I have borrowed this negative from a local historian. It is in an envelope labelled “Bishop’s Bridge Norwich” and dated 1st June 1899. The negative measures 6x9cm approx and is on a translucent rather than transparent film base that I assume to be celluloid. The top and bottom edges are cut with castellations with processing marks on each castellation.
Has any member of this forum any idea why this was cut in this way or what type of camera was used to take the image?
The Bodleian Library is delighted presenting a lecture by Ken Jacobson marking the appearance of a book published by Bernard Quaritch and written by Ken and Jenny Jacobson: Carrying Off the Palaces: John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerreotypes.
At a small country auction in 2006, the authors discovered one lightly regarded lot, a distressed mahogany box crammed with long-lost early photographs. They were daguerreotypes and all are now confirmed as once belonging to John Ruskin, the great nineteenth-century art critic, writer, artist and social reformer. Moreover, the box turned out to contain the largest collection of daguerreotypes of Venice in the world and probably the earliest surviving photographs of the Alps.
Ruskin's daguerreotypes aided the creation and influenced the style of his watercolours and in some instances reflected his emotional state of mind. Despite his sometimes vehemently negative sentiments regarding the camera, Ruskin ambivalent attitude towards the new art meant he never stopped using photography.
Despite being intended as simple documents, the quality and unorthodox style of many of Ruskin's daguerreotypes will come as a revelation to both photographic historians and Ruskin scholars. There are exemplars, however, within the history of both painting and photography that provide a historical and aesthetic framework within which Ruskin's work can be located.
The lecture on 3 June will be followed by a reception 6-7pm in the Visiting Scholars' Centre, Weston Library (2nd floor). Registration is required.
See: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/whats-on/upcoming-events/2015/jun/carrying-off-the-palaces
Photo London, London city wide celebration of photography centred on Somerset House attracted more than 20,000 visitors over five days. 70 galleries from 20 countries participated in the first edition of the fair, along with 10 publishers and 3 special exhibitors. They showed the best photography from all over the world, with strong sales across a range of photography from vintage and rare prints to contemporary and new work by established and emerging talent.
Michael Benson, Director of Photo London said: "The reaction to our first edition has been astonishing - far exceeding our own expectations and predictions. Indeed many of our exhibitors have told us that Photo London is the best art fair they have ever attended. Our aim was not to be the biggest, simply to be the best and with our first edition we have taken a huge stride in that direction."
PhotoLondon saw a major public programme which included three specially commissioned exhibitions, including Beneath the Surface showing works from the V&A's Photographs Collection will remain open until the end of August (see image left); performances and talks. Sebastião Salgado's accepted the first Photo London Master of Photography Award.
Photo London will returned in 2016 from 19-22 May 2016. See more and sign up for emails here: http://photolondon.org/
It is announced that The Irving Penn Foundation is providing a generous grant toward the production of the book, Platinum and Palladium Photographs: Technical and Aesthetic History, Connoisseurship, and Preservation.
This publication represents the extended proceedings of the International Symposium on this subject, held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, last October, and reported on BPH here
The book will be published by The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Photographic Materials Group (AIC/PMG), Washington, DC. The book project coordinator and chief editor will be Constance McCabe, Head of Photograph Conservation, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The probable date of publication is Summer 2016.
As readers will know, Irving Penn played a critical role in the modern history of the art of platinum photography, passionately exploring the medium in his quest for the perfect and permanent platinum print, which led to a revitalization of this exquisite photographic process. What some readers may not know is that the origin of this present collaborative study of platinum and palladium photographs, which finally involved about 40 researchers across some 20 institutions, can be traced to the preparations for the National Gallery of Art’s 2005 exhibition and publication, Irving Penn: Platinum Prints, during which many questions were raised regarding the highly technical nature of Penn’s photographs and platinum prints in general. Now, ten years later, new scientific research has made great advances toward a meaningful understanding of the chemical, technical, and aesthetic nature of these complex photographs.
