Pencil of Nature

West Dunbartonshire Council in partnership with Scottish Society for the History of Photography

14th January, 11AM – 12 noon: Robert Grieves Transport Archive
Tim Aymes, Scottish Motor Museum Trust, will be discussing the Scottish transport photographs from the Robert Grieves Archive and Scottish Motorsport.
Dumbarton Heritage Centre, Dumbarton Library, Strathleven Place, Dumbarton, G82 1BD.
Free. No need to book. Tel: 01389 608065

21st January, 11AM – 12 noon: ‘Clydebuilt and still going strong’
Bruce Peter, Reader, Glasgow School of Art will be discussing the Clyde Shipyard Photography of John Edward Kerr Smith.

Clydebank Heritage Centre, Clydebank Library, Dumbarton Road, Clydebank, G81 1XH.
Free. No need to book. Tel: 0141 608965

28th January, 11AM – 12 noon: ‘A Mirror With a Memory: the origin and development of photography in the 19th century’
Ray Mackenzie, Senior Lecturer, Glasgow School of Art, will be giving An Introduction to 19th Century Photography.

Dumbarton Heritage Centre, Dumbarton Library, Strathleven Place, Dumbarton, G82 1BD.
Free. No need to book. Tel: 01389 608965

Genii Loci: Work in Progress

Friday 28th October at 6.00pm
Hawthornden Lecture Theatre
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Free, no booking required.

Karen Knorr is an internationally acclaimed photographic artist who
has published widely and won numerous prestigious awards for her
intelligent and beautiful images involving interior installations and
constructions.

Since the early 1980s her work has continually explored and
critiqued ideas which underpin heritage and patrimony, and the role
of art in the construction of national identity.

She is in the process of preparing solo shows of her recent work in
Paris, Mumbai and Cordoba. She is currently Professor of
Photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham,
Surrey.

If you were in the audience for last year’s brilliant Photographer’s Lecture, you’ll want to try and get to Simon Norfolk’s current exhibition in London (at Tate Modern). See
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/burkeandnorfolk/default.shtm

Characteristically, Norfolk’s message is the futility of war and the outrageousness of imperialism. This exhibition explores the current situation in Afghanistan by revisiting – or as he puts it, re-imagining – the subject matter of John Burke, whose photographs of the Second Afghan War (1878–80) were among the earliest to have been taken in that country. Norfolk has engaged in what he terms a collaboration with the earlier photographer, exhibiting his own digital work alongside modern prints of many of Burke’s wet-plate collodion images to demonstrate that Plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose. And rather than making exact modern versions of Burke’s images, he has sought echoes or equivalents – what Burke might have photographed had he been in Afghanistan in 2010/11. Thus where Burke captured a view of an expanse of tents – a British army camp – Norfolk shows a concrete and metal moonscape megalopolis constructed by the occupying American forces. And whereas Burke lovingly shows glimpses of the traditional culture of Afghanistan, Norfolk identifies the fake and vulgar architecture of the country’s new rich – the heroin-traders and gangsters – and the huge defensive structures built with American money, while the normal infrastructure and economy of a city are almost non-existent and the ordinary people struggle to survive.

In the video at the entrance to the exhibition, Simon Norfolk explains that he chose to use the blue light found before dawn or after sunset to symbolise his own blue, disillusioned view of Afghanistan as it now is. This contrasts with the optimistic golden hue of Burke’s albumen prints and indeed of Norfolk’s own previous work in the country. His images in the exhibition – mostly larger than Burke’s, but not huge – have an almost unreal beauty, and he has explained that he’s used beauty to seduce the viewer so that he can then make his powerful political and humanitarian points. Importantly, however, neither Norfolk nor Burke shows the carnage of the battlefield. Their points are made in terms of materiel, structures, the effect on the landscape.

Now the good news – from a SSHoP perspective. We normally publish material from the previous year’s Photographer’s Lecture in Studies in Photography, but this year, instead of an extract from his 2010 lecture, impressive though that was, Simon is generously allowing SSHoP to publish an edited and illustrated version of an interview that he gave to Paul Lowe on this Afghanistan exhibition.

So if you can’t make it to Tate Modern by 10 July you’ll still have a chance, at the end of the year, to see something of this outstanding show and to read Simon Norfolk’s powerful commentary.

–Monica Thorp

Friday 13 May 2011, 10am-4pm. £20 (£10)
Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh.

To complement the ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander exhibition at the Dean Gallery, this symposium will address the cultural significance and legacy of August Sander’s hugely ambitious and methodical photographic analysis of the people of Weimar Germany. From his early contribution to the visual canon of peasant representation, as seen in his Stamm-Mappe archetypal portraits of rural types, to his appropriation as a model for photographers working in the communist East German state, this forum will offer fresh and exciting insights into the nature of his work and its reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century.

