out with fashion photographer Miles Aldridge, Tate curator of Photography Simon Baker and art critic Miranda Sawyer, as part of the ongoing ‘Meet Tate Britain’ series. British artist Fiona Crisp, HotShoe editor Gregory Barker and renowned instagrammer Michael O’Neal will also be hanging out live to discuss the importance of photography as an artistic discipline.

Viewers can tune in from anywhere in the world to watch the discussion at 20:00 – 20:30. This is the third in a series of hang-outs which explore the relationship between art and wider creative spheres. For more information please visit: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/special-event/photography-meets-art-hangout-on-air

An accompanying video will also be released during the day featuring Miles Aldridge as he embarks on a brand new project inspired by Tate collection piece The Carousel by Mark Gertler. This exclusive footage will offer viewers an insight into Miles’ photographic practise and the inspiration he gains from the collection at Tate Britain. It will go live on the 30th here 

See more here: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/special-event/photography-meets-art-hangout-on-air

This is the third in our new series of books exploring key aspects of both contemporary and historic photography. With 480 pages and more than 100 colour illustrations The Photograph and The Album: Histories, Practices, Futures is a perceptive and stimulating guide to understanding that most pervasive photographic format, the photo album. Becoming "increasingly unruly", it has survived for over 150 years, from the first experimental albums of the 1850s to today's interactive, mobile applications. 

Through the placing of single images in sequence, the photo album is the narrative format par excellence. And, as this book demonstrates, its narratives embrace the social, the historical, the sexual and the political. With contributions from twenty respected international authors - academics, curators, photographers, collectors, researchers and writers - The Photograph and The Album examines the topic in both visual and written form, spanning historic practice, present-day creation, and future trends.

More here: http://www.museumsetc.com/products/album

PUBLICATION DETAILS

Title: The Photograph and The Album: Histories, Practices, Futures
Editors: Jonathan Carson, Rosie Miller & Theresa Wilkie
ISBN: 978-1-907697-91-3 [paperback] | 978-1-907697-92-0 [hardback] | 978-1-907697-93-7
Pages: 480
Colour illustrations: 110 
Size: 203 x 127 mm 
Price: £39.95 [eBook] | £49.95 [paperback] | £79.95 [hardback]  
Publisher: MuseumsEtc 

Problem ordering online? Download our Order Form.

Box of Light which runs from 25-27 October at the Library of Birmingham is a celebration of the pre-cinema,magic lantern and early cinema. A series of events, talks workshops and activities taking place throughout the weekend. The event coincides with the Magic Lantern Society's Convention.

Library of Birmingham and The REP 25 – 27 October 2013

To coincide with the Magic Lantern Society’s annual conference in Birmingham, Flatpack Festival presents Box of Light, a  weekend full of events, workshops and activities celebrating early cinema.

Before the days of film, the magic lantern was an important source of entertainment, using glass slides to create moving images and visual tricks. Birmingham played a key role in this pre-cinema world, producing thousands of lanterns for export, leading to the birth of the flipbook, and eventually the cinema. 

Box of Light Variety Show

25 October

7.30 – 9.30pm – £8

Studio Theatre, Library of Birmingham, Centenary Square, Broad Street, Birmingham, B1 2ND  

An evening of edification and entertainment featuring acclaimed performer Professor Heard, who will provide a whistle-stop history of lantern shows and explain how they helped pave the way for cinema. This will be followed by the Physioscope, a Victorian experiment with light and mirrors recreated for the first time in a century by Roderick MacLachlan, and the finale of the show is provided by French artist Julien Maire, whose Open Core performance includes a live dissection of a video projector. 

Birmingham de Lux

Saturday 26 October 11am and 1.30pm, £5

Birmingham de Lux is Ben Waddington’s exploration into the city’s people, locations and moments that led up to the creation of cinema. The story of the transition from theatre to picture house is one of bold experimentation, imaginative use of simple devices, intriguing prototypes and assorted forgotten wonders that prefigure our long-term fascination with the moving image. The tour takes place in and around the city centre and lasts approximately 90 minutes.

