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The National Library of Scotland has an extensive collection of photographic material, including loose and mounted photographs, photograph albums, slides, negatives, volumes illustrated with photographs and photographic postcards. There are several discrete photographic collections but most of the material is dispersed through the print and archival collections. The post of Photographic Collections Curator is one of several roles created as part of a project to improve the Library’s knowledge of these collections, to develop its policies and practices in this area, and to make the collections more accessible through description and digitisation.   

The Photographic Collections Curator will report to the Rare Books, Maps and Music Collections Manager but will work across the entire range of the collections, including General Collections, Manuscripts and Archives Collections and the Moving Image Archive as well as the RBMM collections. They will survey the photographic collections in their entirety, co-ordinate finding aids, inventories and catalogues, and will work on a project to digitise and create metadata for one particular collection.    

Applications are encouraged from individuals who have both subject expertise in the history of photography and its technical processes and experience of working with photographic collections in a library, archive or other cultural heritage institution – in particular, experience of cataloguing and description, collection management, digitisation and/or interpretation.     

Please click here for job description

Working at the Library

See more and apply here

The Legacy of Alfred Hugh Fisher and the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) is a PhD research scholarship including stipend and tuition fee costs offered within the Photographic History Research Centre in the School of Humanities at De Montfort University In collaboration with the Royal Commonwealth Society department at Cambridge University Library.  It is available to UK or EU students who are suitably qualified and have outstanding potential as researchers.

In offering this scholarship the University aims to further develop its proven research strengths in the study of photographic histories, practices and cultures. It is an excellent opportunity for a candidate of exceptional promise to contribute to a stimulating, world-class research environment.

The Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) was a body charged in 1902 with creating a visual record of Britain’s overseas territories for use in British schools. Cambridge University Library (CUL) maintains its photographic archives, and this project will focus on the Fisher Photograph Collection. Mainly comprising of photographs taken by artist and amateur photographer Alfred Hugh Fisher in 1907-1910, the collection documents changes to physical and sociocultural environments across the globe during the first decade of the twentieth century. A collaboration between the Photographic History Research Centre and Cambridge University Library, this project will explore the significance of visual records in cultural exchange, and how subsequent re-use of images from the Fisher Photograph Collection led to innovative understandings of ‘other’ cultures and lands.

PhD supervisor: Dr Gil Pasternak

PhD Commencing October 2017

For a more detailed description of the scholarship, the subject area at DMU and an application pack please visit http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/graduate-school/phd-scholarships.aspx.

For additional details you may also want to check this advertisement: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AXP124/graduate-school-full-bursary-phd-scholarship-the-legacy-of-alfred-hugh-fisher-and-the-colonial-office-visual-instruction-committee/.

Please direct academic queries to Dr Gil Pasternak on +44 (0)116 201 3951 or email gpasternak(at)dmu.ac.uk. For administrative queries contact the Graduate School office email: researchstudents@dmu.ac.uk, tel: 0116 250-6309.
Completed applications should be returned together with two supporting references and an academic transcript.

Applications are invited from UK or EU students with a Master’s degree or good first degree in a relevant subject (First, 2:1 or equivalent). Doctoral scholarships are available for up to three years full-time study commencing in October 2017 consisting of a bursary of £14,296 per annum in addition to waiver of tuition fees.

Please quote ref: ADHFB2

CLOSING DATE: Monday 10th April, 2017.

Interviews for shortlisted candidates will be held by Friday 28th April approximately

Making Jamaica which is open at Autograph/ABP, London, explores how a new image of Jamaica was created through photography in the late nineteenth century. More than 70 historical photographs, lantern slides and stereocards reveal the carefully constructed representation of this transitional period in Jamaica’s history. For first time, its people are depicted as an industrious nation post-emancipation, and their surroundings as a desirable tourist destination and tropical commodity.

Under the Dark Cloth: Working with Photography Studio Archives is an International one-day symposium at QUAD, Derby, on Saturday, 8 April 2017, presented to coincide with the exhibition People, Places, and Things: the W. W. Winter’s Archive, on show at Derby Museum during Format 2017. 

Commercial photography studios were once common sights on almost every high street.  Each has its own distinct history and place within the lives of the communities they documented and served.  Many of these studios are now closed, their rich archives lost or destroyed, and the history of these important social, commercial and cultural institutions lost forever.

