Blogs

How have women photographers in Scotland taken control of their own image? This 2nd Morton symposium will reveal neglected stories of Scottish women in photography, including feminist social documentary photographer Franki Raffles, folklorist Margaret Fay Shaw and more.

Inspired by and featuring collections from The National Trust for Scotland and Glasgow Women's Library, this event explores photographic portrayals of women through time and will challenge institutions to better use photographic collections to tell women’s stories.

The NTS photographic holdings feature many women as takers, collectors, preservers and subjects. These include the collections of folklorist Margaret Fay Shaw, aristocrat Violet Brodie and Glaswegian typist Agnes Toward, all of which frequently depict women.

‘Ways of Seeing’: Exhibition

At the library for one day only before it’s showing at Tenement House, Shutter Hub brings together an exhibition of women’s photography in response to the ‘Ways of Seeing’ symposium with an informal reception between 5pm and 7pm, open to all.

Booking

This event is for open to all and is free to attend. Please book below (you will be taken through the shopping cart but no charge will be made) or you can call us on 0141 550 2267. If you have booked a place and are no longer able to attend please let us know so that we can make your place available to someone else.

‘Ways of Seeing’: Women and Photography in Scotland
Thursday 2nd April, 9am to 5pm, followed by a drinks reception
Glasgow Women's Library
Details and booking here: https://womenslibrary.org.uk/event/ways-of-seeing-symposium/

Please consider joining SSHoP, The Scottish Society for the History of Photography. We publish Studies in Photography twice a year - a high quality A4 journal of 104 pages - dedicated to historical and contemporary photography, with quality illustration and authoritative, critical writing.

SSHoP is a not-for-profit charity run by volunteers.  Our funding comes through a small amount of advertising, sales of the journal, and most importantly, membership subscriptions, which pay for publishing the journal and the events and lectures that we organise.

Besides receiving the journal, membership ensures that you are informed of, and have free admission to, our events and lectures. Please check out our website at: www.sshop.org.uk

At present, Membership is £25.00 for individual UK membership and £15.00 for UK students.

Please consider joining us. Sign up is easy though the membership pages on the site - and for any queries please contact membership@sshop.org.uk

***It is with very heavy hearts that we announce the cancellation of the Photography Beyond the Image symposium. Due to the current public health emergency, we feel compelled to make this difficult decision. The event will be rescheduled for the autumn and we will be in touch with new details once the current crisis alleviates.***

Recent years have seen photographic studies move beyond the analysis of the visual product. From a focus on photographs as the privileged points of access for studying photography, thus supporting a predominant understanding of the medium as a representational tool, the field is today embracing a more holistic approach. This has brought photography into a much needed interdisciplinary and intermedial analytical environment, and alerted us to the social, cultural and commercial entanglements that shape and are shaped by photographic practices. This one-day symposium hosted by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture seeks to examine these intellectual trends by reflecting on their postulates, methodologies and future directions.

SPEAKERS:

Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Oxford)
Dr Geoffrey Belknap (National Science and Media Museum)
Professor Patrizia Di Bello (Birkbeck)
Professor Elizabeth Edwards (Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute and De Montfort University)
Professor Steve Edwards (Birkbeck)
Professor Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool)
Dr Nicoletta Leonardi (Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan)
Dr Gil Pasternak (De Montfort University)
Dr Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton)
Convened by Dr Sara Dominici (IMCC, University of Westminster)

Photography Beyond the Image symposium
Saturday 25 April 2020, 9.45am – 4.45pm
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW
Full programme available here.

The event is free and open to all, but spaces are limited and booking essential. Tickets here.

Colleagues and researchers interested in correspondence relating to Brunel’s commissioning of photographs of the S.S. Great Eastern, may enjoy a blog by Emma Howgill: Photographing Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s S.S. Great Eastern. Images of the correspondence between I K Brunel and Joseph Cundall are also available on the University of Bristol Library Special Collections online archive catalogue (see Emma Howgill’s blog for links).

To whet your appetite part of Emma's blog says: 'Seven months later there is another set of correspondence about these photographs, beginning with a letter from Isambard Kingdom Brunel asking to see the photographs of the Great Eastern under construction (DM1306/11/1/2/folio 72). This set of correspondence ends with two pages of Instructions for Photographs listing exactly how Brunel wants any future photographs to be taken (DM1306/11/1/2/folio 85-86).  And just over a year and a half later, on 9 December 1856, there is a letter from Joseph Cundall of the Photographic Institute in New Bond Street, requesting payment for taking these photographs. Brunel’s letter-books, carefully showing the sequence of all the correspondence that he both sent and received about the Great Eastern allows us to trace the development of Brunel’s idea to illustrate the process of constructing his great ship, from its conception to payment.'

