Blogs

New York auction house Swann Gallery's upcoming auction of Fine Photography on 19 February 2015 includes a ninth-plate daguerreotype of The Monument in the City of London. 

The lot description is here: 

Sale 2374 Lot 3

(CASED IMAGE) 
Ninth-plate daguerreotype of London's iconic Monument to the Great Fire, at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke; in a leather case. Circa 1850

Estimate $4,000 - 6,000 

The monument, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire Of London, was erected in 1667. Today, visitors climb 311 steps to the top of this historic landmark to see spectacular views of London.

See the lot and full catalogue here.

London's History and Theory of Photography Research Centre, at Birkbeck has a series of free seminars open to the public, taking place at 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD. In addition there are a number of Master’s Bursaries and Studentships open to applicants on its MA History of Art with Photography, and funding for Postgraduate M.Phil/PhD research in Photography (historical and/or practice-based).

Tuesday 10 March, 6-8:00

Keynes Library (room 114)

Seminar

Carol Jacobi (Tate Britain) and Hope Kingsley (Wilson Centre for Photography)

Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860

Carol Jacobi and Hope Kingsley will be talking about the aesthetics and reception of salted paper prints in the nineteenth-century, and the experience of curating an exhibition of these rare early photographs in the twenty-first.

Tuesday 24 March, 6-7:30

Keynes Library (room114)

Seminar

Michael Berkowitz (Professor of Modern Jewish History, UCL)

Not Harry Gresham:  Why Helmut Gernsheim's Jewishness matters

The project to restore the University of Westminster's cinema to its former glory continues and the opening is scheduled for the early summer. Shira Macleod, formerly of the Riverside Studios has been appointed as Director.

The site is where the UK's first photographic studio was opened by Richard Beard in March 1841 at the Polytechnic Institution, where the Lumière brothers held the first public screening of film using their new Cinématographe in February 1896 and, later, on the Polytechnic of Central London was an important institution for photographic education. 

There are still opportunities to support the project including the naming of seats.

The photographs here show the building work in progress. 

See more here: http://www.birthplaceofcinema.com/

The Conservation of Photographs is a relatively new discipline in the cultural heritage preservation field with its beginnings in the late 1960’s early 1970’s. However, it has its roots firmly grounded in the formative years of photography as practitioners and the emergent photographic industry grappled with its inherent instability. The treatment of faults in both material systems and their chemistries and the need to develop more stable photographic processes have hugely impacted and influenced the evolution of the photographic process itself. Today the result of materials and image instability continues to present huge challenges to contemporary users, photographers, the photographic industry, collectors and collections both public and private in the wider heritage field worldwide.

This seminar will look at the conservation of photographs past and present. It will also consider the huge challenges faced by both private and institutional collections, with regard to the future preservation of both historic and contemporary photography in all its diverse material forms. The preservation and conservation of contemporary photography alone is already presenting huge challenges to collections and conservators, presenting issues that are already impacting and will continue to impact collectors, the art market and ultimately the value and veracity of contemporary images.

Admission is free and open to all.

Ian L. Moor and Angela H. Moor

The Conservation of Historic and Contemporary Photographs

17.00, Wednesday, 25 February 2015

Research Forum South Room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Ian and Angela Moor have been at the forefront of the development of photographic conservation in the UK since the early 1970s, both as researchers and developers of photographic conservation techniques, and as consultants and advisers to major collections of photography. They established The Centre for Photographic Conservation in 1981. Ian is a partner/director and Head of Conservation and Angela is Conservator Administrator at The Centre for Photographic Conservation.

James Hyman Gallery, the UK’s leading commercial gallery for vintage 19th and 20th century photography, is pleased to present the latest in a series of monographic and thematic exhibitions addressing photographs from the earliest days of the medium. 

The Age of Salt: Art, Science and Early Photography, which is open to the public from 3 February to 6 March, takes as its starting point one of William Henry Fox Talbot’s greatest works and one of the finest prints outside a museum. Entitled Veronica in Bloom (1840), this exceptional print dates from the very moment in which the birth of photography was announced. 

The exhibition traces the development of photography both through technical advance and through the forging of a new aesthetic, initially in dialogue with painting and then freed from this relationship. These pioneering moments include intimate untrimmed salt prints by Calvert Richard Jones and Edouard Baldus, remarkable salt prints made in Britain, France and Italy and, subsequently, the evolution of new techniques including collodion on glass, albumen printing and forms of photomechanical engravings from heliogravures by Charles Negre and Henri le Secq through to photogalvanographs by Roger Fenton. 

The Age of Salt: Art, Science and Early Photography anticipates Tate Britain's exhibition of early salt prints entitled Salt and Silver (25 February - 7 June 2015) and the Media Space's Revelations: Experiments in Early Photography (20 March - 13 September 2015).

See more by clicking here.

The latest V&A re-hang of the permanent collection displays focuses on the wider visions of photographers through series and sequences of images, rather than through individual photographs. The display includes photographs from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and features work by Sally Mann, Josef Sudek, Eadweard Muybridge, Lewis Baltz, Masahisa Fukase, Sian Bonnell and Sze Tsung Leong.

A History of Photography: Series and Sequences

Fri 6 February 2015 – Sun 1 November 2015

V&A Gallery 100

http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/3820/a-history-of-photography-series-and-sequences-5358/

With the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a new BBC TV programme examines his life and reviews his relationship with young girls. Towards the end of the programme an albumen photograph attributed to Carroll and in the collection of the Musee Cantini, Marseille, (click here to see it) of, allegedly, a naked teenage Lorena Liddell, the elder sister of Alice, is given as evidence of a darker interest by Carroll's in girls.

Of the photograph, conservator Nick Burnett states 'My gut instnct is it's by Lewis Carroll'. A facial recognition expert also believes it is of Lorena Carroll.  

Having seen the programme I am unconvinced by the programme's claims. At best the photograph itself and provenance requires further research: simply being albumen from a glass negative and later dealer's pencil inscription is probably not sufficient to say one way or the other.

Make your own mind up and view the programme on BBC iPlayer here Available for 28 days from 31 January 2015.

Image: Presenter Martha Kearney looks at a Carroll negative from The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford.

UPDATE: A leading Carroll scholar has stated he is 'unconvinced' by the programme's conclusion and notes that the size of the plate/print suggests it dates from Carroll's Christ College period by which time Lorena would have been a more mature woman. 

Are you organised, professional, approachable, great at engaging a diverse range of people with new ideas and opportunities? These are the key qualities we are looking for in our Volunteer Coordinator at the National Media Museum in Bradford. You will work closely with people across the Museum to continue to develop our volunteer programme, taking a strategic approach to maximise and deliver beneficial and engaging opportunities for the volunteers and for the Museum. You will have successful experience working independently to co-ordinate an established volunteer programme and demonstrate enthusiasm and commitment to further developing this area.

Click here to see more