Screen Resources

London Screen Archive
A significant upgrade to the LSA online catalogue is underway.  You will be able to access this from their website: http://www.londonsscreenarchives.org.uk/

BFI Player Launched
The BFI Player provides a mix of free and pay-per-view content.  UK audiences can watch contemporary and archive films in the comfort of their own home.  Watch now at: http://player.bfi.org.uk/

Other On Demand services
One of the films you can watch on the BFI player is 'The Selfish Giant' by Arbor director/writer Clio Barnard.   If you go to The Selfish Giant website, you will see a number of other On Demand sites to choose from: Curzon Home Cinema; BT; Virgin Media; EE; Film Four; Blinkbox [from Tesco]; Sky Store; Google Play; and Volta.

British Council Film Collection - now online

The British Council Film Collection is an archive of over 120 short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how Britain lived, worked and played.

Investigating archives - links

I am talking today to the Photojournalism students about archives, which gives me a chance to reflect on the course I attended earlier in the year.  I wonder what they will think of it...

I am collating all the relevant links in the post below.

Exhibition [at Tate Modern]

Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan [video]

Course details

Investigating the Archive; Photographic Collections of London [Birkbeck/Photographers’ gallery]

Individual archives mentioned

http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about/archive-services

http://www.flickr.com/photos/westminsteruniarchives/

http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ta/

http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/collections/photoarchiveintro/photoarchive.aspx

http://www.magnumphotos.com/

http://www.vam.ac.uk/resources/print_study_reading/index.html

http://www.therai.org.uk/the-rai-photographic-library/

http://www.apimages.com/

http://www.galeuk.com/trialsite/ [Picture Post Historical Archive trial site]

Other archives

http://www.corbisimages.com/

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/

www.gettyimages.com/archival

http://www.arts.ac.uk/kubrick-archive.htm

London Metropolitan Archives

Internet Archive

Digital Book Index [Photography Collections] [Photography periodicals]

http://www.npg.org.uk/research/archive.php

http://www.winningendeavours.org/

Online hubs

http://archiveshub.ac.uk/

http://www.aim25.ac.uk/

http://www.photographiclibraries.com/

References

Bacon, J. (2007). Archive, archive, archive!  Circa Art Magazine, no. 119, p. 50-59

Foster, J. & Sheppard, J. (2002) British archives: a guide to archive resources in the United Kingdom, 4th ed. Hampshire: Palgrave. [available in Archive Services at Regent]

McDonald, S. (2004). HultonArchive – History In Pictures. Accessed from: http://corporate.gettyimages.com/masters2/conservation/articles/HAHistory.pdf

Mereweather, C. (2006) (ed.). The archive [documents in contemporary art]. London: Whitechapel.

Phillips, C. (1982). The judgement seat of photography. October, 22: 27-63. [online]. Accessed from: JSTOR < http://www.jstor.org/stable/778362 >. [Accessed 29 March 2011].

Picture Post Historical Archive [online] [product description]. Available from: http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/picture-post-historical-archive.aspx [Accessed 05/05/2011].

Phillips, S. S. (2003). ‘A history of evidence’ in Sultan, L. & Mandel, M. (2003). Evidence. New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.

Sekula, A. (2002). ‘Reading an archive; photography between labour and capital’ (pp. 443-452 in Wells, L. (ed. ) (2002). The photography reader. Routledge.

Sekula, AL. (1986).  The body and the archive.  October, vol. 39, p. 3-64.

Zylinska, Joanna(2010) 'On Bad Archives, Unruly Snappers and Liquid Photographs', Photographies, 3:2, 139 — 153 [Special Issue: Photography, Archive and Memory]

Norfolk's 'slow photography' draws on archive

Simon Norfolk talks about his current exhibition at Tate, 'Burke + Norfolk - Photographs from the War in Afghanistan,' on the BBC World Service here.

The exhibition draws on the archive of the nineteenth-century Irish photographer, John Burke, linking the late 19th century anglo/afghan war with the current conflict. For Norfolk this shows the "circularity of imperial history". He talks in this interview about how the photographic process of the time accentuated the racial difference of the Afghans and Europeans.

There are several examples of Norfolk's books in the library collection at Harrow; and the most recent, 'Burke + Norfolk,' is on order.

The exhibition continues at Tate Modern to the 10th July.