Projecteo

26 October

1.30pm – Free (bookable)

Designer Benjamin Redford will be giving a talk about his ingenious miniature slide projector which has proved to be an online sensation and a big hit on Kickstarter. In response to modern technology and the craze for Instagram, Benjamin has created a tiny projector to share Instagram pictures called the ‘Projecteo’. This analogue approach works by creating wheels of slide film to hold up to 9 images, which can be watched and enjoyed as a slideshow

Just published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, a monograph entitled 'John Chillingworth - Picture Post Photographer.  Since you are interested in the life and times of the old magazine, my images from the 1940's and 1950's may possibly give you a flavour of the style and power of picture story-telling by the youngest of the post-war team of eight highly individual staff photographers.  As a student photographer commented on meeting me, "Wow!  John Chillingworth - You're history!"

See: http://www.dewilewispublishing.com/GENERAL/FORTHCOMING.html

An unparalleled archive of shipwreck images will be presented for sale at Sotheby’s London auction on 12 November 2013. Taken by four generations of the Gibson family of photographers over nearly 130 years, the 1000 negatives record the wrecks of over 200 ships and the fate of their passengers, crew and cargo as they travelled from across the world through the notoriously treacherous seas around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly between 1869 and 1997. Such is the power and allure of the Gibson’s photographs that these images have captured the imagination of some of the UK’s most celebrated authors.

At the very forefront of early photojournalism, John Gibson and his descendants were determined to be first on the scene when these shipwrecks struck. Each and every wreck had its own story to tell with unfolding drama, heroics, tragedies and triumphs to be photographed and recorded – the news of which the Gibsons would disseminate to the British mainland and beyond. The original handwritten eye-witness accounts as recorded by Alexander and Herbert Gibson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be sold alongside these images. The archive will be sold as a single lot in Sotheby’s Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History sale, and is estimated to achieve between £100,000 and £150,000.

The Gibson family passion for photography was passed down through an astonishing four generations from John Gibson, who purchased his first camera 150 years ago.

Born in 1827, and a seaman by trade, it is not known how or where John Gibson acquired his first camera at time when photography was typically reserved for the wealthiest in society, however we do know that by 1860 he had established himself as a professional photographer in a studio in Penzance. Returning to the Scillies in 1865, he apprenticed his two sons Alexander and Herbert in the business, forging a personal and professional unity which would be passed down through all the generations which followed. Inseparable from his brother until the end, it is said that Alexander almost threw himself into Herbert’s grave at his funeral in 1937.

The family’s famous shipwreck photography began in 1869, on the historic occasion of the arrival of the first Telegraph on the Isles of Scilly. At a time when it could take a week for word to reach the mainland from the islands, the Telegraph transformed the pace at which news could travel. At the forefront of early photojournalism, John became the islands’ local news correspondent, and Alexander the telegraphist - and it is little surprise that the shipwrecks were often major news. On the occasion of the wreck of the 3500-ton German steamer, Schiller in 1876 when over 300 people died, the two worked together for days – John preparing newspaper reports, and Alexander transmitting them across the world, until he collapsed with exhaustion. Although they often worked in the harshest conditions, travelling with hand carts to reach the shipwrecks - scrambling over treacherous coastline with a portable dark room, carrying glass plates and heavy equipment – they produced some of the most arresting and emotive photographic works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

See the lot description at: 

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.50.html/2013/travel-atlases-maps-natural-history-l13405

Several Hills & Saunders CDVs I've seen refer to a Yorktown studio, (see here for an easily posted example: http://whowerethey.wordpress.com/category/photographer/hills-saunders/ ), but - unless they ventured across the Pond and this is the place where Britain lost the American war! - I have been unable to pin down where it is. It may well have been a garrison town like Sandhurst and Aldershot, but not one I can positively identify, which leaves me feeling rather dopey.

Can anyone help please?

The Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California invites submissions for a conference on Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, which will be held May 4-5, 2014.  The conference is part of a three year project on “Visual Evidence.”  The full paper call is here.

They invite submissions from junior scholars and graduate students in their final year working across all times and places on “news pictures.” Send a 250-word abstract and CV by November 1, 2013 to vsri@usc.edu; include “News Pictures” in the email title. Travel and expenses will be paid. Papers will be pre-circulated and commented upon and there is an expectation that participants will read the papers of other participants (between 10-12 papers). They will be due April 25, 2014.

