TABLE OF CONTENTS
This is the table of contents for the blog produced for an AHRC funded research project on the work of the Ilford Limited photographic company and aspects of photographic culture during WWI and in the interwar period in Britain.
The blog is kept as part of my own research practice as well as to communicate ideas in progress to anyone who is interested. I am aware that the possible groups with a stake in this research are really diverse, so rather than try and pitch it to a particular readership, I have just tried to write in a way that does not presume too much prior knowledge of my field, though the tone is definitely academic rather than journalistic.
Clicking on the title of a blog entry will open that entry (and the rest from that month) in a new tab. The low-resolution images in the sidebar (or below if you are looking at this on a phone) are from the Ilford Limited archive at Redbridge and to the best of my knowledge out of copyright. I hope to add details / captions later but for now they are just decorative.
1 | 14 August 2018 | Aesthetics, Industry and Innovation in Twentieth Century Photography: The Ilford Archive | New AHRC funded research project starting September 2018
Project announcement and details
2 | 15 August 2018 | Research talks and workshops | New AHRC funded research project starting September 2018
Offering talks, workshops etc.; links to social media accounts.
3 | 20 August 2018 | Beginnings and Returnings | Aesthetics, Industry and Innovation in Twentieth Century Photography: The Ilford Archive
Readings and beginnings; refining terminology; concept of innovation; “laboratory studies”; business structures and models.
4 | 25 August 2018 | Excursus into Economics | Understanding Innovation in Schumpeter's Economic Theory
Joseph A. Schumpeter; innovation as a social activity; role of the entrepreneur; “creative destruction”; evolutionary model of capitalism; Marxism; Thatcherism and Reaganism; political emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation.
5 | 26 August 2018 | Innovation as Fetish Object | David Harvey and Key Points on Innovation
Critique of Schumpeterian economics; innovation as means for monopoly; role of the state in innovation; technological innovation as an industry in itself; reluctant consumers; “creative destruction”.
6 | 28 August 2018 | Innovation-Determination | Modernism, Feminism, Technology-in-use
Modernity and modernism'; spectacle and astonishment; wonder and habit; avant-garde; everydayness of technological commodities; gendering of technology; technological determinism; adaptations, maintenance, repair and re-use.
7 | 30 August 2018 | The Sensory Economy | Imperceptible changes in everyday aesthesis
The “distribution of the sensible”; the senses in social and cultural history; relation between senses and regulatory frameworks; newness; aesthísis and expanded conception of sensory and aesthetic experience; change, cultural loss and nostalgia; innovation and ailments.
8 | 4 September 2018 | Photochemistry as second nature | Walter Benjamin and Sensory Experience in Modernity
The rise of organic chemistry; aniline dyes; reconfiguration of the human senses in industrial modernity; mass-production and industrialisation of photography; first world war expansion; German and British production of sensitising dyes; reciprocal effects in technological development; new technologies and newly attuned bodies.
9 | 7 September 2018 | Into the Archive | A Dizzying Variety of Film
First visit to the Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre in Ilford; 1930s packaging and labels; Ilford aerial film; Dufay-Chromex; military and defence supplies; the Hythe gun camera; specialist films for clydonographs, oscillographs, optical sound recording and phototelegraphy; importance of the negative; “designer emulsions” and diverse film formats.
10 | 11 September 2018 | Cutting Through the Haze | Cultural Techniques and Ilford’s Aerial Film
“Grey media”; “cultural techniques”; the 1933 Houston Mount Everest Expedition; aerial films and plates; emulsion production methods; procedures and instructions; modernization through technology; fascism and imperialism; Nepal and British nationalism; military mapping; innovation and use; rendering the world visible and exploitable.
11 | 21 September 2018 | Avant-Garde and Kitsch | Photographic Advertising, Modernism and Sentimental Realism
“Photographic Advertising” company; stock photography; advertising agencies; sentimental realism; advertising illustration; Selo film advertising in the 1930s; beach photography; modernist tropes; images of divers; the female body in flight; concepts of freedom; bodies and technology; hedonism; outdoor photography; rise of the holiday.
12 | 27 September 2018 | Surviving the Slump | Ilford Limited and British Industry in the 1920s - 1930s
The Great Slump of 1929–33; British empire; export markets; family firms; consolidation and amalgamation; state intervention; Kodak and Agfa; rationalization and recession; Woolworths and Boots the chemist; Selo roll film; consumer film markets; militarization; Nazification of IG Farben; British armaments industry; the ‘warfare state’ and the military-industrial complex.
13 | 5 October 2018 | Now and Then | Links between my work on contemporary photography and the Ilford Limited project
Connections between writing on social media photography and my Ilford research; history written from the perspective of the present; need for digital photography theory to have more nuanced understanding of analogue, chemical photography; the chemical and industrial infrastructure of experience; new technologies reconfiguring the everyday.
14 | 7 October 2018 | Fogging | Light, air, purity and pollution
Contamination of photographic emulsion; London fogs; atmospheric pollution; humidity in manufacture; coal; industrialisation of photography; poor light in Britain; class prejudice; eugenics; moral purity; expansion of suburbs; gas industry and the smoke abatement campaigns; gasworks; air conditioning; association of photography with sun and seaside.