Additional resources

Tate Channel: Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan [17 minute video]

http://www.simonnorfolk.com/burkenorfolk/ [introduction, photographs, conversation]

Haven't we been here before? Art and design The Guardian [Ian Jack]

Afghanistan: There is a small corner that is forever England Mail Online [Simon Norfolk]

Picture libraries - AP and Magnum

As part of the archives course I am attending, I was invited recently to the photo library of Associated Press. This is situated in an old gin factory in Camden Town. AP 'went digital' in 1995, but the negatives (or ‘negs’) before this date, are stored in a cold room. They sit alongside a massive card index, a small section of which you can see in the picture. There is something you get from flicking through these drawers that is not replicated in a computerised system – a sense of the human behind the cataloguing.

You can search the AP Images database to see the sort of material that is currently uploaded, as well as selected pictures from the archive (e.g. the photographs of AP photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt).

The photographers, though, are not the focus of the agency, unlike at Magnum – which is a cooperative, owned by the photographers. The current exhibition, The Magnum Mark, at the Magnum Print Room, shows the photographic print as collectors' items.

Some of the prints are displayed in hinged frames, so that you can see the ‘magnum mark’ on the back – and in the examples here, a succession of marks – part of the provenance, which confers value (or a specific sort of value) on the print. The care taken in the darkroom is evident in the ‘print maps’ – here shown through the work of Magnum printer, Pablo Inirio.

Two very different visions of the photographer are presented at AP and Magnum respectively: the photographer as hack and the photographer as auteur. 

Related links

AP Images

Corbis Corp

Getty Images

'Getty Images, Inc' n.d., Datamonitor/Life Science Analytics Company Profiles, EBSCOhost, viewed 4 February 2011

Magnum

Carrot or potato – but which is better?

The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980])

On the 22nd January, Sas Mays – Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Critical Theory – led a seminar on critical approaches to the Archive. This was based at the Photographers’ Gallery offices and part of the Investigating the Archive course I am attending.

The carrot, an umbelliferous plant, with a hierarchical root system (with a primary root, from which secondary roots form, which in turn branch to form tertiary roots) was contrasted to the tuberous potato, in order to explore metaphors for seeing the world, or of organising knowledge, or of organising the Archive. In so doing, we were exploring the ideas expressed by Deleuze and Guattari in their stream-of-consciousness-like work A thousand plateaus.

The taproot, like the carrot – but more often the tree – is typically used as a metaphor for knowledge – for example by the thirteenth century writer, Ramon Llul [Arbor_scientiae]. In some senses, it suggests a closed form of thinking, since it privileges structure and hierarchy, which are implicit within the Archive. Rhizomatic (potato-like) thought, in contrast, “stresses multiplicity, complexity, multi-dimensionality and chaos” (Rhizome, 2004).

In Foucault’s analysis, if knowledge is power, then the organisation of knowledge is the organisation of power; and the Archive stands in symbolic relationship to existing power structures – reflecting, representing, and perpetuating them. Photography, too, is implicated. The anthropometric work of Alphonse Bertillon (e.g. tableau synoptique des traits physonomiques) can be cited in this context and so too can Jacob Riis, but there are many other examples.

But, if these readings of the Archive don’t seem to fit with the anti-authoritarian urgency of the Weiner Library (for example), it is perhaps well to remember that while philosophers always reflect on reality, reality does not always reflect on philosophers. Deleuze and Guattari are an entertaining read because they flirt with the non-linear, and pose with the chaotic, but are ultimately neither; their reasoning against reason is reflexive.

Further reading

Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987 [1980]) ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, in A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian. University of Minnesota Press.

Rhizome (2004), in The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies, Sage UK, London, United Kingdom, viewed 30 January 2011, from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/sageukcult/rhizome.

Investigating archives - The Wiener Library

“If we don’t save our history, it will perish” say the Wiener Library [Institute of Contemporary History] on their website.

The library was started by Alfred Wiener, who having fled Nazi Germany in 1933 set up the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam; then fleeing Amsterdam in 1939, he moved the institution to Manchester Square in London. His purpose: to expose the true nature of Nazism to the world.

The library continues this work to this day. Its collection includes well over 10,000 images, a small proportion of which have been digitised and can be previewed online; there are also books, pamphlets, eye-witness accounts and other documents.

It has for fifty years remained in a building on Devonshire Street, but its lease has now expired and it will be moving shortly to Russell Square.  It will then be next door to the newly formed Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, with which it will work.

V&A Prints and Drawings Study Room

On Saturday, I went down to the area of London which is apparently now known as 'Albertopolis' - to explore the V&A Prints and Drawings Study Room.

This was part of my 'Investigating the archive' course.

Here again were prints by Julia Margaret Cameron.  Alongside, was work by Fox Talbot, John Watson, Roger Fenton, Eugene Atget and Gustav Le Gray. 