This event welcomes a range of speakers who have saved, preserved, researched and presented exhibitions about studio archives.  Their papers explore a diverse range of subjects revealing how the photographic studio can contribute to migrant identity formation; how an Italian art dealer employed photography for commercial purposes;  the issues for studio photography when it moves across from a private space into the public domain of the archive and the gallery; a remarkable project to salvage and restore the extraordinary studio of the Portuguese photographer Carlos Relvas and the work undertaken to preserve the archives of the two oldest working studios in the UK. The papers will be complimented by a short series of films about studio archive projects.  

Presented with support from the new Photography Collections Network, the event aims to provide a platform to share skills, knowledge, and experience among those working in this field, and to tell some of the stories about the studios, the photographers, their subjects and their archives. 

The event is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC), the Royal Photographic Society, The Photography Collections Network, QUAD, FORMAT Festival, Derby Museums, Arts Council England, W. W. Winter and The Art Fund.

See more and book here: http://www.formatfestival.com/events/symposium-under-dark-cloth

We’re delighted to announce details of the upcoming Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture’s one-day symposium on Researching, Writing and Exhibiting Photography.

Speakers: David Bate (University of Westminster); Benedict Burbridge (Sussex); Sara Davidmann (London College of Communication, in collaboration with Val Williams, London College of Communication); Anna Dannemann (The Photographer’s Gallery); Christopher Morton (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford); Russell Roberts (University of South Wales); Karen Shepherdson (Canterbury Christ Church); Kelley Wilder (De Montfort)

This one-day symposium seeks to explore current practices of researching, writing and exhibiting photography, three activities central to the production of knowledge about photography. The symposium will consider the intertwined relationships between these activities from two main standpoints. The first is the ways in which the practices of researching, writing and exhibiting photography draw from, influence and critique one another as they produce our understandings of the photographic. The second is the ways in which the photographic, understood here as technical forms and associated images, operates as a transformative force within society, and in doing so produces the field for researching, writing and exhibiting photography.

Organised into three successive panels – “Researching Photography”, “Writing Photography” and “Exhibiting Photography” – the event brings together researchers, writers and curators working in academic and commercial contexts, and whose interests span from photographic archives to contemporary photographic practice. The symposium will provide a platform to discuss conceptual, theoretical and practical approaches to the study, discourse and display of photography; and how their intertwined relationship(s) can offer reflections on approaching the opportunities and challenges presented by working in the arts and humanities today.

The event is free and open to all, but places are limited and booking is essential.

You can find further details of the programme, and can book your ticket, on the RWEP symposium website: http://rwepsymposium.weebly.com/

Further information from Sara Dominici at: s.dominici1@westminster.ac.uk

I thought that immersing a 100 year old+ RP (real photo) postcard in water would assist me to soak off marring patches stuck to the postcard that obscured a particular collectable photo postcard's right side edge. Once satisfactorily soaked 'marring bits' stuck to the photo could be picked off - thus, enabling restoration of my old RP postcard of the famous early 1900s violinist Jan Kubelick (of which I have a varied collection of his image as a child prodigy and into adulthood as the renowned violinist) to something of a satisfactory photo postcard (c.1910) collectable completeness. Further (before the disaster to ensue) I thought photo images were photographically 'fixed'. Or, was it that I made the disastrous mistake of boiling a kettle of which 'hot water' I poured over 'the to be restored 100 year old+ RP postcard' laid in a Pyrex glass dish - and to my horror saw the image immediately dissolve away before my eyes. I lifted the card out of its hot solution and the lovely Victorian image, smeared and smarmed, drained away terribly of its positive photographic life leaving a ghost of its former self.

1.%20Jan%20Kubelik%20.jpg 

2.%20Jan%20Kubelik%20.jpg       

The newly formed Photographic Collections Network has appointed staff who will be taking the PCN forward over the next 15 months, supported by the steering committee. They are:

• Paul Herrmann, Manager
• Johanna Mannerfelt Empson, Coordinator
• Helen Trompeteler, Researcher
• Steve Slack, Evaluator

For more on the PCN see: http://www.photocollections.org.uk/

There are a number of events, talks and exhibitions taking place across the United Kingdom that include the photography of Helen Muspratt throughout 2017. 