Speakers include:

• Dr Christian Weikop, Visiting Lecturer in History of Art, University of Edinburgh
  August Sander’s Stamm-Mappe and the German Tradition of Peasant Representation
• Jill Stephenson, Professor of Modern German History, University of Edinburgh
  Occupations: August Sander and German Society in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
• Erica Carter, Professor of German, King’s College London
  August Sander and Social Portraiture
• Katherine Tubb, PhD candidate, University of Glasgow
  Sex and Race: Document versus Drama in the Photography of August Sander and Marta Astfalck-Vietz
• Dr Sabine Kriebel, Lecturer in History of Art, University College Cork
  Sander’s Surfaces
• Dr Sarah James, Lecturer in History of Art, University College London
  A Socialist Realist Sander? Comparative Portraiture as a Model in the German Democratic Republic

Welcome address by Keith Hartley, Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Roundtable Discussion chaired by Iain Boyd Whyte, Professor of Architectural History and Director of VARIE, University of Edinburgh

A collaboration between the National Galleries of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh’s VARIE Research Forum for German Visual Culture (RFGVC), founded by Dr Christian Weikop.

BOOKING INFORMATION:

Tickets cost £20 (£10 concessions) and are available from the Information Desk at the National Gallery Complex or by phoning 0131 624 6560 with debit/credit card details between 9.30am-4.30pm, Monday-Friday. Advance booking recommended

www.nationalgalleries.org

On Saturday 7 May a (free) symposium is being held in the Burrell in Glasgow in connection with the exhibition of digital images from John Thomson’s photographs of life in China. The event promises to be wide-ranging and illuminating.

Speakers include Sara Stevenson, Nick Pearce, Fung Ming-Chu (Deputy Director of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan), and Yupin Chung (Curator at the Burrell Collection).

The symposium includes the chance to see some new images from Thompson’s negatives.

Please note that spaces are limited. Places can be booked by calling 0141 287 2593

FotoSpace in Fife is seeking submissions from members of Scottish Photographers. Donald Stewart has written with information about this:

Dear SSHoP Member,

It is a rare event that sees the opening of a new gallery dedicated entirely to photography. However this is exactly what is happening in Fife at the Rothes Halls and Fife Foto Group has been established to progress this from an idea to a reality. The gallery will be called FotoSpace and will open in late September this year. The plan is to have a number of exhibitions throughout the year highlighting the diverse and exciting range of contemporary photography, particularly Scottish, with each exhibition having a four to six week run. The exhibitions for the first year are mostly in place.

I am delighted to inform you that Fife Foto has agreed on the opening exhibition for this new gallery being an exhibition of the work of Scottish Photographers. Fife Foto hopes that you will see this as an opportunity to showcase the excellent work being produced by the members of Scottish Photographers. As a member of both groups, as well as of SSHoP, I would encourage you to support this new venture. A positive response would not only get FotoSpace off to a great start but would show the good folk of Fife and beyond how many talented photographers there are in our ranks.

Donald Stewart FRPS – Member of SSHoP and Scottish Photographers, and Treasurer of Fife Foto Group.

Please contact Donald for submission guidelines.

Katherine Tubb: Sex, Drugs and Cabaret: 1920s Berlin through the photography of Marta Astfalck-Vietz

Tuesday April 12 at 6.00 pm
Mackintosh Lecture Theatre
Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew Street

Free, no booking required

Until her recent re-discovery, Marta Astfalk-Vietz was almost completely
unknown, even in her native Germany, but is now recognised as an artist of extraordinary diversity and originality, with much to say to contemporary
audiences. This lecture will explore the achievement of an artist immersed in the bohemian underground culture of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and
whose work ranges from fashion plates and self-portraiture to her innovative Dadaesque ‘Combi Pictures’.

Katherine Tubb is a graduate of the University of Glasgow and is currently completing her doctoral thesis of the work of Marta Astfalck-Vietz.

To Paris in January! Members of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography and the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group shepherded by Donald Stewart had the privilege of a private tour of the exhibition Primitifs de la Photographie – Le Calotype en France 1843-1860 and a visit to the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Our guide was the Curator of Photography, Sylvie Aubenas. Wonderful!

We went with forgivable assumption. The calotype was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot at Lacock Abbey, wasn’t it?. In a very short time indeed, it reached its apotheosis with Hill and Adamson at Rock House in Edinburgh, didn’t it? Surely, therefore, when it came to making calotypes, we British were the best.

We knew that the French were preoccupied with M. Daguerre’s exquisite but extremely limited system and that it was clearly a dead end. As to their interest in paper positive-negatives, it is true that we were aware of a few practitioners such as Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Charles Nègre and Louis Blanquart-Évrard and of the occasional British visitor including Talbot but that was about it.

We had even confirmation of our conceit courtesy of the French themselves. Impressed by Light – British Photographs from Paper Negatives 1840-1860, the outstanding exhibition and publication by Roger Taylor and Larry Schaaf had been presented at the Musée d’Orsay in 2008. Shamefully, no British gallery would take it. But if ever there was proof of the true nationality of the calotype – that was it. It was ours!

