Points of View

Early photography discovery day

There's just a few tickets left for our major free event on Saturday 7 November.

Enjoy, explore and learn about the remarkable early years of photography at a packed day of free talks, displays, workshops and activities.

• Bring in your very old photos and talk to experts about what they show and how best to look after them
• Families with children aged 6 and over can make and use a pinhole camera, with a separate workshop for adults
• Experience the mysteries of Willett & Patteson's Amazing Camera Obscura
• Dress up in Victorian costume and have your photo taken in Madame La Luz's Photographic Parlour
• See the highlights of the British Library photography collection in our magnificent exhibition
• Enjoy a period Magic Lantern Show
• Come to one of our free talks with curator John Falconer and Michael Pritchard, photograph historian

More - all events and activities are free!

[JF]

More press coverage

Some great press coverage:

Daily Telegraph on Nelson's Column

Times Archive blogs about the famous Regent's Park hippo

Thanks also to Michael Pritchard for his blog posting on British photographic history. Glad to hear that he enjoyed the opening party last night.

[CW]

Just about ready

Press views today - which means that the first visitors are arriving just as the last exhibition labels are going out.

It's looking good for the exhibition opening this evening.

Points of View opens to the public at 9.30 tomorrow morning (gallery closes at 18.00).

Gallery and Shop opening hours

[CW]

And one from today's Times Online

Very positive review from Joanna Pitman in the Times this morming: 4/5 stars.

Here are some excerpts, with links to the images:

'Lovely little gems dot the show, such as the photograph taken by Don Juan Carlos, the Duke of Montizon, of the hippopotamus Obaysch that arrived from Egypt in 1852 to live in Regent’s Park Zoo.'

'The exhibition is packed with curiosity and beauty, typified by some charming pictorialist photographs by Peter Henry Emerson, such as Coming Home from the Marshes (1886).'

'Frith was one of the most commercially successful makers of photographic views of the Middle East [...]. One of his finest photographs is The Rameseum of El-Kurneh, taken in 1857.'

'A beautiful velvety photograph by Wilhelm Burger of a village near Yokohama taken in 1869 gives a highly picturesque view of Japan.'

'Napoleon Sarony’s portrait of Oscar Wilde taken in New York in 1882 [...] was later used as the basis for an advertisement for a New York department store.'

'If this is just a taster of the library’s collections, there are many more treats in store for us.'

[CW]

Spirits, ghosts and ectoplasm

An event for Hallowe'en (Sat 31 Oct)

'Imagining the Impossible: The Truth about Spirit Photography'

Images of departed spirits, ghosts and ectoplasm captured on photographs became a huge sensation between the 1860s and 1930s.

As establishment figures such as Arthur Conan Doyle enthused about these miraculous messages, others sought to uncover fraud and trickery.

An illustrated talk by Gordon Rutter, scholar of anomalous phenomena... Find out more

[CW]

'Reportage' in the FT

The Financial Times ran a nice piece on the exhibition over the weekend. Here is Claire Holland's 'Reportage' on FT.com.

[CW]

The Genius of Photography

Watching a re-run of this excellent 6-part series on BBC Four (first seen two years ago) tonight reminds me that there's an excellent website still available.

See, in particular, 'Fixing the shadows'.

[CW]

Book this one now

Some really interesting events coming up over the next few months.

One I shall certainly be going to is 'A Village Lost And Found: into an extraordinary stereoscopic world' on Wed 11 Nov. A few people have asked me if the speaker is 'that' Brian May. The answer is 'yes'. He's the world-famous... astro-physicist.

[CW]

Online exhibition goes live

As promised in the previous post, there's now an online exhibition of 37 key photographs, arranged in 8 'themes'. You can zoom in for the details. What's your favourite?

Of course you'll 'be able to see the originals when Points of View opens to the public on 30 Oct.

[CW]

Victorian photographs and how they were made

We're all working away on the exhibition and associated website. In the next few days we'll be offering you a preview of the physical exhibition in our Online Gallery.

To whet your appetite, here are nearly 1,500 Victorian photographs to look at now.

You can register for the Online Gallery and log in - to mark favourites, comment on individual items, and even create your own personal galleries to share with others.

We also have a feature by curator John Falconer on early photographic processes. Know your wet collodion from your calotype and collotype and impress your friends.

[CW]