On Saturday 29th March 2025, the University Of Wolverhampton played host to the Royal Photographic Society’s Historic Group and held a symposium at the George Wallis School Of Art Building. “Exploring the history and impact of photography”
I had booked tickets on eventbrite a few weeks before but had forgotten about it until Simon, a lecturer, reminded me of it. So I arrived in good time to a group of people in the foyer of the MK building and prepared to wait for the start at 10:00am.
I sat down on the sofas and struck up a conversation with someone who used to be a student at the uni and he graduated in 2020. Matthew is a documentary photographer and we discussed that he is now working in marketing for many global brands. I recalled seeing some of his work when Euripides showed us some previous works in my early years on the course.
The time came and we all filed into the Lecture Theatre to take our seats for the main event.
Alan Hodgson “The historical significance of an aerial survey print”
He shared with us a photo of an Earth orbit print from 1981 made aboard the Columbia Space Shuttle’s second flight at a height of 225km and the print had a scale of 1:500000 , covering 300x50km of the earths surface.
It was a radar image and has the ability to see through several metres of soft sand. It IS a photograph according to the RPS definition it’s just that it is Synthetic Aperture Radar rather than visible light.
Film recorder was from Apollo 17 as they reuse kit due to tight budgets in the organisation. The flight was classified as a military / engineering flight STS-2.
Alan discussed that the context of the print had changed due to its classification being relaxed over the years, it was a photo of Iran according to Alan and this would have been a politically charged event if the contents of the image had been leaked at the time.ine presentations
Simon Harris “The object of study in an experimental practice”
Next on the bill, was Simon our lecturer and he was discussing his practice, his reasons behind the works and his work at HMP Grendon where he currently has a residency.
He showed us a Wet plate collodion image of a self portrait that was shiny and got him thinking about reflections etc. He shared a quote from Kublai Khan regarding Marco Polo and his ability to accurately describe what he had seen on his travels to the emperor who could not travel through his own empire.
During the lockdown in 2020 he felt like his toys were taken away, and resulted in making a camera out of a matchbox. He captured several images with him the picture.
The figurative given” and on surfaces that are reflective, on prints that he was producing from the negatives captured in the matchbox pinhole camera. About this time he was tasked with making a response to works already in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery so he made images of himself looking into a Bridget McDonald painting. He could see himself in the picture and then turned it into a screen print with a shiny surface. He had also painted the rear of the print cadmium red to reflect some red colour off the white wall but it had been painted grey so that wasn’t very effective.
Residency at the HMP Grendon was the next topic and he had made several images, before an interview by Ikon asked him if they were self portraits. He then talked about the use of mirrors in painting and how the Artemisia Gentileschi “Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting” must have been painted using two mirrors and how the relationships of the artist is captured in the painting or how the imaged are captured in the image.
Roger Farnham and Harry Magee, Reverse engineering applied to the history of photography
ROger and Harry had selected an old photograph or photogravure and discussed the location of the original shot and how they might be able to track down the spot the photo was taken from.
Dark Mountains 1891 by James Craig Annan
Taken up Ben Vorlich one of the Munroes in Scotland
Looking into the family history and the contemporaries that JCA was associating with they figured out who might be in the photo and where it may have been. They spent a long time looking in family trees, organisations and censuses as well as art literature from the day. They had a walk up Ben Vorlich to see if they could find the spot but the photos made did not align with the original.
Harry Magee then stood up and said that they might have saved time by looking at the linear perspective etc Using techniques worked out by Durer and his “Drawing Frame” they used the Linear Perspective process to calculate the dimensions.
Linear perspective appeared in painting as painting of black and white squares on floors and patterns that all seemed to be super accurate.
Brunelleschi created a proof of linear perspective, mirror with a hole through it and a painting of a building that when looked through in the right spot the image seen with the eye through the hole aligned perfectly with the actual scene in front of the viewer.
Vermeer sometimes used a pin through canvas and chalk line onto the canvas to help with perspective before applying the paint to the canvas.
Harry kept using the term QED on his slides meaning that he had proved what he set out to prove.
He showed how using visual centre, station point, and lines intersecting these from the peaks of hills at a known distance from the peak of Ben Vorlich could triangulate where the camera might have been. He explained Ordnance Survey maps and the terrain contour lines which could be overlaid with the result from the deductions to ascertain the origin point. Quite clever really, but he said they needed to do more work and possibly get some surveyors equipment to more accurately find the spot.
Ron Callender, “Colour, a historical ramble”
Ron started off with a journey through the different versions of colour charts that might have been created over the many centuries.
The Neolithic colour chart, Aristotle was thinking about colour theory, Philosopher Robert fludd 1630 Urine Specialist 7 colours of urine that meant different conditions.