Photo Archive News Twitter follower, budding photographer, Holly Rollins is currently studying for a BA in Photography from Falmouth University part of which she has to do a work placement week, which she did at Mary Evans: "I had to undertake a work placement as part of my professional practice module, photo archiving immediately sprung to mind"
Read the Full article and more photos
BPH Is pleased to report that Julien Faure-Conorton has been awarded a doctorate for his thesis on Robert Demachy. Julien defended his work on 11 May at the EHESS, Paris. His research was carried out under the supervision of Michel Frizot and was titled Characterization, contextualization and reception of Robert Demachy’s photographic work (1859-1936). An abstract is available here. Following his defence he was award the title of Doctor of Art History and Theory, summa cum laude.
Julien is working on an exhibition which examines the work of Robert Demachy and is interested in hearing from institutions interested in hosting it. He can be contacted here:
Julien FAURE-CONORTON, Ph.D.
Docteur en Histoire et Théorie des Arts
Historien de la Photographie / Photography Historian
+33 (0)6 83 16 12 04
LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/pub/julien-faure-conorton/60/453/696/en
Twitter : @Photo_Secession
The Royal Opera House in the UK are looking to clear usage on an image beleived to be by photographer Richard Dormer of Margot Fonteyn ,1960. The only details I have are that it is an image of Margot Fonteyn as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty ...details on PhotoArchiveNews.com
Matt Butson, Vice President, Hulton Archive walks and talks us through another sectionof the vast Getty Images collection.
This two-day conference has been organised in association with the exhibitions, 'Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience, 1950s-1990s' which are currently on display at the V&A and Black Cultural Archives, Brixton. The conference raises awareness of the contribution of black Britons to British culture and society, as well as to the art of photography. Speakers include Barbie Asante, Jennie Baptiste, James Barnor, Pogus Caesar, Ingrid Pollard, Syd Shelton and The Islington Twins.
The conference is free but booking is essential. For further information and to book a place please phone the V&A Bookings Office on +44 (0)20 7942 2211
Staying Power: Narratives of Black British Experience
Friday 22–Saturday 23 May 2015
Day One: Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, V&A, South Kensington
Day Two: Lambeth Town Hall and Black Cultural Archives, Brixton
To view the conference programme please visit the V&A's website:
Starting a digitisation project completely from scratch has its challenges but it also has a great number of advantages, not least being given the opportunity to thoroughly understand the reasons for digitising the collection and being able to research and think through the workflow and methodology in advance to make sure that we get it right first time. So often, digitisation is undertaken piecemeal and without a clear plan, and what results is a collection of disparate images of varying quality which need to be revisited over time.
The challenges of the project, namely a limited budget, tight time frame (two years of initial funding), reliance on a volunteer workforce and need to use pre-existing kit could have proved difficult but in fact, as we worked through our approach to this project, these limitations have actually helped to clearly inform decisions about what we can and cannot manage and how we should approach the material, and in their way have largely simplified the process.
You can read the rest of the blog here
Our latest blog, by The Past on Glass Project Officer Abby Matthews
Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) was a pioneer of early photography who created an outstanding body of work depicting the landscape and architecture of India and Burma (now Myanmar) in the 1850s. This major presentation of Tripe’s photographs will include more than 60 of his most striking views taken between 1852 and 1860.
On display will be Tripe’s photographs of architectural sites and monuments, ancient and contemporary religious and secular buildings, as well as roads, bridges, moats, landscape vistas and geological formations throughout India and Burma. Many of the images are the first photographic records of these sites and the prints on view represent the highlights of Tripe’s output. They will be shown alongside bound albums of his work, a panoramic scroll and two models of monuments similar to his subjects.
Linnaeus Tripe was born in 1822 in Devon, the ninth of 12 children, joining the East India Company army in 1839 and stationed in India throughout the 1840s. He learned to photograph during several years on leave in England in the early 1850s. The exhibition will highlight Tripe’s considerable skill at a time when photography was about to undergo rapid change and the practice and recognition was becoming more widely adopted. It will also show his understanding that photography could be used to convey information about unknown cultures and places to the general public.
