Blogs

This is the story of Francis Frith, a Victorian adventurer, pioneer photographer and visionary businessman, and his amazing legacy – a unique archive of over 300,000 photographs illustrating the changing face of Britain over 110 years.

Between 1856 and 1860 Francis Frith made three arduous expeditions to Egypt and the Holy Land, where he took some of the earliest photographs ever seen of those regions. He then founded his own photographic publishing company and began an incredible project – the creation of what is widely considered to be the first extensive photographic record of Britain.

For the next 30 years he and his company photographers travelled around the country recording thousands of cities, towns and villages, landmarks, historic buildings, coasts and countryside in photographs to sell to tourists as souvenir prints. After Frith’s death in 1898 his successors continued his project into the 20th century, by which time the Frith company had become one of Britain’s leading postcard publishers. By the time it closed down in 1970 it had created an unrivalled record of Britain over more than a century of change, which is now recognised as a photographic collection of national significance.

• Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Francis Frith’s birth in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in 1822, this book tells the story of his eventful life and is also a celebration of the extraordinary photographic legacy of this remarkable man, which is now viewed by millions of people
  around the world on the Frith website francisfrith.com.
• Extensively researched, it contains new information about his Middle Eastern expeditions, including the identification of a number of his companions and extracts from letters written by one of them on their journey through the Sinai Peninsula.
• Lavishly illustrated with over 500 period photographs, ranging from the monuments of ancient Egypt to nostalgic images of the people and places of Britain between 1860 and 1970.
• An absorbing read for anyone interested in the early history of photography, travel and exploration in the 19th century and Egyptology, as well as British history.

A Grand Spell of Sunshine. The Life and Legacy of Francis Frith
Julia Skinner
The Francis Frith Collection
£35. 400 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-1-84589-924-0
email: sales@francisfrith.co.uk
web: www.francisfrith.com

Charlotte Connelly has been appointed Head Curator of the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. She replaces Dr Geoff Belknap who has moved to a new role as Keeper in Edinburgh. The post was advertised earlier this year. 

Charlotte is currently Museum Curator at the The Polar Museum, Cambridge. She holds a MSc in Museum Studies, a BSc History and Philosophy of Science and has just submitted her PhD thesis.  She previously worked at the Science Museum between 2010 and 2014. See: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/people/connelly/ 

She tweets at @curatorconnelly

William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor of photography, created around 15,000 photographs in the nineteenth century, most of them attempts to produce compelling scientific documents or pictorial records of the world around him. However, among those that have survived are also prints in which an image has been obscured, obliterated or simply failed to register.

Borrowing its intriguing title from a poem written by Talbot, this book features twenty-four of these prints, his most experimental photographs. Originally intended as test prints or creative exercises, all that remains on these shaped pieces of photographic paper are chemical stains or imprinted patterns or shapes. Offered to the reader as enigmatic physical artefacts, these failed or ruined photographs are here reanimated as objects of beauty, mystery and promise, as artworks that speak of photography’s most fundamental attributes and potentials.

An accompanying essay illustrated with comparative images places these photographs in a broad historical context leading up to the present, revealing what relevance Talbot’s experiments have to contemporary concepts of the art of photography.

The Forms of Nameless Things: Experimental Photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot
Geoffrey Batchen
Bodleian Libraries, November 2022
ISBN: 9781851245932
£30

The Association for Art History has a call for forty 2023 Annual Conference sessions held in-person at UCL. The Association for Art History’s 2023 Annual Conference is open to all and you don’t need to be a member to attend or present a paper. The call closes on 4 November. 

There are many sessions which include photography, would benefit from a photography perspective, or are focused on photography. These include: 

The conference will take place at UCL, London, from 12-14 April 2023. 

• Photography and 21st-Century Migration
• Toward a Media History of Art and Design Education
• Victorian Colour Revolution: The Nineteenth-Century Chromatic Turn
• Remaking Femininity: Women’s Portraiture in Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture

All session calls are here: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2023-annual-conference/

The Edward Reeves Archive in association with the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at UAL and Edward Reeves Photography present Stories seen through a glass plate: in their footsteps, an exhibition of historic photographs of Lewes and its people displayed on lightboxes throughout the town centre during September and October 2022.

• A new exhibition for 2022 from the Edward Reeves Archive. A century of life in Lewes, showing townsfolk in the places they lived, worked, relaxed and celebrated. Walk in their footsteps.
• Displaying new unseen images from the Edward Reeves archive.
• Accompanying exhibition, Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus, examines the crucial role of the building in town life.

The Edward Reeves Archive lightbox exhibition returns in 2022 with Stories seen through a glass plate: in their footsteps. Including formal portraits taken in the Reeves’ Studio as well as Lewes street scenes, it reveals the world in which the subjects lived and the people they may have encountered. Contemporary newspaper reports and guidebooks have provided personal back stories, describing family life, work, and leisure pursuits.