A new publication continues Terry Bennet's fascination with east Asian photography, mostly recently his three-volume History of Photography in China. Just published is Early Photography in Vietnam which is a fascinating and outstanding pictorial record of photography in Vietnam during the century of French rule. As with Terry's previous volumes the  book is carefully researched and referenced.  In more than 500 photographs, many published here for the first time, the volume records Vietnam’s capture and occupation by the French, the wide-ranging ethnicities and cultures of Vietnam, the country’s fierce resistance to foreign rule, leading to the reassertion of its own identity and subsequent independence.

This benchmark volume also includes a chronology of photography (1845–1954), an index of more than 240 photographers and studios in the same period, appendixes focusing on postcards, royal photographic portraits, Cartes de Visite and Cabinet Cards, as well as a select bibliography and list of illustrations.

Thoroughly researched and illustrated the book will be the definitive volume on Vietnamese photography up to 1954 for many years, as well as providing a structure for other researchers to build upon.

Early Photography in Vietnam
Terry Bennett
Renaissance Books, 2020
ISBN 978-1-912961-04-7
£70.00, 404 pages. 

See: https://www.renaissancebooks.co.uk/Forthcoming-Titles/171-/Early-Photography-in-Vietnam

The Science Museum has announced its research seminar series for winter and spring 2020. They are free to attend and open to science museum staff, students, museum professionals and academics with a research interest in the history of science, technology, medicine and  museums as well as material and visual culture more broadly. Admission is free. 

Of particular note is Merrick Burrow discussing the Cottingley Fairies and Conan Doyle. 

In the December 1920 issue of the Strand Magazine Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, published what he considered to be conclusive photographic proof of the existence of  fairies. He followed up this article with another one the following March, which featured three more photographs by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, the same young women who had taken  the two original pictures. As a result of Doyle's patronage these five photographs of ‘the  Cottingley fairies’ became a global cause célèbre.

Doyle, though widely mocked, maintained his view that the photographs were genuine. Frances and Elsie refused for decades to bow to pressure to confess to faking the pictures. Eventually  they admitted the hoax in the 1980s, though Frances maintained to the end that one of the photographs was genuine.

In this talk Dr Merrick Burrow will explore the background to the Cottingley fairies photographs  and the peculiar circumstances that turned them into the world’s greatest photographic hoax.

Dr Merrick Burrow is Head of English and Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield. He is curator of a major exhibition on the Cottingley fairies at the Brotherton Library, Leeds, running from September 2020.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of the Cottingley Fairies: Merrick Burrow (University of Huddersfield)
Date: Tuesday 31 March 2020, 13.00–14.00

Dana Research Centre & Library
165 Queen’s Gate, London, SW7 5HD.
Feel free to bring a packed lunch to eat during the seminar.

See: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/research-seminar-series

The Art Newspaper has reported that the Alinari photographic archive which was under threat of dispersal has been acquired by the regional government of Tuscany.  It will create a new foundation in Florence to preserve its more than five million items.

The world’s oldest photographic firm, Alinari put its historic Florentine headquarters up for sale last May after years of financial difficulty. The collection—ranging from daguerreotypes to 200,000 digital images, as well as photographic equipment and thousands of books—was moved to a private storage facility while politicians brokered a deal to save it for the Italian nation. The Tuscan Soprintendenza for archives, part of the Italian culture ministry, had placed the holdings under export ban in December 2018 for its “primary importance” to the history of photography.

Besides “guaranteeing the care and correct conservation” of the archive, the region plans to renovate Villa Fabbricotti, an 1860s estate in the hills north of Florence currently used as government offices, as its permanent home and exhibition space. A new foundation dedicated to managing the archive will be created by May, with a committee of photo­graphy experts—including former Alinari employees—and the possible involvement of the culture ministry.

The project is estimated to cost around €15m, with at least €2.4m due to Fratelli Alinari. The figure is, however, a fraction of the €138m valuation placed on the collection by the Italian photographer and historian Italo Zannier in 2008. 

See the report here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/alinari-photographic-archive-saved-by-tuscan-government

and the Alinari website: https://www.alinari.it/en/about-us

The History and Theory of Photography Research Centre is announced it spring seminar programme. All are free and open to all to attend. 