The photographs on view represent two major expeditions and preserve an important period in Indian, Burmese and British history. In 1855 Tripe was appointed by the governor-general of India to accompany a mission to Burma to study the area. Here Tripe became the first person to photograph the region’s remarkable architecture and landscapes. He then went on to be the first to photograph extensively in south India after his subsequent appointment as photographer to the Madras government. Through this official role Tripe aimed to capture as much of the south Indian region as possible. After each trip he returned with more than 200 large format paper negatives, from which he carefully oversaw the complex printing in his Bangalore studio that he founded for this purpose.
Tripe’s photographs are technically complex and he is known for his innovative precision with the camera, paying close attention to both his composition and its realisation when printing. To evoke atmospheric effects Tripe retouched most of his negatives by applying pigment in thin layers and included in the exhibition will be a selection of waxed-paper negatives that reveal these working methods. Also on display will be a segment of a panoramic scroll showing the inscriptions around the base of the Great Pagoda temple in Tanjore. Composed of more than 20 prints assembled and mounted onto a long canvas scroll, it is now regarded as a considerable technical achievement, given the physical and climatic conditions of the time.
Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852-1860 is organized jointly by the National Gallery of Art, Washington and and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with the V&A. It includes photographs from the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the British Library and many private lenders, as well as photographs and objects from the V&A’s own extensive collection of Tripe’s works. The exhibtion is curated by Roger Taylor, Professor Emeritus, Photographic History, De Montfort University. It has been adapted for the V&A by Martin Barnes, V&A Senior Curator of Photographs.
Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852-1860 Part of the V&A India Festival
24 June – 11 October 2015 www.vam.ac.uk/linnaeustripe| #LinnaeusTripe
Image: Amerapoora: Colossal Statue of Gautama Close to the North End of the Wooden Bridge, 1855, Collection of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro
Soldiers and Suffragettes curator, Anna Sparham, Edwardian postcard expert, Guy Atkins and women’s history specialist Di Atkinson, will discuss the remarkable career of Christina Broom and review the role of the image in Edwardian society. There will also be an exclusive after hours viewing of the exhibition at the first of the museum's late night openings of the exhibition.
See more here
Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom
Friday 19 June – Sunday 1 November 2015
For information on the exhibition and associated events see more here.
Christina Broom is widely considered to be the UK’s first female press photographer, beginning her photographic career at the age of 40, in 1903, when she published her first news photographs as postcards.
This major exhibition, the first entirely dedicated to her, will feature a cross-section of her impressive work including many photographs that have previously been in private collections and never-before-seen on public display. These will be joined by original glass plate negatives, postcards, and objects which build a fuller picture of Broom’s character and her career, including personal possessions, letters, event passes, autograph books, notebooks and cuttings books.
For more information about the exhibition click here.
Image: 'Bermondsey B’hoys’ from the 2nd Grenadier Guards inside their base at Wellington Barracks in either 1914 or 1915 © Museum of London
The London Photograph Fair has announced a collaboration with the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust at its debut Special Edition. Based at Dimbola Museum and Galleries in Freshwater on the Isle of White (the former home of the Camerons), the Trust will be bringing original photographs, albums and personal artifacts from their collection to London; a rare treat to see these artworks on the mainland, even more so in the perfect neo-Gothic surroundings of Two Temple Place, Embankment.
Expert talks on Julia Margaret Cameron's life and career, plus demonstrations of her technique will also be given. The venue - the magnificent Thames-side mansion commissioned by William Waldorf Astor - is one of London's hidden architectural gems, opening to the public for only the second time this year.
The London Photograph Fair is a boutique event for fine, rare, and vintage photographs. International dealers will be offering the opportunity to purchase works from the entire history of the medium, including fine art, travel, exploration, fashion, architectural and press photographs, as well as albums and photobooks.
The London Photograph Fair takes place on 23 and 24 May 2015. See: http://www.photofair.co.uk/
The Bodleian Libraries has launched an ambitious project to create a new web-based research tool that will allow scholars and members of the public to view and search the complete photographic works of British photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. This online catalogue raisonné will include images of thousands of photographs and negatives by Talbot and his close circle. It will shed new light on Talbot’s photographic discoveries and will invite academics and the public to help fill in the blanks about mystery images.
