Annual lecture

The Colin Ford Lecture

The 2020 lecture, The Future of the Past: The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné took place on 6 February at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Professor Larry Schaaf has been examining and compiling information on Talbot images worldwide for more than four decades. Beginning in 2014, with the backing of the William T Hillman Foundation, the Bodleian Libraries undertook converting these private databases into a public resource. So far, images and data on more than 16,000 photographs have been made freely available on the website. These allow individual researchers to pursue their own questions and draw their own conclusions.

The event was ‘sold out’, but free, with a number of hopefuls queuing at the door for no shows. The lecture is available to download at: http ://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/2020-colin-ford-lecture

The lecture is named in Colin Ford’s honour. Between 1972 and 1982 he was Keeper of the film and photography collections at the National Portrait Gallery. He then became the first Director of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford.

The Hurther & Driffield Lecture

Ferdinand Hurther (1844–1898) and Vero Charles Driffield (1848–1915) were nineteenth-century photographic scientists who brought quantitative scientific practice to photography through the methods of sensitometry and densitometry.

This is generally a lecture on a technical subject.