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De Montfort University is pleased to announce the availability of one Wilson Fellowship for its MA in Photographic History. The Fellowship offers £5,000 toward the defrayal of tuition and other costs related to the MA, and is open to all students UK, EU and International.The Wilson Fellowship will be awarded to applicants who will contribute significantly to the field of photographic history.

To apply for the Wilson Fellowship, please submit your cv and a proposal outlining your MA thesis topic, in English, to the Admissions Committee by 1 August. This proposal should be no longer than 4,000 words. For applications to the MA, you can access the DMU application at https://onlineapplications.dmu.ac.uk or apply through ukpass.ac.uk.

For questions about the MA programme or the Wilson Fellowship please contact Programme Tutor Dr Gil Pasternak at gpasternak@dmu.ac.uk

The MA in Photographic History and Practice is the first course of its kind in the UK, taking as it does the social and material history of photography at its centre. It lays the foundations for understanding the scope of photographic history and provides the tools to carry out the independent research in this larger context, working in particular from primary source material. You will work with public and  private collections throughout Britain, handling photographic material, learning analogue photographic processes, writing history from objects in collections, comparing historical photographic movements, and debating the canon of photographic history. You also learn about digital preservation and access issues through practical design projects involving website and database design. Research Methods are a core component, providing students with essential handling, writing, digitising and presentation skills needed for MA and Research level work, as well as jobs in the field. 

The Photographic Historical Society has announced the program of papers to be presented at PhotoHistory XVI that will take place in Rochester, New York on 10-12 October 2014. Martin L. Scott, Program Chair of PhotoHistory XVI, made the announcement.

According to Scott, the program committee has selected the following papers for presentation at George Eastman House:

• Working Without Pictures: Recovering the Early Years of American Photography / Greg Drake, Photographic Historian / Boston, MA
• Photography: Hungary’s Greatest Export? / Colin Ford, Photographic Historian, former Director of UK Museum of Photography (Bradford) / Enfield, England
• The Photographic Periodical Press 1853-1914: disseminating knowledge and forming opinions / Michael Pritchard, Research Associate, Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University / Leicester, and Director General, The Royal Photographic Society / Bath, England
• Geographic Origins of Still Cameras Manufactured in the United States / Ralph London, Portland, OR
• Spy Satellites, the Cold War, and Kodak / J. Bradley Paxton / Eastman Kodak (retired), Webster, NY
• The Uvachrome System of Color Photography / Cornelia Kemp, Curator of Photography and Film, Deutsches Museum / Munich, Germany
• Georeferencing the Work of Historical 19^th Century Photographers in Arizona and New York City / Jeremy Rowe / Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
• The Trumbull Panoramic Camera / Peter and Barbara Schultz / Brown University, Providence, RI
• Teaching the History of Photography in the Digital Age / Kenneth White, Professor of Photography / Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
• Skylight Photo Studios of the Finger Lakes / Nicholas M. Graver, Photographic Antiquarian, Brighton, NY
• The Digital Single-Lens Reflex: Born and Raised in Rochester / James McGarvey, Eastman Kodak (retired), Hamlin, NY

“Our committee had a particularly difficult time selecting papers for PhotoHistory XVI from an extraordinary number of excellent submissions. Our hope is that those we couldn’t select this time will submit again for the next PhotoHistory Symposium. We have chosen presentations representing early processes, pioneers, special apparatus, national schools, commercial manufacturing, national defense, and the preservation of the past,” Scott explained.

Further details concerning the attendance costs and the banquet keynote speaker will be released later this summer. 

PhotoHistory XVI, the world’s only continuous symposium on the history of photography, begins with a meet and greet get-together the first evening, and will continue with a full day of presentations, an evening banquet followed by a next day of browsing at a photographic trade show which attracts dealers from North America and internationally. The most recent PhotoHistory XV was held in October 2011 and drew about 200 visitors from the Americas, Europe, Australia and Japan.

The symposium’s venue, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, combines the world’s leading collections of photography and film housed within the stately landmark Colonial Revival mansion that was George Eastman’s home from 1905 to 1932. The Museum is a National Historic Landmark.

