Royal Mail has withdrawn a stamp design marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day - after BBC News pointed out it showed US troops landing in what was Dutch New Guinea, nearly 8,500 miles from France.
For the full article see https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46694509
What is interesting to me is not just Atkins choice of the new medium of photography to describe, both scientifically and aesthetically, the beauty and detail of her collection of seaweeds; but within that new medium of photography, she chose not the photogenic or calotype process, but the graphic cyanotype process with its vivid use of the colour blue, a 'means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints'.
Here we have a process that reproduces reality as in a diagram, a diagrammatic process that is then doubly reinforced when Atkins places her specimens directly on the cyanotype paper producing a photogram, a photographic image made without a camera. The resultant negative shadow image shows variations in tone that are dependent upon the transparency of the objects used. (Wikipedia)
Atkins photographs, produced "with great daring, creativity, and technical skill" are "a groundbreaking achievement in the history of photography and book publishing." While Atkins' books can be seen as the first systematic application of photography to science, each photograph used for scientific study or display of its species or type, there is a much more holistic creative project going on here.
Can you imagine the amount of work required to learn the calotype process, gather your thoughts, photograph the specimens, make the prints, write the text to accompany the images, and prepare the number of volumes to self-publish the book, all within a year? For any artist, this amount of concentrated, focused work requires an inordinate amount of time and energy and, above all, a clear visualisation of the outcome that you want to achieve.
That this was achieved by a woman in 1843, "in contrast to the constraints experienced by women in Victorian England," makes Atkins achievement of scientific accuracy, ethereal beauty and sublime transcendence in her photographs truly breathtaking.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
READ THE FULL TEXT AND SEE THE IMAGES AT https://wp.me/pn2J2-aRJ
Anna Atkins (1799-1871)
Ulva latissima, from Volume III of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1853
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Just after World War 2 the UK Developing and Printing (Photofinishing) trade was still mainly printing amateur snapshots by contact methods. But by the mid 1950s automatic projection printers had been developed and the so called “enprint” was born. At this time, in the UK, Kodak Limited had brought out their Velox Projection Printer and Ilford Limited were marketing the Kenprinter that was manufactured by a subsidiary company, Kennington and Bourlet Limited of Brentford, Middlesex. The Kenprinter and the VPP were both enlarging projection printers and used a soft grade of paper three and a half inches wide in rolls of up to 500 feet. Exposure was automatically controlled by a photocell and associated electronics.
The Kenprinter was patented by it’s inventor Arnold Reginald Kennington in the mid 1950s.
The Science Museum Group have an example of a Kodak VPP in their collection but do not seem to have a Kenprinter. Internet searches also suggest that no other museum has one.
I have recently discovered with an Internet search an export version of a Kenprinter that is presently for sale by a Danish building materials reclamation company.
https://www.genbyg.dk/en/curious_items/?view_prod=79346/
The machine may not be complete but from photographs posted on the Internet it only appears to lack the removable legs, the foot pedal and the paper pressure plate. It does have all three lenses (these were usually made by Dallmeyer) and a selection of negative carriers. I wonder if any Photographic, Scientific or Technology Museum, or any individual with storage space, could get involved in acquiring this very rare piece of British photographic history?
The Kenprinter was in use by many D&P companies across the UK and I can recall over five different photographic businesses using them in the Great Yarmouth area in the 1960s. Several years ago I built a web site about Ilford’s D&P equipment, there is more information about the Kenprinter on this site.
http://www.greatyarmouthphotographic.co.uk/ilfordltd/page7.html
The Kenprinter illustrated here is the even rarer 600 model that produced prints up to whole plate size.
Looking to identify this Officer. 6 x 4 inch albumen print with no ID. Grenadier Guards? I think that's a cap with plumage, and a sword hilt.
Many thanks in advance,
David McGreevy
In one of his recent statements, Noam Chomsky presented a truly pessimistic diagnosis of our times: the very beginning of the 21st century led us towards the crisis of democracy. Nowadays, we need to confront the system in which property relations play a decisive role in our social network. Power, according to Chomsky, is inevitably associated with wealth. In consequence, the rules of democratic societies are no longer valid, since the capital helps to avoid them.
