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On the retirement of Professor Elizabeth Edwards, applications are invited for the full-time, permanent post of Professor of Photographic History, based within the School of Humanities.

The successful candidate will be appointed as the Director of the Photographic History Research Centre which was established in 2010 and is already widely acknowledged as a world-leading centre for the interdisciplinary study of the history of photography in all its aspects. He or she will also be expected to contribute to the broader development of History and of Photography as subjects at De Montfort.

Applicants should have an international scholarly and/or curatorial reputation in one or more fields of photographic history, an outstanding publication record, and be able to demonstrate experience of research leadership and funding development.

Closing date 18 September 2015 / Interviews: mid-October 2015

See the full specification and job description here

A recent paper in the Journal of Museum Ethnography discusses Lewis Carroll's photograph 'Dressed as a New Zealander' and discusses the props use by Carroll and the wider context around the image, the sitters and its subsequent history.

The full paper reference is available here: Jeremy Coote and Christopher Morton, 'Dressed as a New Zealander', or an ethnographic mishmash? Notes and reflections on two photographs by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Journal of Museum Ethnography, no.28 (March 2015), pp. 150–172; and it may be available directly from the authors. 

Image: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

With thanks to Professor Elizabeth Edwards. 

The 2015 PHRC Annual International Conference addresses the complex and wide range question of ‘photography in print.’ The conference aims to explore the functions, affects and dynamics of photographs on the printed page. Many of the engagements with photographs, both influential and banal, are through print, whether in newspapers, books, magazines or advertising. Photography in Print will consider what are the practices of production and consumption? What are the affects of design and materiality? And how does the photograph in print present a new dynamic of photography’s own temporal and spatial qualities? In addition, photography can be said to be ‘made’ through the printed page and ‘print communities’. Therefore, the conference will also explore what is the significance of photography’s own robust journal culture in the reproduction of photographic values? How has photographic history been delivered through the printed page? What are the specific discourses of photography in the print culture of disciplines as diverse as history and art history, science and technology?

Photography in Print
June 22-23, 2015
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Registration closes 18 June

For registration details and programme

https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-conference-2015/

Open Book Publishers have published Thomas Annan of Glasgow: Pioneer of the Documentary Photograph by Lionel Gossman. It is claimed to be the first account of Annan’s full achievement as a photographer. 

The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, Thomas Annan’s photographic record of the slums of the city prior to their demolition in accordance with the City of Glasgow Improvements Act of 1866, is widely recognized as a classic of nineteenth-century documentary photography. However, Annan’s achievement as a photographer of paintings, portraits, and landscapes is less widely known. To repair this neglect, Thomas Annan of Glasgow offers a handy, comprehensive and copiously illustrated overview of the full range of the photographer’s work. Successive chapters deal with each of the main fields of his activity, touching along the way on issues such as the nineteenth-century debate over the status of photography — a mechanical practice or an artistic one? — and the still ongoing controversies surrounding the documentary photograph in particular.

Lionel Gossman, a native of Glasgow whose own graduation portrait was made, in 1951, at the studio of T. &. R. Annan in Sauchiehall Street, has spent his career as a teacher of literature at universities in the United States (Johns Hopkins and Princeton). Here he returns to his roots to produce a tribute to one of his city’s most talented and conscientious nineteenth-century artists. He chose to publish with the innovative Open Book Publishers so that Thomas Annan of Glasgow could be read for free online and reach the largest number of readers possible.

The book can be accessed here: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/339/thomas-annan-of-glasgow--pioneer-of-the-documentary-photograph It is also available in interactive PDF and e-book versions.

Open Book Publishers is a non-profit organization, run by academics in Cambridge and London. We are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. This dedication to changing the nature of the traditional academic book continues with Thomas Annan of Glasgow.

Special Auction Services is holding an auction of cameras on 1 and 2 July 2015 which includes a large collection of British cameras, especially brass and mahogany. Also included is a telescope reputed to be the former property of William Henry Fox Talbot.

