News

To coincide with 'Reflections On A Glass Plate' Symposium in London on Thur 17 May, 2018, we invited one of the speakers to tell PCN members how a UK collection inspired her to go on a two-year journey to develop a unique process for making contemporary glass plates. A process she now teaches.

Debbie Adele Cooper is an artist, curator, participation designer and educator moving between digital and analogue, and seeking to create new conversations between the past and today. Her work as a glass plate (dry plate) photographic artist has involved creative response to, and participation with, UK photographic collections and archives including a residency at WW Winter Photographers.

Shooting on Glass by Debbie Adele Cooper
I photograph on glass plate, I love it. I love the magical quality that an image has when on seen on glass, and I love it when someone on one of my workshops makes and then shoots their first plate. This process took me years to master, but each time I make a plate I still learn something new.

5 years ago I had no idea what Dry Plate photography was or that photographs on glass existed. It was 2013 I was running a mass participation photography project for FORMAT International Photography Festival, asking people to send in photos of their working day, creating a photo map of our collective working day. I was sent a photo of people at work in a photography studio in 1900s, I was blown away by this image and contacted the submitter right away. They told me that they were a photography studio in Derby and had been photographing on Midland Road since 1850s and they had a vast collection of images which I was welcome to see, I went to visit W W Winter Ltd that very day.

They showed me around their purpose built studio and showed me some of their vast collection. On this visit, for the very first time I held a negative from the W W Winter collection, and it was also the first time I'd ever seen or heard of glass plate negatives. As a child in the 1980s I'd photographed on film, and learnt black and white processing at college, but never seen or heard of the dry plate process. I was enchanted by the glass plate as an object and wanted to know more...

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More of the UK’s fascinating photographic collections have recently launched online, featuring mashups of maps and images.

Timepix
Timepix.uk has been described at the Google Street View of its time - and currently features work from 1940s and 50s. Timepix is a web-based application that links old photos with the places where they were taken. It has launched with thousands of photographs from Greater Manchester, made by Ordnance Survey to map revision points. The photos are mostly from street corners, and usually feature a worker holding a white arrow aimed at the point in question, but also include lovely details from the era - passers-by and curious onlookers, shopfronts and verges, front gardens and endless gateposts. Learn more at https://www.timepix.org/ and explore the map itself at https://www.timepix.uk/#/welcome

Britain from Above
Meanwhile BritainFromAbove.org.uk, which relaunched in 2017, starts from a similar map interface, but gathers together 95,000 aerial photos of the country from the Aerofilms collection that were taken between 1919 and 1953. Most urban and many rural areas are covered, and a free account allows users to zoom into photographs and add pins with information. As with Timepix, prints can be purchased.

Prince Albert
A project to digitise and publish Prince Albert’s private collections has been given the go-ahead. The Prince Albert Digitisation Project, at the Royal Collection Trust, will include over 10,000 photographs collected and commissioned by Albert between 1841-1862, by many of the earliest pioneers of British photography. More info via The Guardian.

The Brunei Gallery will be exhibiting the first London Exhibition of Scottish photographer John Thomson to encompass his 10 years in Asia. Thomson’s photography across China, Siam (Thailand) and Cambodia was widely praised by his peers and continues to enthuse new audiences today. 

John Thomson (1837–1921) began his travels in Asia in 1862 and his photographs of his journey form one of the most extensive records of any region taken in the nineteenth century. Thomson's photographs were were taken only two decades after the invention of photography and working with the wet collodion process he travelled with cumbersome crates, glass negatives, a portable dark room, as well as highly flammable and poisonous chemicals. 

Thomson's photographed subjects including King Mongkut Rama IV, his royal family and entourage, Angkor Wat, the Chao Phraya River, temples and monks, dancers and musicians. Thomson's role as a pioneer of photojournalism is marked by his desire to present a true to life representation of the people of Asia, whether this was the rich and famous or this was people working on the streets. 

His collection of 700 glass plates travelled back with Thomson to Britain in 1872 and since 1921 has been housed and preserved at the Wellcome Library, London. The extensive collection of photographs will be exhibited alongside a selection of Qing robes, textiles and Siamese court objects.

The exhibition opens on the 13th April at the Brunei Gallery SOAS, University of London and continues until 23th June.

Admission is free. 

More information and a video trailer for the exhibition can be found here.

On until Sunday, 22 April 2018, The Victoria and Albert Museum present Trees in Photography, a display as party of their Into the Woods series to mar the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest and the launch of the 2017 Charter for Trees, Woods and People. Including work by 40 photographers including Paul Strand, Robert Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the display explores the ways in which trees have been displayed from the emergence of photography in the mid-19th century from botanical records to creative expression.

From the V&A Website:
Trees were among the first photographic subjects collected by this Museum as a learning resource for artists and designers. The V&A has continued to acquire photographs of trees in various contexts: within landscapes and forests, as lone subjects, in relationship to humans, in rural and urban settings, and as symbols of cultural significance.

More can be found out here.