The need to look at the problem of power in a broader way, which would go beyond the context of political domination, has already become strongly present in contemporary humanities. This topic became the subject of interest of the authorities of our academic discourse (especially Michel Foucault, Pierre Nora or Bruno Latour). Chomsky, however, in the aforementioned statement, also raised a second issue, which is especially important in our attempts to analyse today’s iconosphere: the phenomenon of the so-called ‘fake news’. At this point, his thought meets the observations of Giorgio Agamben. The recognition of the condition of our times made by both scholars is accompanied by the observations regarding the crisis of images. Paradoxically, despite the gradual loss of faith in the image (progressing with the growing awareness of the ways of manipulating it and using it as a means of persuasion) the thesis of Hans Belting, claiming that “we live in images and understand the world in images” still remains in force. After all, armed conflicts and trade wars are followed by the stream of provocative photographs. This spectacle of suffering was considered as a product created for consumption (Susan Sontag) or as a fast stream of “photo-shocks” (Roland Barthes).
We are strongly convinced that the tension growing on the axis power versus photography is the key issue for the research focusing on contemporary visual culture. Therefore, in the next issue of “Daguerreotype. Studies in the history and theory of photography” we would like to invite you to present your answer to the question of how photographic strategies place themselves in the complicated network of power, history, and memory. Let us ask ourselves what role photography can play in the game between those mighty opponents: is it stronger than only a defenceless pawn?
We invite you to send texts regarding the following problems:
The issue of relationship between photography and power requires a broad, interdisciplinary perspective. Therefore, we invite scholars which work in different fields, such as anthropology, social and cultural studies, philosophy or art history, to join this discussion. Our intention is to present both theoretical essays, as well as case studies in our journal. The starting point of each paper can be located in the field of documentary, creative photography or photojournalism, but may also include analysis of examples from the private sphere or from the world of advertisement. Although the tension in the relations of photography and power is particularly noticeable in the era of the digital image, we are open for the reflection which refers to the roots of the photographic medium, which would be close to the title of our magazine and its traditions.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Małgorzata Maria Grąbczewska and Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch
The deadline for sending the final articles is: 28th February 2019
Please prepare the text according to our editorial guidelines (you can also check our website dagerotyp.com) and then send to the address: dagerotyp@shf.org.pl (if you won’t receive a confirmation from us, please send the text again)
We encourage our potential authors to consult the topics of the articles with the editorial board before sending the final text.
CFP
No. 2 (26) / 2019: Photography and power
John Myers will discuss his new publication Looking at the Overlooked, which documents the claustrophobia of the suburban landscape in the 1970s, published by RRB Photobooks 2019.
Looking at the Overlooked presents Myers’ photographs of substations, shops, houses, televisions and landscapes without incident (boring photographs), which are now being compared with the photographic movement New Topographics.
Followed by questions from the floor and photobook signing.
See more and book here: https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/events/john-myers/
Image: Television No. 4, 1973 © John Myers. Courtesy of RRB Photobooks.
The Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards recognise individuals or groups of individuals who have made an outstanding original or lasting contribution to the literature of or concerning the art and practice of photography or the moving image. Two winning titles published between 1 January and 31 December 2018 will be selected; one in the field of photography and one in the field of the moving image (including film, television and digital media).
The judging panel consists of three internationally recognised experts in their specialist fields. Judges for the 2019 Kraszna-Krausz Awards will be announced in January. Previous judges have been drawn from the worlds of fine art, photography, film, galleries, museums, academia and publishing.
Full details of how to submit and terms & conditions can be found on the Kraszna-Krausz website.
The Prize
From the total submissions, a long list of ten books will be selected in both categories by the judges. This will then be reduced to shortlists of three, from which two final winning publications will be chosen. Each winning book will receive a £5,000 cash prize.
Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Chairman Sir Brian Pomeroy is delighted to announce that the winners will be awarded their prize during Photo London week at a ceremony in London. The winning authors, photographers or editors will be invited to attend. Longlisted titles will be promoted and displayed on the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation stand at Photo London, Somerset House, 16-19 May 2019.
The Foundation
The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation was created by Andor Kraszna-Krausz, the founder of Focal Press.
Since 1985 the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards have been the UK’s leading prizes for books on photography and the moving image. Winning books have been those which make original and lasting educational, professional, historical and cultural contributions to the field.
For further information visit the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation website: www.kraszna-krausz.org.uk
Three years ago we launched www.britishphotography.org to showcase our private collection of British photographs and to use the collection as an educational resource. Since then we have continued to develop the collection and the range of our activities
ACQUISITIONS
Since our 2017 newsletter we have continued to acquire pictures by photographers not previously in the collection.These include Heather Agyepong, Hannah Collins, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Eliza Hatch, Marketa Luskacova, Sarah Maple, Polly Penrose, Simon Roberts, Paloma Tendero and Keith Vaughan. We have also increased our existing collections of vintage photographs by Cecil Beaton, John Blakemore, Bill Brandt, John Davies, Fay Godwin, Brian Griffin, Bert Hardy, Paul Hill, Kurt Hutton, Dafydd Jones, John Myers, Mark Power, Chris Shaw and Wolfgang Suschitzky.
PHILANTHROPY
The Hyman Collection has donated 125 photographs to The Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, USA). The gift included works by Cecil Beaton, John Blakemore, Jane Bown, Bill Brandt, Caroline Coon, Anna Fox, Anna Fox and Andrew Bruce, Fay Godwin, Bert Hardy, Paul Hill, Colin Jones, Dafydd Jones, Chris Killip, Roger Mayne, Martin Parr, Mark Power, Tony Ray-Jones, Jo Spence, Wolfgang Suschitzky and Homer Sykes.
WEBSITE
We are committed to making the collection publicly accessible and to developing its educational role. As part of this, we are increasing our freely available online content by adding more works to the website and providing more detailed cataloguing. We are also including a growing number of essays on bodies of work and on individual pictures.
EXHIBITIONS of THE HYMAN COLLECTION
The Yale Center for British Art New Haven, CT staged an exhibition of works from the collection (January-April 2018) comprising photographs gifted to them by The Hyman Collection.
The Hepworth Wakefield (Art Fund Museum of the Year 2017) curated an exhibition of works from the collection, entitled Modern Nature which runs from July 2018 to April 2019.
LOANS from THE HYMAN COLLECTION
We are pleased to make the collection visible through loans to museums and institutions. Loans in 2017-18 include:
Nine works by Heather Agyepong to the exhibition Play It Again: The Art of Remaking at Firstsite, Colchester.
Vintage photographs by Bill Brandt and Bert Hardy to the Museum of London for their major exhibition, London Nights.
Original Spitting Image puppets to the exhibition Roger Law: From Satire to Ceramics, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich. Loans of our original Spitting Image puppets.
Exhibition panels, photographs and contact prints by Jo Spence to the international exhibition on gypsies and travellers, Maquinas de Vivir. Flamenco y arquitectura en la ocupación y desocupación de espacios. (Madrid, Barcelona, tour).
Numerous loans to Here We Are, an exhibition celebrating British photography staged by Burberry at Old Sessions House, Clerkenwell Green (and tour to Hong Kong and Paris).
Loans of seventeen works to the exhibition A Green and Pleasant Land: Landscape and the Imagination, 1970-now, at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne. (The biggest lender along with The Arts Council of England).
Loan of a rare vintage Paul Nash photograph to Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain at the Hepworth Wakefield, touring to Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, 2018-19
We also have a large number of pictures promised to future museum shows in the United Kingdom, Europe and America.
About THE HYMAN COLLECTION
The Hyman Collection began in 1996 and consists of artworks in all media. Over the last ten years The Hyman Collection has focused on photography from its earliest days to the present.