Glasgow School of Art: 4 March - 27 May: Exhibition: Franki Raffles “Observing Women at Work”

Two of Helen Muspratt’s photographs of women working in the fields, taken in the Soviet Union in 1936 will be shown and compared with those taken by Raffles during a visit to Russia in 1989.

www.gsa.ac.uk

Cambridge Science Festival: 20 March: talk by Jessica Sutcliffe: "Experiments in Photography - Cambridge in the Thirties"

Monday 20 March: 5.30 pm: Cambridge University Library

The talk will concentrate on the experimental work; solarisation, multiple exposure and rayograph techniques, carried out by by Helen with her partner, Lettice Ramsey after they set up Ramsey & Muspratt in Cambridge;

Booking opens on 20 February.

www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk

Durlston Castle, Swanage:  20 June - 12 July: Exhibition: Helen Muspratt Photographer

Exhibition of Helen,s work in her home town of Swanage. I will also de giving a talk during the exhibition. Date to be confirmed

Open daily 10.30 am - 5 pm

www.durlston.co.uk

Exhibition: Oxford Central Library

An exhibition will be held in the  Oxford Central Library later on this year. It already owns, and is digitising a number of Ramsey & Muspratt images and will reopen its newly revamped library with the show. There should be a considerable interest in the city where Helen Muspratt spent most of her working life and took portraits of numerous local people, both Town and Gown. 

See more here: http://www.helenmuspratt-photographer.com/

Shadows of War is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on Roger Fenton's pioneering photographs of the Crimean War, taken in 1855. Fenton was already an accomplished and respected photographer when he was sent by the publishers Agnew's to photograph a war that pitched Britain, France and Turkey as allies against Russia.  Arriving several months after the major battles were fought in 1854, Fenton focused on creating moving portraits of the troops, as well as capturing the stark, empty battlefields on which so many lost their lives.  Published in contemporary newspaper reports, Fenton's photographs showed the impact of war to the general public for the first time.  Through his often subtle and poetic interpretations Fenton created the genre of war photography, showing his extraordinary genius in capturing the futility of war.

A book of the same title by Sophie Gordon, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Royal Collection Trust will be published in August 2017, priced at £35. 

Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea, 1855
4 August 2017 – January 2018
Edinburgh: The Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse; then London: Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, from November 2018.

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/shadows-of-war/the-queens-gallery-palace-of-holyroodhouse

Hello everyone, I am a Kingston University filmmaking student in my third year and I am trying to track down a wet plate camera for my final project. We are making a film inspired by these portraits of hidden mothers. (linked below)

The film is about these beguiling sittings. We plan to shoot through the wet plate camera (almost using it as a lens/filter). We have worked in this way before, using through the viewfinder photography but with a Mamiya C330. Below are some stills from this work.

I was wondering if anyone had a wet plate camera they would be kind enough to let us take a look at it - to see if what we plan is feasible and possibly use it for our shoot. I am also quite keen on learning how to do wet plate photography (I’ve heard you can adapt an old Polaroid camera - any advice on this would be great.)

Please forgive my intrusion and thank you for your time and help,

Best,

Flo Wallace

During this 3-day workshop participants will learn about the deterioration affiliated with the various photographic processes. Storage, housing and exhibition guidelines will be discussed for negatives, 19th Century photographs and for modern and contemporary processes. During course practicals participants will view damage and deterioration on study collection photographs. The course also covers the main aspects of loan requirements and condition surveying of photographs.

Clara von Waldthausen, instructor of the course, received her Masters in Conservation in 2000. After her studies she researched the autochrome process at the CRCC in Paris under the supervision of Bertrand Lavedrine. Waldthausen has since been in private practice working for most of the major museums in the Netherlands, and teaching workshops and students internationally. Since 2014, she coordinates and teaches the Master in Photograph Conservation at the University of Amsterdam. (http://www.conservation-restoration-training.nl)

Read more here: Preservation of Photograph Collections

Date:        29, 30 & 31 March 2017

Costs:      695,00 euro excl. VAT 

Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The course will be taught in English. The costs include lunch & coffee breaks, and the course reader. To register for this course please send an email to: fotorestauratie@icloud.com  

The Constructing Scientific Communities (https://conscicom.org/) and the Million Pictures projects (http://a-million-pictures.wp.hum.uu.nl/) are pleased to announce a special workshop, hosted at London’s Royal Institution, to consider the multiple relationships that existed between popular science and the magic lantern, with an emphasis on the long nineteenth century. Papers will consider magic lantern slides, instruments, and instrument makers, as well as considering issues of curation and performance. A special attraction will be Jeremy Brooker’s evening entertainment concerning John Tyndall’s celebrated lectures at the RI.

All workshop attendees will be also welcome to join this public lecture without charge. Attendance is free, but space is limited. To attend, email: gb224@le.ac.uk by March 1st, 2017.