The description reads: An early 19th Century three-draw brass and mahogany Abraham of Bath, 1½in. Pocket Telescope, believed to be formerly the property of the great photographic pioneer William Fox Talbot (1800-1877), engraved ‘William Talbot Esq’ to brass collar ring, with hinged eyepiece dustcap, clear fingerprints to third draw, 550mm long extended, F-G, lacquer worn, objective dust cap missing; although the provenance of this piece is not known, researches have indicated that it is extremely unlikely that anyone else of the same name would have purchased a telescope engraved in such a manner and bought from a source so close to Fox Talbot’s home at Lacock Abbey; it could have been a gift from his stepfather, Rear-Admiral Charles Fielding or Sir John Herschel,a known patron of Abraham’s; the Abraham family were involved in the retailing of early photogenic paper £4,000-£6,000

More details of the cameras and the telescope can be found at the SAS website here. 

The Royal Photographic Society is encouraging everyone interested in photography to nominate an individual connected with photography to become the face of the new £20 banknote. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has announced that the next £20 note will celebrate Britain’s achievements in the visual arts and The RPS believes a UK photographer or photographic scientist is well-placed to be selected. 

The BBC's Arts Correspondence Will Gompertz has come out as a supporter of Cameron. See here.

RPS Director-General said: "Photography has been the defining medium of the ninteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries and it's inconceivable that a photographer or someone connected with photography would not be chosen as the face of the new £20 banknote. If you own or use a camera or enjoy looking at photographs think about who you would like to see on the £20 note and nominate that person - and let the Society know by emailing director@rps.org so we can keep the UK photography community updated ".

Members of the public will have two months to nominate people of historic significance from the visual arts including photographers and filmmakers – whose work shaped British thought, innovation, leadership, values and society. The public can nominate characters from within the field of visual arts on the Bank’s website.

Nominations are required by 19 July 2015. Click here to make your own nomination and to learn more. 

The public nomination programme is the first to be held under the Bank’s new character selection process which was put in place to ensure that the choice of characters for the Bank’s notes commanded broad respect and legitimacy. In line with principles announced in December 2013, the field of visual arts was chosen by a new Banknote Character Advisory Committee. Following the two month nominations period, the full Committee, with input from public focus groups, will draw up a shortlist of characters from which the Governor will make the final choice. The selected character will be announced during spring 2016. The new £20 note will be introduced into circulation in 3-5 years.

- See more at: http://www.rps.org/news/2015/may/nominate-a-photography-person-for-a-new-banknote#sthash.2WdA0X3b.dpuf

UPDATE: The Bank of England has issued a list of visual artists nominated by the public which can be seen here. It features a number of photographers. Please continue to visit the link above and continue to nominate photographers to ensure that they make the final short-list.

The works in these two component displays are drawn from around 2500 photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries generously donated by Terence Pepper, Senior Special Adviser on Photographs. Curators’ Choice is a tribute to his skills of detection and identification, and his eye for an overlooked or mis-identified sitter or photographer, as well as his interest in charting cultural life in all its variety.

Terence’s long and illustrious career at the National Portrait Gallery as Curator of Photographs and Head of the Photographs Collection (1978-2013) has left its mark in the remarkable body of photographic works acquired for the Collection in this period. Terence’s expertise, energy and enthusiasm transformed the Gallery’s photographic holdings, and today the Photographs Collection comprises over 250,000 portraits by leading photographers including many that he has helped bring back to prominence.

This selection, taken from the gift, has been made by staff who worked with Terence Pepper over a number of years: Georgia Atienza, Clare Freestone, Imogen Lyons, Constantia Nicolaides and Helen Trompeteler.

The display in Room 24 shows photographs from the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Beginning with cartes-de-visite and continuing with cabinet cards, stereoscopic cards, cigarette cards and postcards, presented broadly chronologically, the selection reflects Terence’s recognition and championing of the popular forms of photography that helped drive the medium’s development during the nineteenth-century and which are integral to its history.

The themes covered in the display in Room 31 aim to reflect Terence’s career, his appreciation of the arts, his championing of press prints as an invaluable record of key historic moments, his breadth of knowledge of popular culture, notably from the 1960s, as well as the defining exhibitions he curated.

Curators' Choice: Photographs from the Terence Pepper Gift

The 2015 bicentennial anniversary of Julia Margaret Cameron’s birth is a timely opportunity for a reappraisal of the interdisciplinary significance of her work. The last twenty years have witnessed growing art-historical and literary interest in this pioneer of Victorian photography, yet much remains to be said about the range and import of her cultural influences, as well as her participation in Victorian debates surrounding the arts and sciences, religion and philosophy.