The Hyman Collection seeks to support and promote British photography through acquisitions, loans, education and philanthropy. In 2015 it launched www.britishphotography.org to provide online access to British photographs from the collection and to use this part of the collection as an educational resource to increase international awareness of British photography. As well as including forms of documentary photography, the collection focuses on artists working in photography who have pursued more subjective or conceptual strategies. The collection has historic as well as contemporary photographs and includes an equal number of works by male and female artists.
More information on the Hyman Collection can be found at: www.britishphotography.org
Claire and James Hyman britishphotography.org
An exciting opportunity has arisen to explore the popularity of immersive and interactive images in visual culture 1820-1920. This Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) will be based on the extensive and unique resources of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and would make a substantial contribution to both its public mission and to our understanding of the nature and development of ‘immersive’ media. Many new visual formats and optical devices in the period were characterised by their ‘immersive’ qualities: these could be experienced within the home or as part of a lecture, performance or fairground attraction. Circular and moving panoramas awed with enormous canvases; the diorama created illusionistic tableaux; stereographs beguiled with a 3D world, while the many varieties of peepshow promised a marvellously garish experience of patriotic battles and far-off places. If that was not enough, printed ephemera and toys, such as protean prints, mutoscopes and Kinora Viewers required an embodied spectator. ‘Immersion’ is often seen as a defining characteristic of contemporary digital media, but this CDA will elaborate a much longer genealogy. Within the broad parameters of the research project, the student will have the freedom to define and shape the projects, and to decide which formats and media to focus on.
Key Research Questions: What were the visual formats and devices offering an ‘immersive’ experience in the period 1820-1920? In what ways did they ‘immerse’ their viewers? How was ‘immersion’ characterised through a series of discourse and motifs prior to the invention of film? In what ways do contemporary devices and technologies remediate and build on a longer tradition? How does the BDC collection present an alternative history of immersive media through its games, novelty prints, devices, toys and everyday ephemera? How might such material be best exhibited by the BDC and other museums?
Research Collection: This CDA will augment and expand the work of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, located at the University of Exeter, which is home to one of the largest collections of material relating to the moving image in Britain. It is both an accredited public museum and a research facility and holds a collection of over 80,000 items. The collection includes artefacts dating from the seventeenth century to the present day, covering all aspects of cinema, pre-cinema and the history of the moving image. The collection is diverse but is united by an emphasis on the audience’s experience of the moving image. A key strength is its holdings of items relating to nineteenth-century moving, projected and 3D images, both in terms of devices, toys, pictorial media such as lantern slides, and printed ephemera. The collection, for example, contains 30 small peep shows and 70 peep show prints and vues d’optiques, as well as more than 1500 assorted stereoscope cards.
The BDC also has an excellent track record of enabling PhD scholarship and delivering Employability skills. This CDA would provide numerous value-added opportunities for the student to gain professional skills, training and experience; they would gain heritage and museum skills; contribute to a redisplay of the permanent galleries; curate a temporary exhibition based on the studentship; be trained in cataloguing and working with archival sources, including objects and printed ephemera. There would also be opportunities to contribute to the Public Engagement programme of the museum.
Supervisory Team
Professor John Plunkett (Exeter), Professor Julia Thomas (Cardiff) and Dr Phil Wickham (BDC). Plunkett is an expert on 19th c visual media and performance. Thomas is an expert on Victorian illustration, material culture, and digital humanities. Dr Phil Wickham, Lead Curator, will act in the role of supervisor for the BDC.
See more here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=3417
We at Bazar Nadar are proud to announce there are three vintage salt prints of Roger Fenton added to our gallery.
The portraits of the royal children are made in 1854. They come together with the later official gelatine silver prints made by Kirk Armitage as a coronation gift to King Edward VII. Only six of these exist. We found a matching print for every salt print of this series.
Find out more about these unique prints in our online gallery, Bazar Nadar
Please feel free to contact us for more information or any questions.