Source: No Caption Needed

More information

I am looking for any information on a trading company THE LIGHTNING PHOTOGRAPHIC Co. in Torquay. The company used the stationery as shown in the link http://www.photographyinphilately.com/piwigo/picture.php?/732/search/117

Is it mentioned somewhere ?

Bonhams book auction on 12 November contains an extraordinary cache of ten Hill and Adamson calotypes; an album featuring work by Dodgson, Cameron and Rejlander; and an image by Le Gray. 

According to Bonhams' catalogue the album was compiled by Rev. F.H. Atkinson, and relates to his family and acquaintances including the Tennyson family, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Rejlander, and locations on the Isle of Wight and Ceylon. It has approximately 165 albumen prints (mostly carte-de-visite portraits, some views, others larger), mounted between one and six per page, mostly captioned (many with cut signatures of sitters pasted beneath), with a 3-page AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED BY JOHN RUSKIN (mounted), newspaper cuttings, contemporary morocco, later cloth wrappers with Atkinson arms embroidered on upper cover, 4to, [c.1862-1890s]

Corfield Cameras: A History and Collectors' Guide is a new publication by John E Lewis being launched today at Ballymoney Town Hall, Northern Ireland. In the 1950s when most British camera manufacturers seemed content to produce outdated designs or very expensive models, K G Corfield Ltd bucked the trend. Their range of Periflex 35mm cameras and related equipment brought a breath of fresh air to the market and challenged the strong German competition. Within a few years the business was transformed from a cottage industry into Britain's most modern camera manufacturing plant. 

This history of the company and its products is based on thirty years research, plus interviews with the former management, including Sir Kenneth Corfield, and employees. For collectors and historians there is a section which provides full technical details of all Corfield products, together with advice on their purchase and restoration.

The 200-page book includes over 150 illustrations and is available for £10.95 plus £1.75 UK postage or £7 overseas. Orders can be sent directly by email to: corfieldphoto@btinternet.com   

Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia presents approximately 120 photographs and a selection of albums, glass plate negatives, cabinet cards, cartes-de-visites, and postcards illustrating the rich tradition of portrait photography in India, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Nepal from the mid-19th century to early 20th century. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi.

The exhibition explores the democratizing aspect of photography by presenting royal court portraits alongside photographs of the middle class that were often circulated as carte-de-visites, cabinet cards, or postcards.

The photographs in the exhibition are drawn exclusively from the Alkazi Collection of Photography. They reveal an alternate history of 19th-century India that reflects a transition between Mughal culture and British rule, as seen for example in late 19th-century photographs that reference miniature painting aesthetics. The exhibition looks at the form of the painted photograph, popular and idiosyncratic in India and Nepal in the 19th century, for both artistic purposes and as a gesture toward realism.

It is the first public exhibit in recent memory of early portrait photography from South Asia, and is held at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York until February 2014. Details can be found here.

An installation by Charlotte Cory, one of the country's leading surreal photographic artists. The exhibition is an imaginative, witty and informative exploration of the Brontës and the history of early photography, drawing on the Victorian craze for collecting cartes des visite – portraits once produced in their millions and now discarded. Using twenty-first century techniques, Cory creates colourful new characters for these long forgotten figures, which are at the same time poignantly reminiscent of Victorian taxidermy; animals collected and preserved for posterity in their glory, and now extinct.

Capturing the Brontës, Brontë Parsonage Museum to Dec 31. Full details can be found here.

Photographic researcher, Paul Godfrey, has written and published a small book,"Snapped at Gorleston on Sea", (ISBN 978-0-9926929-0-2) about commercial seaside photographers from the past who traded there. It focuses on Jackson's Faces and J Barker & Sons Ltd who both specialised in walking/promenade photography of strollers on Gorleston seafront in the summer months, along with William Hastings, an early holiday camp photographer, This 50 page A5 format book covers the firms involved, their handling methods, the cameras used and the people who ran or worked for these firms. One chapter is devoted to establishing the date of a Gorleston Promenade photograph. The period covered is from around 1921 until the early 1960s. The book contains 50 black and white photographs many of which have not been published before. Price £6

Further details from the author's web site http://www.greatyarmouthphotographic.co.uk/paulgodfrey/