Recent events

Olive Edis FRPS (1876–1955) is best known today for her portraits of North Norfolk fishermen, as the first British woman to be appointed an official war photographer and for her early adoption of the autochrome technique.

However, she called Cambridge her ‘third home’, exhibited in the city and photographed some of its most prominent residents, from women in public life and scientists such as JJ Thomson and Ernest Rutherford, to the medievalist and writer of ghost stories MR James. Edis was a member of the RPS from 1913.

In this talk, Jill Whitelock explores Edis’s Cambridge connections through a collection of her photographs at Cambridge University Library that have only recently come to light, as well as discussing curatorial practice and the different ways in which photographs in libraries can find meaning.

Jill Whitelock is Associate Director and Head of Special Collections at Cambridge University Library, with strategic responsibility for the Library’s collection of manuscripts, archives, photographs and early printed materials.

Founded in London in 1868 as the Colonial Society, the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) collection, now housed at Cambridge University Library, is an enormous repository of information, pictorial and written, on the Commonwealth and Britain’s former colonial territories.

The photographic collection comprises over 125,000 items (albums, loose prints, slides, glass plate negatives and lantern slides).

The RCS actively acquired photographs from established commercial photographers as well as from its own members overseas. Notable photographers represented in the collection include Felix Beato (Burma), Samuel Bourne (India), John Thomson (China), Alfred Hugh Fisher (Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee), G.R. Lambert & Co. (Singapore), the Lisk-Carew Brothers (Sierra Leone) and Alfred Lobo (Uganda).

This talk by curator Sally Kent will provide a general introduction to the RCS photograph collection, with a summary of the available finding aids and digital resources.

This talk looks at the E Chambré Hardman House and Studio in Liverpool. It is presented by Amy Carney and Lindsey Sutton and hosted by RPS Historical Group chair Gilly Read FRPS.

The Hardmans’ House, 59 Rodney Street, Liverpool was the home and photographic studio of E. Chambré and Margaret Hardman from 1949 until their deaths in 1988 and 1970 respectively.

Chambré was Liverpool’s foremost portrait photographer - and Fellow of the RPS. He was also renowned for his urban and rural landscape photography. He was an exemplar of the pictorialist school of photography. While portrait photography was their bread and butter work, their passion lay beyond the studio.

The Hardmans’ House is the only known photographic practice of the 20th century where the entire output has survived intact, together with the studio.

Since 2019, work has been taking place to better understand the contents and size of the significant collection and cataloguing and selected digitisation has taken place. A current estimate at the size of the collection is 142,000 items.

In this talk, Anna Sparham discusses the trailblazing Christina Broom, her life, photography and legacy.

Broom (1862-1939) is considered to be Britain's first woman press photographer.

Her subjects included royalty, soldiers during the First World War and the suffrage movement.

Broom has been selected for a Historic England Blue heritage plaque which was unveiled in August 2024.

Anna Sparham is National Curator of Photography at the National Trust.

She was formerly Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London, curating several exhibitions including Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom.

She is lead author of 100 Photographs, From the Collections of the National Trust (2024).

Cartomania was a photographic phenomenon that seized the British public’s imagination at the beginning of the 1860s. The format enjoyed a popularity of such epidemic proportions that for a while it became the dominant medium of visual culture.

Paul Frecker’s talk looks at some of the lesser known aspects of the format’s cultural impact, specifically the market for celebrity portraits, the problem of access to celebrities and the format’s tendency to obscure class distinctions.

He began collecting cartes-de-visite in 2001 when he came across an album in a local antiques market. That one fortuitous find eventually led to him become a dealer in vintage photographs, specialising in cartes de visite.

The British Library has as part of its collection the Dillwyn Llewelyn/Story-Maskelyne photographic archive, a collection of 19th-century photographic albums, negatives, and papers from the Dillwyn-Llewelyn/Story-Maskelyne families, relatives of William Henry Fox Talbot.

In this talk, Susan M. Harris takes a closer look at Thereza Mary, the daughter of John Dillwyn Llewelyn, a keen amateur photographer who was also interested in botany and astronomy. Susan uses Thereza's albums and journals to highlight the work of this remarkable woman and her photographic and scientific pursuits in the 19th century.

Susan M. Harris is a design historian specialising in photography's material and visual culture.

In 2018, Signal Film and Media embarked on 'Seeing the North with Sankey,' a journey to re-house, catalogue and celebrate the incredible Sankey Family Photography Collection.

The Sankeys were a father and son trio, who documented life in Barrow and Cumbria over 70 years starting around 1900.

The postcards they created from their photographs were posted all over the world and tell fascinating snippets from people's lives across the 20th century.

With support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, a three year project explored and shared the priceless photographic work of the Sankey Family in collaboration with local communities in Barrow-in-Furness and wider Cumbria.