‘Business’ can have many meanings. In the most straightforward sense, it refers to the photographic marketplace, its industry and the commercial relations established among different agents. Some of these actors, such as studios and companies of the like of Kodak and Ilford, are specifically photographic and have featured prominently in histories of photography. But the photographic business also depends on other social, cultural and economic agents like chemical supply companies, image brokers, content providers, commissioning editors, advertising campaign managers and digitization officers, among others.
Especially since the beginning of the 21st century, historians have begun to pay attention to the broader implications of what one might call ‘the business of photography’. In this sense, it is not only about commerce and trade, but also about visual and material economies, where photography and the many worlds and people it affects directly or indirectly negotiate, define or transform social, cultural, political, scientific, and other ideological environments as well as values.
In this 7th annual conference of the PHRC, we invite 20-minute papers stretching the notion of ‘the business of photography’. While not neglecting the transformative role of photographic companies and that of photographers as businessmen and women, we encourage submissions that stretch our understanding of ‘business’ to the circulation of and the impact exerted by photographic images, objects and raw materials. We invite papers that think outside of the box, and address themes like:
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to phrc@dmu.ac.uk no later than Friday, the 25th of January 2019.
For any queries please email: phrc@dmu.ac.uk
Today we take pictures of anything we fancy on our phone. But in the early 1860s, the idea of portraying daily life using the long exposures and the temperamental wet-plate process of photography was not even imagined. To include people in a photographs, the subjects had to stay still for several minutes – something only achievable in a studio, or perhaps on the verandah of a home. Images of street life were pretty well impossible.
John Thomson arrived in Singapore to work with his brother William, a marine instrument maker with a photo service on the side. They made money from studio portraiture, but also made views to take back home. Working in Penang and Province Wellesley in 1862–63, Thomson realised that he could include the locals in situ with minimal staging. One of his most delightful images shows durian sellers (probably paid to stay still), an image that still evokes any outdoor market scene.
Thomson's photographs from The Straits were left behind when the Thomson Brothers studio closed and their glass plates has disappeared. Thomson's role as a pioneer in the new medium of documentary photography and photojournalism must be gleaned from the surviving small numbers of large prints and tiny cartes de visite studio and outdoor photographs, several of which are held in the Peranakan museum.
About the speaker
Gael Newton, former Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Australia, is an Australian curator and photohistorian specialising in 19th- and 20th-century Southeast Asia photographers. Newton contributed an essay to the forthcoming Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography catalogue, about Scottish professional photographer John Thomson (1837–1921), one of the first photographers working in Asia (1862–72).
See more here: https://www.peranakanmuseum.org.sg/whats-on/lectures/12dec2018_newton
The talk is part of a programme accompanying an exhibition Amek Gambar which presents over a century of photographs, tracing the emergence, adoption and evolution of photography in Southeast Asia.
The W W Winters Heritage Trust is hosting a talk titled Derby, the Royal Photographic Society and the history of photography on 12 December 2018. All welcome.
Contact W W Winters on 01332 345224 or office@wwwinter.co.uk to book a place.
Wednesday 12 December 2018, 6.30pm for a 7pm start.
Room OL1, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 1GB
This exhibition provides an overview of the rise of photography in Salisbury during the first decade or so of the medium’s existence up to the end of the First World War. While amateur photography began in and around the city during the 1840s, it was following the 1851 Great Exhibition that commercial photography took off in Salisbury. The exhibition will examine the photographers of the 1850s and 1860s and the subject matter and photographic formats they exploited. The extensive collection of the Salisbury Museum and other local collections will provide examples of a wide range of images of Salisbury and the surrounding area.
The Origins of Photography in Salisbury 1839-1919
Saturday, 19 January-Saturday, 4 May, 2019
See: https://salisburymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/origins-photography-salisbury-1839-1919
Image: William Russell, High Street, 1853
The inaugural Colin Ford CBE lecture takes place at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on 14 December. Robert Gurbo will discuss the Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész (1894-1985).
Gurbo is the Curator of the André Kertész Estate in New York and has promised a fascinating first hand perspective on this celebrated photographer's life and work.
This lecture is supported by the André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation.
Tickets are £5 and can be booked here.