Illustrated with stunning photographs, showing the amazing quality of the images taken from the original glass plates, the lightboxes are placed in locations relevant to the subjects. You will meet Edward Reeves and his daughter Mary Elizabeth, also a photographer, their neighbour Ruth Simmons who married twice and then emigrated to Canada, and from just across the High Street Caroline Napier and Annie Mullens who ran a school for young ladies. In their daily life they may have bumped into Thomas Weston, ‘haircutter and perfumer’ out on his penny farthing bicycle or passed by Edwin Battersby, managing clerk of the Lewes Probate Registry and attempted murderer. Among the street scenes, the witnesses to an early car crash, a town celebration for a coronation that didn’t happen and the lively aftermath of a general election result with the report of eggs thrown and fireworks discharged!

The lightboxes will be available to view until Sunday 23rd October. Brigitte Lardinois, Director of the Photography and the Arts Research Centre at LCC, UAL: “The Edward Reeves Archive project is very important in the history of British photography and I am delighted that with the help of our many volunteers we are able to once again share some of this unique collection.”

Tom Reeves, fourth generation photographer at Edward Reeves Photography: “It is really exciting that, through the efforts of our volunteers, we have been able for the first time to search our archive for specific named subjects, so in this exhibition we can include portraits of people exhibited in the windows of the houses that they once occupied. That sheds a fascinating light on a past Lewes and its people.”

Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus. This additional exhibition at Lewes Town Hall displays photographs from it’s opening in 1893 to the current day, shows the central role the building has always played in the social and commercial life of the town. A Royal visit, concerts and theatricals, meetings and tea parties, and a remarkable exhibition of early electric lights and equipment can all be seen.

Stories seen through a glass plate: in their footsteps
Thursday 29th September – Sunday 23rd October 2022
Lewes High Street, Cliffe High Street & surrounding area
Exhibition maps available at the Lewes Tourist Information Centre, Lewes Town Hall, Edward Reeves Photography
(159 High Street) and many of the host shops and businesses.

Lewes Town Hall: A building in focus
Thursday 29th September – Saturday 15th October
Monday – Saturday, 10.00am – 4.00pm
Baxter Corridor, Lewes Town Hall (High Street Entrance)

Established in 1855, Edward Reeves Photography is believed to be the oldest continuously operated photographic
studio in the world. It houses an archive of over 250,000 glass plates in addition to over 400,000 images on film
and in the form of digital files. With much of the original paperwork intact, this archive is a unique record of daily
life in and around Lewes, and of the history of commercial photographic practice. The Victorian studio is still in
daily use and the business is now owned and run by Edward Reeves’ great grandson Tom Reeves with his wife Tania
Osband. For more information, visit www.reevesarchive.com.

Images: © Edward Reeves Photography

The University of Manchester's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine has relaunched its seminar programme which will be both live and online via Zoom. On 22 November Dr Alexander Medcalf will look at the World Helath Organisation's photography archive. As the quote in the title suggests, over almost half a century the WHO invested heavily in procuring photographic material and showcasing it in magazines, newspapers and at exhibitions around the world.

Dr Alexander Medcalf, Department of History, University of York
22 November 2022 at 1600 (GMT)
"The most extensive photographic collection in the world": seeing health "through the eyes" of the WHO, 1948-1990  
Abstract and further details
Register for free: https://blogs.manchester.ac.uk/chstm/2022/10/01/chstm-research-seminar-22-november-2022/

What are photographs ‘doing’ in museums? Why are some photographs valued and others not? Why are some photographic practices visible and not others? What value systems and hierarchies do they reflect?

What Photographs Do explores how museums are defined through their photographic practices. It focuses not on formal collections of photographs as accessioned objects, be they ‘fine art’ or ‘archival’, but on what might be termed ‘non-collections’: the huge number of photographs that are integral to the workings of museums yet ‘invisible’, existing outside the structures of ‘the collection’. These photographs, however, raise complex and ambiguous questions about the ways in which such accumulations of photographs create the values, hierarchies, histories and knowledge-systems, through multiple, folded and overlapping layers that might be described as the museum’s ecosystem.

These photographic dynamics are studied through the prism of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an institution with over 150 years' engagement with photography’s multifaceted uses and existences in the museum. The book differs from more usual approaches to museum studies in that it presents not only formal essays but short ‘auto-ethnographic’ interventions from museum practitioners, from studio photographers and image managers to conservators and non-photographic curators, who address the significance of both historical and contemporary practices of photography in their work. As such this book offers an extensive and unique range of accounts of what photographs ‘do’ in museums, expanding the critical discourse of both photography and museums.

What Photographs Do. The making and remaking of museum cultures
Edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious
£30.00
ISBN: 9781800082991
Publication: November 21, 2022
£30 (paperback); £50 (hardback); £0 (open access download)
Details: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/192313?_pos=1&_sid=42025d3ac&_ss=r