This talk is presented by Liz Critchley and John Harrison from the 'Seeing the North with Sankey Project' (2018-2021).

Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most innovative photographers of the nineteenth century.

In 1875, Cameron left England for Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, where she died three years later. Remaining photographs from her 'Ceylon period' are few, numbering less than 30 and little known.

Aneela de Soysa, who is working on a thesis on Cameron’s Ceylon photographs, shares traces of Cameron’s life and times in Ceylon derived through archival sources and visits to the locations where the photographs were taken, bringing new insights into Julia Margaret Cameron's last photographs.

Pete Moore's talk explores a small pioneering photographic business established in Grantown on Spey in Moray, in the Highlands of Scotland.

Alex Ledingham's studio traded between c.1907 and 1954 and provides a valuable local social documentary capturing events and people in Strathspey.

In this talk, Tony Richards journeys into wet-collodion photography. He shares his experiences of cameras, kit and chemistry.

The stress of TV and movie commissions, the joy of sharing via workshops and demonstrations, and the possibilities presented with invitations of international travel.

Tony Richards is senior photographer and lead in advanced photographic techniques at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Manchester.

The Royal Photographic Society's Historical Group presents artist and photographer Jo Gane who discusses her PhD research and practice into electroplating and the daguerreotype, looking at daguerreotypes made in 1840s Birmingham by George Shaw and Francis Marrian.

This talk explores the role of recreative practice in understanding the material qualities of the daguerreotype alongside discussing the improvements to the daguerreotype that electroplating offered and how they developed from a competitive industrial environment in Birmingham.

Ulster In Days Gone By: The W. A. Green Photographic Collection is presented by Victoria Millar, Senior Curator of History, National Museums Northern Ireland.

The W. A. Green Collection dates from c.1880 to c.1940. It was acquired by the Ulster Folk Museum in the early 1960s, and consists of approximately 4,000 glass plate negatives, original prints, lantern slides and published series of views.

A talk by John Ashton about 'Photos Bradford,' the photography archive of Bradford District Museums and Galleries.

Created in the tumultuous years of the 1980s, the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit sought to document aspects of people’s lives in Bradford’s diverse communities.

Jane Wigley, one of Britain´s first female photographers, and the official licentiate to take daguerreotype portraits in 1840s Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is today, as she was then, disregarded as a footnote.

New research presented by Kelvin Wilson illuminates the unique shaping behind Jane Wigley´s character.

William Graham, born in 1845, lived most of his life in the Springburn area of Glasgow.

His life-long hobby was photography. He was known for his topographical knowledge of Glasgow and was an original member of the Old Glasgow Club. A collection of his photographs and negatives was acquired in 1916 and is housed in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

The talk is presented by Clare Thompson of the Mitchell Library.

The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world, spanning the whole history of the medium and including most types of photographic processes.

This talk by Valeria Carullo, Photographs Curator at RIBA, provides an introduction to the Collection and to the many aspects of architectural photography.

Bekah O'Neill of the British Library discusses the work of Fay Godwin (1931-2005) and the steps involved in rehousing, cataloguing and storing her archive to make the collection accessible for viewing.

Jamie Carstairs (Special Collections, University of Bristol Library) was Project Manager of "Historical Photographs of China" (2006-2021).

In this illustrated talk, he discusses how negatives and photographs from family-generated collections were digitised and captioned.

In this talk, curator and author Catlin Langford discusses the history and culture surrounding the autochrome, and her process for bringing these works to life for Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome (Thames & Hudson, 2022).

In 'The Road to Balmoral,' Dr. David Barber presents new research on the early years of royal photographers W. & D. Downey of South Shields and Newcastle.

Mary Burgess, Local Studies Assistant at the Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge Central Library, discusses The Post Office Terrace Studio Collection, Cambridge. 

Claire Mayoh, Archive and Library Manager at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford explores its incredible sound and vision collections.

To commemorate the centenary of the death of former RPS member John Thomson FRGS (1837-1921), Betty Yao MBE talks about Thomson's decade in Asia.

Ian Leith of the Wick Society looks at the Johnston Collection, a unique photographic archive which provides an insight into life in and around Wick from 1863 to 1976.

Talk by Blake Milteer, curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, provides a view into the MacKinnon Collection, representing Scottish life and achievements from the 1840s through to the 1950s.

Colin Ford CBE is one of Britain's first curators of photography and has had a long and distinguished career. He discusses some of the highlights with Gilly Read FRPS.

Dr Jan Graffius, curator of collections at Stonyhurst College, talks to Gilly Read FRPS about Roger Fenton and his photographs of Stonyhurst and the surrounding countryside.  

The RPS Historical Group’s 2020 Research Day: a series of papers of research in progress from photo-historians, students and others.