The Morton Charitable Trust has been funding fieldwork on the National Trust for Scotland’s photographic collections since 2014. In 2018–19, this work is raising the profile of these collections through research, articles, talks and dedicated projects, as well as digitising the Margaret Fay Shaw photographic archive of mid-20th-century Hebridean life.
The Scottish Society for the History of Photography website carries an article from Morton Photography Project Curator Ben Reiss who reviews some of the photographic collections that have been explored during the project.
Read Ben's article here.
From 2019 to early 2020 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinbrugh, shows off highlights from an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired jointly by the NGS and the National Library of Scotland. Amassed by collector Murray MacKinnon, The MacKinnon Collection documents Scottish life and identity from the 1840s through to the 1940s and includes photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Annan, Roger Fenton, George Washington Wilson, and others. The MacKinnon Collection is distinguished by the work of photographers who captured unprecedented images that brilliantly transport us back to a century of changing rural communities, growing cities and enduring historic sites, but also illuminate the faces and places that continue to affect our lives today.
THE MACKINNON COLLECTION
15 November 2019 – 16 February 2020
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
0131 624 6200 | Admission FREE
#NGSMacKinnon
For more on the collection see: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/mackinnon-collection
An important album of forty-nine early Scottish portrait photographs dating from the 1850s is being offered by Sotheby's online until 10 December. The album of twenty salted paper and twenty-nine albumen prints, includes many members of the Royal Scottish Academy: Sir George Harvey (1806-1876), Horatio McCulloch (1806-1867), John Syme (1795-1861), Sir Daniel Macnee (1806-1882), Gourlay Steell (1819-1894), Samuel Bough (1822-1878), Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), ?James Drummond (1816-1877), and a photograph of John Graham Gilbert's 1854 portrait of Sir John Watson Gordon (1788-1864); together with portraits of the physician Sir Robert Christison (1797-1882), the geographer and cartographer Alexander Keith Johnson (1804-1871), and minister Rev. Dr Patrick Clason (1789-1867), and other unidentified portraits of men, women and children.
The album is estimated at £5000-7000 and was previously offered by Sotheby's in 1986.
See the full lot description and bid here.
3D and 2D film on the history of William Henry Fox Talbot and his association with the father of 3D stereoscopic imagery Charles Wheatstone. photographed at Lacock Abbey and Village in Wiltshire. UK
Bellmans dedicated photography auction The Art of the Nude, a collection of 19th and 20th century works, will be hosted on thesaleroom.com as an online timed auction going live on the 29 November, with bidding closing on the 12 December. The digital catalogue of 182 lots, covers the spectrum of the photographic process, from the early albumen print through to the contemporary digital print. The sale also includes a selection of Travel, early Royalty photographs, and three Aspinal of London, red leather bound albums of manuscript captioned First World War press photographs. Auction estimates ranging from £80 to £12,000, offer the photography connoisseur or the novice collector a chance to own an influential image
The auction includes works by Irving Penn, Auguste Belloc, Nadar, Vincenzo Galdi, Wilhelm (Guigliemo) Pluschow, Brassai, Paul Caffell, Nick Ross, Dora Maar, Edward Steichen, Bert Stern, Max Caffell, Lewis Morley, Helmut Newton, Edward Sheriff Curtis, Herb Ritts, Malick Sidibe, Jan Saudek, Leif Erik Nygards, E.J. Bellocq, Norman Parkinson, Sebastiao Salgado, Thilly Weissenborn, Patrick Lichfield, Marcus Adams, John Everard, Frantisek Drtikol, Jean Straker, and Keith Cardwell
Highlights include:
These are just a small number of the photographs being put up for auction.
Denise Kelly, Bellmans photography specialist, comments: ‘Photographs are my passion, I have really enjoyed cataloguing this visually exciting sale. We’re looking forward to seeing the market’s response to this sale which we hope will attract buyers across the globe.’
See the online catalogue here.
Image: Alfred Cheney Johnston, Cutter Sisters, [Zeigfield Girls] ca. 1922