Aron Sgrid Fortius , Isaac newton did a prism and then colours into a circle, Lambard used triangles but wa thinking about luminance, Tobias Mayer thought about RGB, Richard Waller created colour chart used to note down colours for animals and plants that meant he could replicate them once back home.
James Sowerby called them primitives red, yellow and blue and invented a chronometer which was to compare the course of one thing against the chart.
Moses Harris proved colours can be made from red yellow and blue, Otto Runge used a sphere, Michael Eugene Chevreul, director of a dye house, described simultaneous contrast after a worker said the thread looked the wrong colour but it was changing depending on the light in the room.
The Munsell system for hue, value and chroma still used in art science and industry today, 1931 produced an rgb primaries diagram
Lippmann process comes through the plate and bounces back into the plate from a mercury mirror behind, Autochrome process in1906 to record colour, Baker Miller pink used in prisons to calm down the prisoners.
It was a ramble through colours and ended with the modern day colour chart but there was no mention of Pantone system that is also in use today. It was interesting to see how different people over the years had thought about colours and how they could be presented.
At lunch break we had the opportunity to view a video made by a member of the RPS Historical group about the Minox Camera. Richard Brown has a Minox and decided to do a delve into its history and the representations of it through its lifetime. It was a good video and showed off the beginnings of it and how it became synonymous with spy films and tv shows. I never realised before how ubiquitous it was in the upper circles of showbiz land either. Looks to be an early form of status symbol.
He detailed the invention of the camera by Walter Zapp and ended up retracing his steps to shoot shooting a Minox camera and revisit the locations of the only other film he shot on a loaned Minox many years ago.
Geoff Blackwell, Photographic Philately
Landscape photography in stamp design was the next subject and there were many examples of how these older photographs were used to design stamps for the postal service around the world. There were also a good few anecdotes.
Niepce image for Mauritius, Jamaican stamps by Adolphe Duperly, 1898 stamp of plots in the USA, Robert Edwards Holloway and Newfoundland stamps including Quidi vidi village.
Frissell 1925 grand falls, Labrador, Frank Hurley Icebound of ship stuck in the ice, Herbert Ponting cavern in the iceberg , George Grant us national park photographer, and Prince Andrew producing photographs of castles on a set of stamps in 1988.
He also said that the two greats of landscape photography Ansel Adams and Peter Adamson were not highly represented on stamps, but that there were no real occurrences of British stamps featuring some of the UKs greatest landscape photographers.
Dr Adrian Thomas & The Work of Sebastian Gill Scott
Adrian is a member of the British Institute of Radiology and a doctor of many different disciplines
Looking at X-Rays ad the history, it became known as the “New Photography”
Bones can be shown as negatives or positives depending on the age of the process and how they are presented in books or magazines etc.
Gill-Scott worked at the Royal London hospital and they developed the process from the hospital’s photography department. Ernest Harnack created a mobile X-ray device and this could be used around the hospital or even out in the battlefield.
The field of Radiobiology was not known about particularly well and many of the practitioners suffered from a condition that they initially called radio-dermatitis. Adrian showed us some photos of a radiologists hand after the radiation had eaten away at the bone and flesh, causing it to decay and ultimately create a cancer. This is due to the radiation that is well known about today and why the nurse ducks out of the room when pressing the x-ray button. It was also thought that Mitol? the developer might have been the cause of the skin inflammations, and it is widely known to be a troublesome chemical.
He has produced a book called Invisible Light that goes through the story and shows further examples. Some of the x-rays he shared with us were quite enlightening and there were more that he said were for more medical minded audiences. He also shared some of the films with us in the break and showed how th films with lots of silver on provided a far greater reproduction that that of the later x-rays.
Mac Mcmcoig – Art, tracing and photography
Tracing = source + equipment + ground
This talk went into the history of photography as an art form, or whether it was purely factual. Mac told us how photographs were considered indexical.
Dibutades making a tracing of her lovers shadow before he goes off to war so she can remember what he looks like.
Other tools were being used too to aid painters and artists including Epidiascope, Camera Obscura, magic lantern, camera obscure.
W.H. Fox Talbot used a Camera Lucida to trace pictures but was not very successful so he set about making a photographic camera like we see today.
“It’s not the form of the art that gives it its intelligence”
Cindy Sherman untitled film stills were used as an example of using photography as art andhow Andy Warhol sold pictures of Chairman Mao traced from the “little red book”
Basically the chat was discussing the differences between how photography was thought about first and how it is used today whether it is used for factual or artistic purposes, which reminds me of a few lectures we had with Sylvia last year.
Victorian Post Mortem Photography by Charles Paul Azzopardi
Joining from Malta on a Zoom call Charles gave us a talk about Victorian photography and their penchant for taking photos of dead people, including infants.