The Photographic Historical Society of Rochester, NY, is the first organized society devoted to photographic history and the preservation of photo antiques. It was founded in 1966. For more information see the Society’s web site at tphs.org. 

If you are looking for a camera obscura you could do no better than buy The Observatory in Bristol which overlooks Brunel's Clifton suspension bridge and Avon gorge. Back on the market at a reduced price the eighteenth century building houses one of the few remaining public camera obscuras. A special covenant relating to the purchase ensures that the camera obscura must remain open to the public. The building, associated caves and grounds are yours for £1,695,000 (freehold) or offers in the region thereof. It was originally on the market for £2 million in 2013 and failed to find a buyer. 

The Observatory occupies a site of great historical interest, originally an Iron Age lookout post and a fortified Roman camp. The existing building was originally built as a windmill for corn in 1766 and later converted to the grinding of snuff. This was damaged by a fire in October 1777 when the sails were left turning during a gale and caused the equipment to catch alight. It remained derelict for some 52 years until artist William West rented the old mill as a studio in 1828. It was Mr West who installed telescopes and a Camera Obscura, used by artists of the Bristol school to draw the Avon Gorge and Leigh Woods well before the construction of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The Camera Obscura is situated on the top floor and is still in full working order giving an impressive bird’s eye view of Avon Gorge, projected onto a 5 ft concave metal surface. Leading to the Camera Obscura, there are two circular rooms which would eminently suit visiting art exhibitions, especially with the historical connection to the artists who used this bird’s eye vantage point to capture on canvas, the dramatic Avon Gorge. 

Mr West also built a tunnel from The Observatory to St Vincent’s Cave, which opens onto a limestone cave on the cliff face of the Avon Gorge. The cave was first mentioned as being a chapel in the year AD305 and excavations, in which Romano-British pottery has been found, have revealed that it has been both a holy place and a place of refuge at various times in its history.

The building that now stands on the site has only been sold on two occasions since it was constructed in 1766 and is now designated as Grade II*. 

The Royal Photographic Society is close by in Bath and the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock.

Read the full specification here. 

Attitudes to photography have undergone a radical shift in recent times. Partly in response to these contemporary changes, historians, curators and photographic practitioners have begun to re-examine older forms of photography: exploring the wide variety of historical technologies and techniques, finding surprising ways in which images were manipulated and determining how an ideology of photographic realism was maintained. Yet there remains a need for scholars to explore questions of early photographic ‘authorship’, singularity and objectivity in much greater detail.

Scholarly studies of nineteenth-century photography have been heavily influenced by later theoretical constructions. As an alternative, Daniel Novak has posited a ‘Victorian theory of photography’. Yet this theory remains unelaborated. Similarly, Elizabeth Edwards and others have called for a move away from the traditional Art History model of analysing photography. This interdisciplinary conference will explore the question of what such an analysis, and such a theory, might look like. 

Possible questions and areas of interest for the conference include:

•           How do technological narratives influence our understanding of photography?

•           Photography as a business; photographers as workers.

•           The hegemony of nineteenth-century photographic realism, and resistances to it.

•           Can/should we do away with the Art History model of photography?

•           Alternatives to the photographer-as-author model of photographic exhibition and analysis.

•           To what extent can we think of photography as being separate to other print and visual media?

•           The role of photography in the creation of nineteenth-century celebrity.

•           Early photography as represented in literature, art and film.

•           Photographs as networks; photographs as objects.

•           When does ‘early’ photography end?

•           Does digital photography allow us to ‘read back’ the performativity of images from earlier periods? How might the revival of Victorian photographic techniques by current practitioners influence historians?

Keynotes: Kate Flint, Lindsay Smith, Kelley Wilder

Organisers: Owen Clayton, Jim Cheshire, and Hannah Field.

To submit proposals for 20 minute papers, please send an abstract of 200-250 words to rethinkingphotography@gmail.com. The deadline is 12^th Jan 2015, 5pm (GMT).