The prints were more carefully looked after here than in the Rothschild archive: we learnt that the V&A use three sizes of archival box - imperial, semi-imperial and royal.

It was more accesssible too: anyone can get access to the Prints Room and ask for these prints to be brought out for their pleasure.

As well as photography pioneers, a whole range of other photographers are represented.  There are also resource boxes with a range of work to illustrate the history of photography. 

You can search the collections online.

Crimp (1993) suggests, "if photography was in invented in 1839, it was only discovered in the 1960s and 1970s."  However, I think the curators at the V&A might disagree: the first exhibition here (the first in any museum) was in 1858; they have a photograph of it.

References

Crimp, D. (1993).  On the museum's ruins.  Boston: MIT Press.

Photographic collections of London

I’m not a hoarder, nor a collector – not even of books; I don’t have a personal archive: I am not a typical librarian at all in fact.

However, I have become interested in archives of late and have enrolled on a course – Investigating the archive: photographic collections of London.

The first of our visits was to the Rothschild Archive - housed in an impressive building, close by the Bank of England.

It is not particularly accessible – two referees are needed to gain access to the reading rooms - and it is not specifically photographic: the Rothschilds are a banking dynasty, so the archive is as often as not accessed by economic historians.

However, the archive includes a photograph album once owned by Charlotte de Rothschild, which includes prints by Julia Margaret Cameron and has the largest collection of autochromes in the country – over 700 plates taken by Lionel de Rothschild . There are also photographs relating to the running of the company: portraits of staff, and some great pictures of people at work in the gold refinery.

Many archives – personal and business – have photographic materials, including incidentally the archives of The University of Westminster (see their flickr stream).

In some of the reading in preparation of the visit, some rather unflattering conjectures on the nature of collecting were discussed. But, as well as collecting being possibly a “masturbatory pursuit of solitary pleasures,” it is also “one way in which we hope to understand the world around us, and reconcile our places within it.” (Pearce, 1995: 8; 25).

Further reading

Ford, C. (2002) ‘Hannah, Charlotte ...and Julia’ in Rothschild archive review of the year; April 2001 – March 2002. The Rothschild Archive Trust. Available at http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/articles/ar2002.pdf [accessed 14/01/2011]

Pearce, S. M. (1995). Collecting processes: an investigation into collecting in the European tradition. London: Routledge

'The colours of another world' [pdf] Available at http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/articles/AR2006Autochromes.pdf [accessed 14/01/2011]

Old Periodicals Online

An advert in this 1910 The British Journal Photographic Almanac declares the Regent Street Polytechnic - a former incarnation of the University of Westminster - as having, "The first, largest and most successful school of photography in the world."  You will find it here.



This e-copy resides on the Internet Archive. 

Thanks to Jo Barker for sending me the link to the photography periodicals section of The Digital Book Index.  There are also links to early copies of Photograms of the year (copies of which are also in the library), which are gems! (see here for example). And there are other sections to explore: the Photography Collections page looks particularly interesting.

The Stanley Kubrick Archive

I visited the Stanley Kubrick Archive yesterday, which was exciting.  The 'Search Room' (above) was designed in the style of the Hilton Space Station in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  This gives it a unique ambience.

The archive - which is now about 80-85% catalogued - is extremely interesting, even if you are not a Kubrick fan, and includes loads of photographs.  These include colour photographs from the set of Lolita, and Weegee's photographs of the pie fight in Dr Strangelove - the only visual record of the scene, as it was not included in the final film.  There are also mountains of material relating to the process of film making - annotated scripts, call sheets, shooting schedules, set design material, costumes, props...etc

The Kubrick Archive is part of the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre, which also has other significant collections - the LCC comic collection, and the Eckersley poster collection.  There are also smaller collections relating to film directors John Schlesinger and Thorold Dickinson. 

According to their information sheet, the centre "seeks to inform, inspire, engage and excite a diverse range of audiences in support of their creativity, learning and research in art, design, fashion, communications and the performing arts," which sounds good to me.

Further information about the collection and about visiting the centre is available on their website.

Further reading
Mahurter, S. (2007).  'The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of Arts London.'  EVA London Conference,11–13 July 2007.

'The Kubrick Legacy'. University of the Arts London Magazine.  Spring/Summer 2006, pp. 8-17

Stanley Kubrick Archive brochure

Related interest
If you are a Kubrick fan, you may be interested to know that St Albans Museum currently has a Kubrick season (he lived in St Albans).