In Malta between 1839 and 1910 hundreds of thousands of images were created, mainly of military personnel by photographic studios. Some of these studios advertised the option to take photographs of subjects recently deceased.
Post mortem photos to make the dead look blissfully asleep and ease the pain of loss, particularly when the subjects were children.
They were often used as Memento Mori and Queen Victoria used photos of Albert around her own portraits as a reminder of him whilst she was still in mourning.
Immigrant to Malta Richard Ellis was prolific photographer as well as J Conroy and 1868 made a photograph in the studio of a child who was dead looking into a mirror. Very creepy.
Common in the times due to the memorialising of the relatives
This subject was an odd one, and the subject was intriguing as well as a little disturbing.
Walter Benington’s Photographic records by Rob Crow
Picturing Gaudier, who was a sculptor working in the late 19th century who died in 1915.
Bennington was a portrait photographer who started taking pictures of Gaudier-Brzeska. The photos of Gaudiers work were used for cataloguing and documenting progress on works and there were very few portraits made of the artist himself.
Gaudier also worked with Jacob Epstein to capture images of himself at work sculpting.
H S Ede was interested in Gaudier, and worked at the Tate. Brodszky published a memoir also using Beningtons images. Archie Utin wanted to archive the portraits of gaudier but there was a single image missing. Six images and the one missing maybe due to being kept away from the media. Sothebys sold the six portraits of Gaudier for £16,000 when the collection was initially thought to be worth around £800-£1200.
Cameron Robertson – W.h.De Lan and his photographic family
This talk was basically a detective story around the family of William Delaney born in Bradford, 1844
Possibly working in 1861 producing “Carte du visite”
He was probably a travelling photographer and father in law is a photographic artist.
Brother in law Richard Robinson was also a photographer
Travelling around everywhere in a caravan making photographs of working class people in the areas where a carnival or funfair may have been taking place. He went on to show how the daughters of the family carried on the photography tradition until their ultimate demise.
Robertson did research, using census records and archives from the area to find a photo of where the family worked in Berwick upon Tweed, he even found an image or two showing the caravan/studio used by the photographer in a wide shot of Berwick from a high vantage point. There was a lot of research and detective like thread pulling to get to the end of the story and come up with a final slide of the grave stones of the family.
Cameron’s instagram handle was @oldsoul1993
Eva Davis- Armin T Wegner Genocide Through a Lens
Last up on the day was Eva Davis who is studying for a doctorate at the University of Wolverhampton and was giving us a presentation in the Genocide images being made by Amin T Wegner.
Eva shared photos and information of the Hamidian massacres and genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire where Wegner was a German military nurse who took photos of the deportation and genocide of Armenians, then sneaked the photos out on glass plates in his belt.
One of his famous photos is “The deported family on the road in 1915” and shows without blood or gore a family being forced out of their homeland and sent on a forced march into the deserts surrounding the area of their origin. This would be the end of them and saved the forces from using bullets, knives or other methods of disposing of the people.
A last photo showed a camp in the Syrian desert where the women and children ended up, with no males as they had all been slaughtered, to die of starvation, illness and violence. This was the end of the road and not a safe space like we might think of refugee camps today.
Wenger died in Austria after writing letter to Adolf Hitler about not making the same mistakes with his plans towards the minorities that he subjected to genocide in the years leading up to the second world war. As a result he ended up moving between 7 concentration camps before escaping to Austria where he died. The photographs on glass negatives survived to document this ethnic cleansing in a time when this sort of event were not usually recorded like this.
Reflection
It was a packed day, from 10am ’til 4pm full of information around historical photography. There were some really interesting speakers who were fully engaging and sharing interesting material that will no doubt come back to me in the future and inform some work. There were other presentations that read purely like an academic essay and are a little on the dry side but still full of fact laden slides.
There were many slides containing images that were close to the mark on taste and the dead children I think was a bit much for a few people. The x-rays information was also pleasing to hear about and how the science behind the subject has grown in the last 100 years.
The image from Space was a good example of the differences a photograph goes though over its lifetime due to circumstances outside of its control. I can imagine NASA images of Iran being tightly controlled at the time and the capabilities of the imaging systems not wanting to be shared with the “enemy” of the day.
The talks around colours and philately were interesting but I found my mind wandering through these as I guess I don’t have much of an interest in the subject. Some people were also reading straight from a script and this also felt a little disengaging.
The talks from a couple of the presenters showed that they had a lot of free time to contemplate tracking down people or locations from photographs and maybe this is something I might think about doing once I retire and am free of the daily grind of full time work.
I would attend another RPS Symposium if one comes up and I think that the whole event was good for the RPS and even better for the University Of Wolverhampton. The cross pollination of ideas and people can only be a good thing right!
Thanks to all involved int he organisation on the day.
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