A few paces into the exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale, or simply on opening the substantial book/catalogue accompanying Les Primitifs de la Photographie, the doubts began to set in. The ‘handful’ of French calotypists of whom we knew turned out to be more than four hundred in number with more being discovered all the time; moreover the period in which they worked is much longer than expected, extending to 1870. The daguerreotype option was always there for them, though expensive, but latterly so was the wet collodion so, evidently, paper was the process of deliberate choice. Perhaps indeed, paper was ‘the future of photography’ as Gustav le Gray put it. The French commitment to the negative-positive paper method was in fact extraordinary.

What took the breath of preconception away was the sheer range and quality of the work. At a technical level, some of the work is astonishing. The received wisdom that the calotype was poor at registering detail is confounded by, for example, Gustave de Beaucorps’ Spanish images, particularly his Porte de l’Alhambra (1858) (images) with its minute filigree decoration. Panoramas, stereoviews, and multiple negative work (Èdouard-Denis Baldus’ Cloitre Sainte-Trophisme d’Arles (1851), (image) confronted us with their style and expressiveness.

The later works even moved the calotype to a new level. Paul Mailand’s Vallée de Luchon (1859) (image) is a good example. The exposure is still too long to disguise the movement of the trees or the flow of the mill lade, but the effect is perfect. Incidentally, Luchon and the Pyrenees around Pau was the base for several calotypists including Vicomte Joseph Vigier (images) and the Scot, John Stewart (Winter Scene at Pau 1853), brother-in-law of Herschel.

It is true that the familiar names and some familiar images were present but nudes by Charles Nègre and Gustave Le Gray were accompanied by those by Albert Fays and Eugène Durieu (images); a still life by Hippolyte Bayard was next to examples by Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet, Édouard Fleury de Vorges (image) and by an anonymous photographer. And this was the joy of the show and is of the book that wherever you look, there is genuine revelation.

The exhibition is over now so no point in heading to Paris if that is your only objective but the book (Amazon sells it for £45, I’m afraid) is terrific and contains all the images immaculately reproduced. So what else did we do in Paris? Plenty, actually. A behind the scenes visit to the astonishing Albert Kahn museum, the brilliant Kertesz show at Jeu de Paume, a quite amazing morning in the archives of the BN (I’ll never forget handling (sic) the original agreement between Niépce and Daguerre); and then there was the Lebanese restaurant and the belly dancer. There is a plan to go to Paris and the BN again in November – can’t wait!

David Bruce.

To Bradford for a two-day conference ‘Niépce in England’ (October 13-14 2010) dealing with four images. Two days?  Just four images?  Surely, hardly enough for a hundred photo-people, art historians, etc, to talk about for that duration, surely some mistake?

Not at all. Fascinating. Of the images, only one was a photograph in the modern sense that it was of an exterior view made in a camera, and even it was not there in Bradford. But the other three were, and they were beautiful.

They were ‘out of their frames’ – small, delicate, silvery and strangely naked in their secure glass cabinet. Objects of veneration.

So, what was there to say about them? That they were very old, we knew; that they were made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s before even the word ‘photography’, let alone the practical process, had been invented, we knew as well. With Niépce we are certainly familiar. We can see him any day in company with Daguerre in the Café Royal in Edinburgh. So where was the scope for revelation?

Well, there was of course lots of serious historical, technical, and institutional context. No surprise there. Larry Schaaf delivered with wit and conquered some dysfunctional IT for good measure. The collaborative nature of the research between the hosting National Media Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute and the involvement of great experts and consultants ensured stellar input from Roy Flukinger, Dusan Stulik, Art Kaplan, Barbara Brown, Pamela Roberts, and Grant Romer.

But what was utterly engrossing (and greatly to the credit of the organisers) were the contributions of the sort of experts who might never have expected to find themselves in a conference of photo-historians. Peter Bower (forensic paper historian) talked about the papers used in the framing of the images; Isabella Kocum (frame conservator at the National Gallery) examined the images’ physical contexts; and Detective Philip Gilhooley (former Head of Merseyside Police Fingerprint Bureau) dealt with just one single impression on one small corner of one plate – and concluded it just might be from Niépce’s thumb.

It is the objects themselves, however, that remain in the mind – the three small plates which Niépce took to England in 1827, to precious little effect. The metal heliographs, ‘Un Clair de Lune’, ‘Le Cardinal d’Ambroise’,  ‘Christ Carrying His Cross’ are simply beautiful. They are not just images on pewter. They are artefacts, complete in themselves. The processes which begot them – were they true photographs, were they enhanced by etching (probably not)? – become irrelevant. Just admire. Privileged to have seen them like that. It will never happen again.

David Bruce

Unknown Scottish photographers: the role of the works photographer
Thursday March 24 at 6.00pm
Mitchell Library, Glasgow G3 7DN
Free, no booking required.

The photographers who worked in and for Scottish industrial firms captured the surprising grace and beauty of many products. Many of their photographs were intended as a basis for engraving so high definition was essential. To that end, photographers generally used large format glass negatives for their work with often spectacular results.

John Hume, the distinguished industrial historian, explores and illustrates this fascinating and largely unknown dimension of Scotland’s photographic heritage.