While scholarship on the interrelations between Victorian visual and verbal cultures has flourished in the past two decades, Julia Margaret Cameron’s contribution to this paradigm has received relatively little attention. With the exception of her photographic illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, her engagement with biblical, classical and literary narratives has been overlooked. Similarly, the critical focus on Cameron’s photographic portraiture has occluded her participation in wider Victorian artistic, scientific, philosophic and religious discourses.

This conference aims to generate renewed interest in Cameron’s intellectual and aesthetic exchanges with Victorian artists, theorists, writers, and scientists.Planned to coincide with the 2015 bicentenary celebrations of her birth, it aims to debate the importance and legacy of her cultural contribution; to emphasise the interdisciplinary appeal of her photography; and to examine her significant engagement with key aspects of Victorian technical and cultural innovation.

The conference will include an evening performance of Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater: A Comedy on Friday 3 July and an organised tour on Sunday 5 July to Dimbola Museum and Galleries, Julia Margaret Cameron’s home in Freshwater, Isle of Wight.

Full 3 day package

Cost: £120.00. Includes 3 day conference registration, a ticket for Freshwater: A Comedy and travel and entry to Dimbola Museum and Galleries

Single day package

Cost: £50.00 .1 day conference registration for Saturday 4 July only

The programme is here. 

More information and registration is here.

Image: © The Royal Photographic Society Collection / NMeM / SSPL.

Olhares sobre a fotografia is a new e-book by Nuno Pinheiro, free to download from Academia.edu. It is a collection of texts, mostly published in the extinct Lisbon daily A Capital dealing with early Portuguese photography. One of them is "Gramophones da Luz" a 1990's academic paper, which is the first try on having photography seen by a social history point of view, preceding other works from the author.

There also some newer texts up to 2015.

https://www.academia.edu/12459152/Olhares_sobre_a_fotografia

Nuno Pinheiro

Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) in Istanbul hosts the exhibition Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914 between 21 April and 19 August 2015. Curated by Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldem and Bahattin Öztuncay, the exhibition mainly consists of albums and archival materials from Ömer M. Koç Collection as well as photographs from the albums commissioned by the Sultan Abdülhamid II.

The exhibition explores some of the most striking aspects of the close connection between photography and modernity in the specificity of the Ottoman Empire. After the birth of photography in 1839, the Empire embraced the new technology with great enthusiasm. In fact, the impact and meaning of photography were compounded by the thrust of modernization and westernization of the Tanzimat movement. By the turn of the century, photography in the Ottoman lands had become a standard feature of everyday life, of public media, and of the state apparatus.

During Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign modernity was often embedded in the photographic act, transforming it into a common and mundane practice showcasing his empire for Western audiences. Camera Ottomana displays different forms of these images disseminated through the illustrated press, postcards sent out to family members or anonymous collectors, portraits presented to friends and acquaintances, or pictures taken of employees and convicts, photography had started to invade practically every sphere of public and private life. The exhibition brings together the Empire’s modern image with an extensive selection of photographs, emphasizing the widespread use of photography in various areas such as propaganda, journalism, education, criminology, and medicine.

Designed by PATTU Architecture, delicate materials such as daguerreotypes, glass negatives and stereographs are carefully placed in the gallery among the meticulous selection of archival documents and photos most of which are on display for the first time. Visitors are also able to examine different techniques that are used throughout the history of photography by the digital technology applied in the exhibition.

A book titled Camera Ottmana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914 by Koç University Press containing essays by Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldem, Bahattin Öztuncay, Frances Terpak and Peter Bonfitto accompanies the exhibition.

Camera Ottmana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840 - 1914
21 April – 19 August 2015
Curators: Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldem, Bahattin Öztuncay

Visiting Hours

Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00 – 18:30
Sunday: 12:00 – 18:30
Exhibition is closed on Mondays.

Admission is free.

Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations
İstiklal Cad. No: 181 Merkez Han
34433 Beyoğlu İstanbul - Türkiye
T: +90 212 393 61 14 F: +90 212 245 17 61 http://rcac.ku.edu.tr

http://cameraottomana.ku.edu.tr/