Programme

9:30-10:15 – Coffee on arrival

10:15-10:30 – Introductory Comments. Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford) and Geoff Belknap (Leicester University), Constructing Scientific Communities Project. 

10:30-12:00 – Panel 1: Approaches to Science and the Magic Lantern

• Iwan Morus (University of Aberystwyth), ‘Seeing the Light: Fact and Artefact in Victorian Lantern Culture’
• Sarah Dellmann (Utrecht University),  ‘Images of Science and Scientists: Lantern Slides of Excursions from Utrecht University, NL (c. 1900-1950)’
• Emily Hayes (Exeter University), ‘Fashioned by physics: the ‘scope and methods’ of Halford Mackinder’s geographical imagination’

12:00-1:00 – Lunch

1:00-2:30 – Panel 2: Magic Lanterns and Museums/Curation

• Charlotte New and Meagan Smith (Royal Institution), ‘Shedding light on yesterday: Highlighting the slide collections of the RI and relevant preservation’
• Frank Gray (Screen archive South-east, Brighton), ‘Working with Archive Collections: Development, Access and Historical Context’

2:30-3:00 – Coffee break

3:00-4:30 – Panel 3: Materiality of the lantern

• Phillip Roberts (York University), ‘Science and Media in the Industrial Revolution: Instrument Makers and the Magic Lantern Trade’
• Kelly Wilder (De Montfort University), ‘From Lantern Slides to Powerpoint: Photography and the Materiality of Projection’
• Deac Rossell (Goldsmiths University), ‘Changing Places: Tracking Magic Lantern Culture from Physics to Chemistry to Cinema’

4:30-4:45 – Closing Remarks. Joe Kember and Richard Crangle (Exeter University), Million Pictures Project.

6:15-7:15 – Drinks Reception

7:30-9:00 – Evening lantern show for the general public:

• Jeremy Brooker, A Light on Albemarle Street: John Tyndall and the Magic Lantern

The pre-launch beta version of the William Henry Fox Talbot catalogue raisonné is now available in advance of the formal launch announcement on Friday, 10 February - the day before what would have been Talbot's 217th birthday on 11 February.

At the time of writing there are some 1345 searchable records but this is will expand significantly to more than 25,000 records as the project continues to document the whole of Talbot's photography corpus.

Take a look here: http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

BPH reported in September 2016 that Rock House, Edinburgh, was up for sale. After an extended period Rock House has finally sold for more than £1.7 million. The new owner wishes to remain anonymous.

Rock House was built in the 1750s, the house became part of photographic history when in 1843 Robert Adamson moved into the property, followed by his business partner and artist, Hill, in 1844. The partnership created some of the most beautiful and important calotype portraits during the photography's early years. As a consequence, Roddy Simpson, an photographic history based at the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow, commented: "Rock House, Calton Hill, Edinburgh, has an unrivalled place in the history of Scottish photography and could be said to be the most famous address in photography.'.

Read more here:  http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/15071987.Historic_home_of_Scottish_photography_sold_for_more_than___1_7m/ and see the property details here: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-42425952.html

From the sepia-toned mass graves of the American Civil War to today’s drone shots of the destroyed Syrian city of Aleppo, war photographs have shaped and continue to inform our understanding of human conflict.  Far from neutral, war photographs challenge our sense of humanity in a complex exchange between ‘taking’ and ‘viewing’. Exploring this relationship through an analytical rather than aesthetic perspective, our six-week course will introduce you to the ethical, theoretical and practical issues connected with taking, viewing and reproducing war photographs.

Beginning with a historical overview and rare opportunity to view original war photographs from the Library’s collection, we’ll consider key themes including photography and truth, ethics and aesthetics, and the idea of cultural memory. Throughout the course we’ll refer to the Library’s extensive photography collections, and analyze photographic images using a variety of theoretical approaches.

Centering our course within contemporary practice, we’ll also spend an exclusive evening at the nearby Foundling Museum, where innovative documentary artist Mark Neville will talk frankly about his photographs taken on the frontline in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Kenya, on display in the exhibition Child’s Play (3 February–30 April 2017).

This course is led by Dr Eleanor Chiari (University College, London) with contributions from British Library curator John Falconer (Lead Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photography Collections) and documentary artist Mark Neville.

In collaboration with the Foundling Museum.

Course dates: Tuesdays 21 and 28 February and  7, 14, 21 and 28 March

Times: 18.00 – 20.00

Read the course outline and see more here.