Blogs

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College seeks applications for the inaugural Linda Wyatt Gruber '66 Curatorial Fellowship in Photography. The Gruber Fellowship is a new and dynamic opportunity for emerging curators focused on the realm of photography, and offers an outstanding 2-year curatorial appoint to a recent Ph.D. in Art History and or an allied field with specialization in the history of photography. The successful appointee will mine an aspect of the Davis photography holdings to produce an exhibition at the Museum. 

The Gruber Fellowship will be awarded to a candidate with exceptional credentials and promise, and who produces an outstanding proposal for an exhibition rooted in the Davis collections.

Applicants must have received the Ph.D. with a focus on photography within 3 years prior to the application deadline. Important criteria for successful appointment are evidence of outstanding scholarship and expertise in the history of photography, including its materials and processes, from its mid-19th century invention to contemporary explorations; strong commitment to curatorial practice and museum work; and willingness to be a collegial member of the Davis Museum staff and the larger community at Wellesley College.

The Davis collections are accessible via the website at: https://www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu. Applications accepted through June 15, 2013. Full details, including application, can be found here.

Cased images of Australian aborigines are few and far between so the discovery of six images, three daguerreotypes and three ambrotypes in the Mill Cottage Museum in Port Lincoln, South Australia is particularly exciting news.
https://open.abc.net.au/posts/rare-daguerreotypes-found-97xr2kf
http://www.portlincolntimes.com.au/story/1481746/great-great-grandfather-identified/?cs=1500

The earliest known aboriginal daguerreotypes were taken by Douglas Thomas Kilburn (eldest brother of the London photographer William Edward Kilburn) in Melbourne in 1847. Few South Australian daguerreotypes of any subject, let alone aboriginal people, have come to light. Only a handul of people are known to have practiced the form commercially in that State.

A reference database of daguerreotypists in Australia I maintain includes the following who were active in South Australia: Samuel Thomas Gill, George Barron Goodman. Professor Robert Hall, Robert Hastings Norman, George Augustus Frederick Hezeltine, Edward Schohl, Samuel Ogelsby, Norwood Potter, Thomas Luke, Kopsch and May, and the Duryea Brothers, Townsend and Sanford. Only one identified and one other possible daguerreotype by the Duryeas for instance, despite being prominent and prolific photographers who started in New York, are currently known to me. Who actually made these freshly announced images is yet to be determined.

The Yorkshire Post has interviewed Greg Hobson, curator of photographs, at the National Media Museum, Bardford about the collections housed there. The film also shows Brian Liddey, curator of collections access .

See: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/lifestyle/the-arts/art/moments-in-time-precious-archive-puts-world-of-our-forefathers-back-into-focus-1-5624872

The National Portrait Gallery in London has launched a series of weekly blogs from members of staff. One of the first deals with the Bassano studio. See: http://www.npg.org.uk/blog/bassano-the-man-himself.php It is written by photographs cataloguer, Constantia Nicolaides.  

Image: Queen Alexandra by Alexander Bassano, 5 May 1881, NPG x137324

Edinburgh and Boston-based publisher MuseumsEtc has launched new editions of two classic books on photography, newly-designed and typeset to be accessible for a contemporary audience. Both highly readable, they provide fresh and fascinating insights into the complex photographic practices - and society - of the Victorian period. A History and Handbook of Photography was first published in 1876, and The Photographic Studios of Europe in1882.

John Thomson, editor of A History and Handbook of Photography, is renowned for his photobook Street Life in London, “a pioneering work of social documentation [and] one of the most significant photobooks in the medium’s history” (The Photobook: A History, Parr & Badger, Phaidon 2004). In a career which also included a series of outstanding photographic portfolios - shot in challenging conditions - documenting life, landscape and architecture in the Far East, followed by a successful studio portraiture business in London, Thomson also took time to translate from the French and edit this edition from the original of Gaston Tissandier.

