FORTHCOMING EVENTS

Photography Month in West Dunbartonshire Heritage Centres

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

14th January, 11AM to 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 to 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 to 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

PAST EVENTS

Annual Photographer's Lecture

Karen Knorr: 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.

Guest Lecture

Katherine Tubb: Sex, Drugs and Cabaret: 1920s Berlin through the photography of Marta Astfalck-Vietz
Tuesday April 12 at 6.00 pm
Glasgow School of Art
Mackintosh Lecture Theatre
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.

Annan Lecture

John Hume: Unknown Scottish photographers: the role of the works photographer
Thursday March 24 at 6.00pm
Mitchell Library, Glasgow
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..

SSHoP Annual Photographer's Lecture

Simon Norfolk - Et in Arcadia Ego
Friday 15 October, 6 to 7.30pm
Hawthornden Lecture Theatre
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh
Free, no booking required.

The Scottish Society for the History of Photography's Annual Lecture welcomes Simon Norfolk, an internationally acclaimed photographic artist who has won numerous prestigious awards for his intelligent and quietly beautiful images documenting war zones and battlefields. Using a large format camera, his photographs speak eloquently of the nature of destruction and meditate on the vanity of empire and man's historical capacity for self-annihilation.

Wet Plate Collodion Demonstration

Saturday 7 August 2010, 10.30-13.30
Streetlevel Photoworks, Trongate 103, Glasgow G1 5HD

A demonstration of the Victorian photographic process used for making ambrotypes, tintypes, and glass negatives, by Carl Radford.

The event is free, but please email to let us know if you will be attending.

Members' Visit

Saturday 1 May 2010
2 pm
Members' visit to the Clapperton Studio
28 Scott's Place, Selkirk, TD7 4DR

Annual Annan Lecture

Thursday 25 March 2010 at 6 pm
Mitchell Library, North Street, Glasgow

'A sad, strange gleam of vision' - the Photography of Margaret Watkins

Joe Mulholland told the fascinating story of Margaret Watkins, the highly distinguished Scottish-Canadian photographer who lived for many years in Glasgow.

Annual Lecture 2009

Saturday 30 October 2009
The 16th Annual Photographer's Lecture was given by Ron O'Donnell, described by Dr Tom Normand as 'one of Scotland's finest contemporary art-photographers ... renowned for his dazzling constructed and narrative photographs'. The lecture took place in the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, Weston Link, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, at 6.00 pm.

Members' Visit

Saturday 17 October 2009
Members' visit to the Photography Archive of the University of Dundee.

AGM and the Annan Lecture

Saturday 2 May 2009 at 11.00 am
Fourth Annual Annan Lecture:
The Clyde Shipyard Photography of John Edward Kerr Smith
by Bruce Peter and Roisin Reilly
Mitchell Library, Glasgow

John Edward Kerr Smith (1929–92) was the chief staff photographer for the great Clydebank shipbuilder John Brown & Co. from 1950 to 1966, and later for the Upper Clyde Shipyards at Clydebank and Govan. In a career spanning almost a quarter of a century he photographed some of the most important ships to be launched on the Clyde, producing a stunning portfolio of ‘official’ photographs for documentary and promotional purposes as well as an extensive body of self-motivated work. The result is a unique pictorial insight into the last phase of Glasgow’s most heroic industrial endeavour [see the Annan Lecture Flier].

The AGM was held on Saturday 2 May 2009 in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, at 12.30, following the Annan Lecture.

SSHoP 25!

A Celebration of the 25^th anniversary of The Scottish Society for the History of Photography and of The National Photographic Collection at the National Galleries of Scotland.

SSHoP gratefully acknowledges the support of Awards for All.

Papers from the conference will be published in Studies in Photography, 2009.

SSHoP visit to St Andrews University photographic collection

On 18 October, the Society orgainised a visit for members to St Andrews, the town that saw the birth of photography in Scotland and played such a pivotal pioneering role in its development. The Photographic Archivist, Marc Boulay, showed members round the University's hugely important collection of early photographs.