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was one of the greatest polymaths of the Victorian age, and is most famous today for being the British ‘founder of photography’. He recognised that negatives, with their ability to make multiple prints on paper, would define the central path of photography right through to the digital age. During his career Talbot and his collaborators created more than 4,500 distinct images. Approximately 25,000 of his original negatives and prints are known to survive worldwide. Some are held in the Bodleian’s recently acquired W.H.F. Talbot archive, while other major collections are held by the British Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Media Museum and numerous other institutions, and in the ownership of private individuals worldwide. Collectively, these negatives and prints map the technical and aesthetic progress of the new art of photography, however there is still more that researchers want to find out about these works and, more broadly, the invention of photography and the emergence of Talbot himself as the first photographic artist.
‘A Catalogue Raisonné of Talbot’s work will help unlock the enormous artistic, documentary and technical information embodied in these images,’ said Professor Larry J. Schaaf, Director of the Talbot catalogue raisonné at the Bodleian Libraries and also a Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford.
Catalogues raisonnés are common in the world of art, serving as a detailed academic inventory of an artist’s work. However, nothing of this scale has been attempted for photography. The website, due to go live later in 2015, will be an essential resource for scholars in the history of photography, history of art and the history of science. It will include a great deal of documentary content, such as early images of cities and landscapes that will be of interest in many fields. The images of prints and negatives on the website will be accompanied by notes, annotations and essays with links to relevant publications and other sites. The resource will include the work of Talbot as well as his close circle of family and colleagues who collaborated in his photographic work, including his wife Constance and his mother Lady Elisabeth Feilding.
In contrast to traditional catalogues raisonnés, which are often published as printed volumes, the Talbot catalogue will be a dynamic online publication, allowing material to be published in draft form in order to make as much information available as early as possible. The website will invite members of the public and scholars from a range of fields – from architecture to botany – to add to the catalogue, for example by helping identify unknown people or buildings in photographs or contributing research related to Talbot’s life and work.
‘With a volunteer army of contributors, I hope we’ll discover new photographs and that new research questions will arise,’ said Schaaf. He adopted a similar interactive approach as founder and editor of the online database The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, which contains annotated full transcriptions of more than 10,000 of Talbot’s letters.
Schaaf has been researching Talbot for more than four decades and has studied Talbot originals in nearly all collections worldwide. His research was greatly enhanced by the generous co-operation of Talbot’s descendants at Lacock Abbey, particularly the late Anthony Burnett-Brown, the great-great grandson of the inventor.
Schaaf developed pioneering databases of Talbot’s work in the early 1980s, before digital humanities became the force that it is today. The Bodleian’s Talbot Catalogue Raisonné will build on these extensive databases and present them in a modern and publicly accessible form. It will contain records on the entire corpus of images produced by Talbot and his close circle. In order to add a rich collection of images to the catalogue raisonné, the project will draw on collections from a number of institutions including the National Media Museum in Bradford, the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Smithsonian Institution and the British Library. Generous funding has been provided by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
A blog has been launched to provide updates on the development of the William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné and it can be found online at http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
The image of Christina by Mervyn O'Gorman will be familiar having been used to promote the exhibition Drawn by Light. The Royal Photographic Society Collection which is still showing at the National Media Museum, Bradford. The Mailonline is trying to find out who Christina was in a feature here. It has interviewed Drawn by Light curator 'and Leeds University lecturer' (better known to BPH readers a National Media Museum curator) Colin Harding who did some biographical research without finding an answer. He has suggested that she was not O'Gorman's daughter but possibly a niece.
O'Gorman was born in Brighton is 1871 and studied science at University College, Dubin. He later worked in electrical engineering and had a penchant for cars, eventually being crowned vice president of the Royal Automobile Club.
The talented entrepreneur married Florence Rasch in 1897, and during the first World War, he became a lieutenant-colonel in the RFC.
When he died in 1958 at the age of 87, Melvyn's obituary described him as 'a man of agile mind and Hibernian eloquence'.
The article is well worth a read and if you know the answer to who Christina was and what happened to her please contact BPH. It would be nice to scoop the Mail!
Image: The Royal Photographic Society Collection/National Media Museum.