The Photographic Studios of Europe by H Baden Pritchard (“a distinguished name in photography” - Mark Haworth-Booth) is the only detailed account available of working practices and conditions in the studios of the leading photographers of the Victorian period. Revealing, surprising, perceptive and authoritative, this first-hand report is based on seeing scores of photographers and their workshops in action. The result is fascinating and valuable both as a social historical record and as a classic of photographic literature.

Read more here: http://museumsetc.com/products/studios and http://museumsetc.com/products/thomson

London auction house Sotheby's is to put on sale a collection of photos on Beijing taken by Italian-British photographer Felice Beato in 1860, which includes the first photographic panorama of Peking showing the interior of the city, under the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Sotheby's believe that the photos could fetch between £100,000 to £200,000, adding that the auction house has received phone calls from potential buyers, including private collectors in China.

You can find full details of this lot (185) which goes under the hammer on 14th May here. 

Born one hundred and fifty years apart the achievements of the struggling landowner and inventor Nicéphore Niépce and the groundbreaking photo historian Helmut Gernsheim were inextricably linked when Gernsheim rediscovered Niépce’s long-lost first photograph in a trunk. Graham Harrison looks at the exploits of the photographer turned historian and of the brilliant, but ill-fated, Frenchman who Gernsheim proved was the true inventor of photography.

Making History: The Gernsheims and Nicéphore Niépce on Photo Histories.

With thanks to Michael Pritchard who provided information concerning Helmut Gernsheim’s membership of the Royal Photographic Society and to Sir Roy Strong who kindly answered questions about the Gernsheim Collection in Oxford in March 2013.

On Saturday 27 April 2013 a new project was started on Luminous-Lint to consolidate the content collected over the last ten years. Building the website has been complex and it is the only online freely available resource that brings together photographs, ephemera and related materials on the History of Photography based on thousands of public and private collections. If there is another one let me know!

Lots of you have helped in all sorts of ways (thanks) but essentially Luminous-Lint is only me!

The evolution of Luminous-Lint has taken time to mature and there are now 50,428 images on the website. These are organised into hundreds of online exhibitions and many thousands of visual indexes that connect images to others in obvious and not so obvious ways. This wealth of content is supported by increasingly thorough reading lists.

I’m now ready for the next step.

If you haven’t been to Luminous-Lint in a while it now has 1,108 Themes which is pretty amazing.With this structure the next step is to bring together the photographs, original sources and texts for each theme.

The themes will have visual examples traced back to individual collectors or institutions along with the texts and footnotes that link them together. Gradually each theme will become an ever-improving history and we will have many hundreds of them making a rich visual resource for all of us.

Take a look at a few pages to get a sense of what is already available – how about Art, Daguerreotypes, Camera Work or USSR in Construction as examples. These are only the starting points and there are vast amounts of supporting material.

So how do we support this endeavour?

Kickstarter is a website for making pledges to creative projects. The $50,000 Kickstarter Project I announced is to work on the Themes in order to bring these histories together – it won’t be perfect but it will provide a framework for us to add to as time goes on.

Here is the KIckstarter project - and you can see a video of me explaining the next step (scary thought). To date this fundraising effort has raised $3,521 in about four days which is gratefully received. Fund raising is all or nothing and it ends on 27 May 2013.

We tend to accept free resources and assume they will always be around but they require nurturing to survive. As a community passionate about Photohistory we will need to find institutions or philanthropists who are prepared to support large scale projects on the History of Photography and place them on a secure footing.

Many of you have provided content, advice, texts and scans for which I’m grateful. In the background I’ve financed it over the last ten years and done the heavy lifting. I’d be grateful if those of you with connections and influence discuss the best means of supporting Luminous-Lint. There is a vast amount of content and knowledge that is available nowhere else.

I’m prepared, with your support, to do the work to make Luminous-Lint all that it can be to assist the community. I’d be grateful if you would show you support by Making a Pledge and by starting a dialogue on how Luminous-Lint can be supported long term.

All the best and thanks for all your help over the years,

Alan Griffiths - alan@luminous-lint.com