Thursday 20 February 2020, 6-7:30pm
Room 106, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD
Jason Bate (Falmouth University)
The Politics and Ethics of Emerging Medical Collections from the 'Great' War

This paper explores the archival afterlives of photographs of the facially injured and disfigured ex-servicemen of the 'Great' War, focusing on the prolific records of reconstructive surgery and aftercare in military hospitals. From the scientific quest to record and understand these wounds and their treatment, to soldiers’ post-war reintegration, the photographs have struggled to shed the conditions of their making as specimen and records of surgical technique. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, partly to safeguard them in the public’s interest, such collections were transferred from Army museums to better-resourced institutions. Their move away from closed holdings within a military-medical context, made them more widely accessible. This talk explores how these photographs have been repurposed in archival space, where they seldom serve as mere surgical documents. Over time, these remediated images have been reclaimed by descendants of patients into a kind of ‘redemptive power of domestic love’, in an effort to welcome loved ones back in a relationship with kin or friends and away from their dehumanised portrayal in clinical settings. Retooling surgical photographs of disfigured soldiers as ancestors, these remediations embrace an expanded range of collections whose family practices and archives will always confound the reduction of that person to only a medical subject, an institutional object.

Thursday 26 March 2020, 6-7:30pm, followed by drinks

Room 106, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Liz Wells, Derrick Price, and Nicola Brandt

SERIES AND BOOK LAUNCH: Photography, Place, Environment (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing) presents Coal Cultures by Derrick Price, and Landscapes Between Then and Now by Nicola Brandt.

 Photography, Place, Environment publishes original scholarship and critical thinking exploring ways in which photography contributes to, or challenges, narratives relating to geography, environment, landscape and place, historically and now. By critiquing relationships between land, aesthetics, culture and photography, and by placing imagery as both the object and the method of enquiry, the books in this series also foster debates on photographic methodologies, theory and practices.

Liz Wells, series editor for Photography, Place, Environment, Bloomsbury Academic, will discuss the genesis, context and visual cultural compass of the series. Derrick Price, author of Coal Cultures and Nicola Brandt, author of Landscapes Between Then and Now will introduce their respective publications, noting specific histories, geographies and contemporary critical issues relevant, respectively, to images of miners and mining communities, and to photography’s contribution within processes of reconciliation and memorialisation in Southern Africa.

See https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/photography-place-environment/

Dr. Nicola Brandt is an artist from Namibia. Her work engages innovative documentary practices in relationship to the role of memory, landscape and positionality. During 2019, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of African Studies and Iwalewahaus (The University of Bayreuth, Germany).

Dr. Derrick Price is a freelance writer and independent scholar who has published widely on photography and film. He worked for many years in higher education and was for more than a decade the Associate Dean of Art, Media and Design at the University of the West of England.

Professor Liz Wells’ publications on land and environment include Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (2011) along with many catalogue essays and exhibitions as curator. She is Professor in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth, UK.

Monday 30 March 2020, registration 6pm, lecture 6:30, followed by drinks

Clore Lecture Theatre (CLO B01), Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London, WC1E 7JL

KRASZNA-KRAUSZ LECTURE 2020: ‘Photography and Cinema, from A to Z’ presented by David Campany

The inaugural Kraszna-Krausz Lecture will be given by internationally renowned writer, public speaker and curator David Campany. Titled Photography and Cinema, from A to Z, the lecture will take the form of twenty-six short reflections on still and moving images. The lecture series, newly established by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, will provide a platform and space for fresh voices and perspectives on photography and the moving image.

Presented in partnership with the The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, which was created by Andor Kraszna-Krausz, the founder of Focal Press, an influential specialist publishing house for books on photography. Since 1985 the annual Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards have been the UK’s leading prizes for books on photography and the moving image. More information on the work of the Foundation can be found online at www.kraszna-krausz.org.uk.

David Campany’s books include On Photographs (forthcoming this year); So Present, So Invisible – Conversations on Photography (2018); Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (2014), Gasoline (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2010), Art and Photography (2003) and Photography and Cinema, which received the 2009 Kraszna-Krausz Award. He has written over two hundred essays for, among others, Tate, MoMA New York, Centre Pompidou, The Photographers’ Gallery London, and the Stedelijk Museum. Many of his touring exhibitions have combined still and moving images, including A Handful of Dust (2015-2020),The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (2016-2019); The Still Point of the Turning World: Between Film and Photography (2017); Victor Burgin: A Sense of Place (2013); Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film (2010); and Hannah Collins: Current History (2010). He is the curator of the three-city Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, (Mannheim/Ludwigshafen/Heidelberg, Germany) opening in February 2020.

The lecture is free to attend but spaces are limited. Tickets must be booked: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/?tag=80

The second release of historic photographs of people, equipment and events, mostly from the early history of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, up to about 1970, is now available on line. The combined PhotoArchive now contains 406 images, 367 in black and white and 39 in colour. The first release contained images of many famous pieces of equipment. 

In this second release, there are more images of experiments and equipment, but there are also letters and writings, more portraits of many of distinguished staff members and, in particular, many images of daily life in the Laboratory. 

See more here: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/cavendish/

Image: Rutherford's research room, c.1933. (P551)