The collection is rich in works by D O Hill & Robert Adamson, and by Dr John Adamson and other members of the St Andrews circle of photographic pioneers, including Thomas Rodger. It also contains the photographic archive of Valentines of Dundee. For more information, see St Andrews University website.

Annual Lecture 2008

The Annual Photographer's Lecture 2008 was given by Hannah Starkey.

Hannah Starkey is one of the most influential photographic artists working today. A graduate of Napier University and the Royal College of Art, she has exhibited internationally and gained numerous high profile awards including the John Kobal Portrait Award. Her beautifully constructed mise en scenes often suggest transient moments of ennui and quiet drama, usually within the everyday life of women. A major retrospective "Photographs 1997-2007", has
recently been published by Steidl.

The lecture took take place at the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre at the National Galleries of Scotland on Friday 24th October 2008, at 6 pm.

Annan Lecture 2008
The Photography of Oscar Marzaroli

Thursday 24 April 2008 at 6 pm, The Mitchell Library, North Street, Glasgow.

The writer William McIlvanney, and David Bruce, photographic historian and a former colleague of Marzaroli's at Templar Film Studios, discussed Oscar's achievement and legacy, and celebrated a great character.

Ray McKenzie, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Glasgow School of Art, introduced the work of Marzaroli, which is of special significance to Scotland's - and particularly Glasgow's - culture.

Exhibition - Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius, City Art Centre, Edinburgh from 9 February until 20 April 2008. The exhibition included examples from the rich collection of his work at George Eastman House and only the third time such an exhibition has toured.  It included work from the early 1920s through to the 1960s. In particular, a 1927 portfolio of rare Parmelian prints (gelatin silver emulsion on parchment paper), is included. Adams' most beloved images of the American West, such as Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico or Mount Williamson from Manzanar, California, as well as portraits, still lives, and abstracts.

Victorian Photography Day

On Saturday 26 January (writes Monica Thorp), as part of the Dunbartonshire Victorian Event, SSHoP mounted a Victorian Photography Day in Clydebank Town Hall.

We were delighted to see a large and enthusiastic audience that included members of local societies as well as of SSHoP. Ray McKenzie provided an inimitable introduction to early Scottish photography, urging its distinctive character, illustrating its wide range of subject matter, and demonstrating the intriguing amount of detail to be found there. His recommendation to take a magnifying glass to our own Victorian photographs is one that we were all keen to follow.

Next, Alison Morrison-Low gave a comprehensive illustrated account of the numerous photographic processes that were practised in the 19th century - not only the well-known Daguerreotype, calotype, wet collodion, albumen and carbon processes but also the collodion positive, the tintype, the gum bichromate process and many more, including printing processes such as the Woodburytype. Her talk was based on one given originally by the late Brian Coe. The audience was then invited to offer examples of Victorian photography for dating and process-identification. Daguerreotypes, collodion positives and tintypes were brought forth, along with albumen prints in some interesting formats: not only, for example, cartes-de-visite and cabinet prints but also one in the larger and most unusual 'boudoir' format.

The rest of the day was for SSHoP members only: a sandwich lunch very kindly provided by West Dunbartonshire Council, followed by visits to local photo-archives in the nearby Clydebank Library and also in Dumbarton library, which - while not throwing up any surprises - did give a salutary insight into the difficulties that local-authority photo-archivists have to contend with.

Annual Lecture 2007

The Scottish Society for the History of Photography Annual Lecture this year was delivered by Brian Griffin.

The lecture took place at the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre at the National Galleries of Scotland on 25th October 2007.

Besides being one of the very few photographers who crosses over between commercial and gallery work, (and has done since the late 80s), Brian Griffin also makes short 'art house' movies which have been screened in film festivals world-wide. He was described by the British Journal of Photography as 'the most unpredictable and influential British portrait photographer of the last three decades'. A full report will follow in the next SSHoP newsletter to members.

As well as the Annual Lectures, SSHoP mounts a series of events and visits offering members access to a wide range of venues, experts and collections. Information is provided in the regular SSHoPTalk periodical sent to members.

Footnote: whilst we take extreme care to continuously check, verify and update the information about Events we would encourage visitors to our site to confirm any dates and times with us and/or the organisers to ensure no changes or alterations have taken place.