15 | 16 October 2018 | Thinking Through the Grid | On Dufaycolor and the Réseau
Dufaycolor; Spicer-Dufay; historical film colours; panchromatic emulsion; grain; digital cameras; Bayer filter; the analogue-digital distinction; the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome; nineteenth-century physiological optics; colour perception; computing; rationality of the grid.
16 | 26 October 2018 | The Rule of Thirds | Grids and Freedom in Photography and Sketching Manuals
Nineteenth-century advice literature for amateur photographers; rules of composition; nineteenth-century drawing and watercolour manuals; amateur artists; William Henry Fox Talbot; the cult of sketching; the picturesque; property and the landed gentry; freedom and ideas of “slavishness”; custom, habit, and sentiment; grids; the Ilford Manual of Photography.
17 | 19 November 2018 | Fiends and Lovers | Lucia Moholy, Pelican Specials and Amateur Photographers
Amateurism; Lucia Moholy’s A Hundred Years of Photography; the Pelican Specials series (Penguin books); Kodak fiends and photography lovers; the photography amateur as a reader of photography histories and Ilford manuals.
18 | 29 November 2018 | Mechanisation and Maintenance | First Thoughts on Photography Factories, Automation and Sensitivity
The Harman Technology Ltd. factory in Mobberley; mechanisation at Ilford Limited 1880s-1930s; emulsion coating machines; factory labour; repair and maintenance; living and working alongside machines; sensitivity and contamination; air conditioning; photographic emulsions as like living creatures; human and non-human collaboration.
19 | 10 December 2018 | From Surface to Skin | Collodion, Celluloid and Artificial Nature
Facture; medium as not inert; gun cotton / nitrocellulose / pyroxylin; wet-plate collodion process; “artificial skin”; cosmetics and surgery; gender and artifice; Parkesine / Xylonite / celluloid; big game hunting; George Eastman; elephants and the ivory trade; analogy between photography and taxidermy; flammability of film; surface culture of modernity.
20 | 4 February 2019 | Vulcanite Goggles | On Archives, Writing and Being Distracted
Writing / archives / fog / distraction / sunglasses / Boots the Chemist / Kodak Limited / cigarette vouchers.
21 | 1 March 2019 | Worldsy | On Photographic Worlding
Representations versus material practices; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Martin Heidegger; relation between world and earth; colonialism; imperialism; concept of world and worlding; the photography archive; sensory experiences and ways of being; work of worlding.
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22 | 9 May 2019 | Update on Progress — Light | Sensitive | Material and The Stuff of Photography
An explanation of the long pause in my blog entries, and description of upcoming events I am co-organising with my colleagues.
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Full list of Sources:
Armstrong Carol, “From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the ‘Lady Amateur’”, October 91 (2000), 101–39.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings, Volume 4 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 313-355. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version” (1936). In Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. 101-133. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bothamley, Charles Herbert, Manual of Photography, London: Ilford Limited. n.d.
Brown, Elspeth H.The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Corporate Culture, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Catford, A.J., Our first 75 years. Redbridge Museum and Library, Ilford Limited Archive, Box 1361, 90/359/E1/6
Chandler, Charles F. “Presentation Address.” Industrial & Engineering Chemistry 6, no. 2 (1914): 156–158
Dominici, Sara, Travel Marketing and Popular Photography in Britain, London: Routledge, 2017.
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James, Roof of the World: Man’s First Flight Over Everest, New York: Random House 2013.
Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic., Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Eastman correspondence 1928, George Eastman House Study Center.
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Edgerton, David, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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Gunning, Tom, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era”, Victorian Studies 54 (3), Spring (2012): 495-516
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”, Social Text, no. 11 (Winter, 1984-1985): 20–64.
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Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1977), 17-87.
Hercock, Robert J. and Jones, George A., Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879-1979, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
Higgins, Hannah B.,The Grid Book, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.
Hobsbawm, Eric, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, London: Penguin Books, 1968/1999 (revised and updated with Chris Wigley).
Holmes, Oliver Wendall. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” Atlantic Monthly, June 1859.
Howard, Frank, The Sketchers Manual, or the Whole Art of Picture Making reduced to Its Simplest Principles by which Amateurs may Instruct Themselves without The Aid of a Master, London, 1837.
Joicey, Nicholas, “A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books 1935–c.1951”, Twentieth Century British History 4:1 (1993), 25-56.
Kaufman, Morris. The First Century of Plastics: Celluloid and its Sequel. London: Plastics Institute, 1963.
Kemp, Martin. “Talbot and the picturesque view: Henry, Caroline and Constance.” History of Photography 21, no. 4 (1997): 270-282.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids”. October 9 (1979): 51-64
Lea, M. Carey, Manual of Photography, Philadelphia, 1868.
Leslie, Esther, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry, London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Lloyd-Jones, Roger, and Merv Lewis. British Industrial Capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. London: Routledge, 2014 (originally published in 1998).
Luckin, Bill, “‘The heart and home of horror’: The great London fogs of the late nineteenth century.” Social History 28(1) 2003, 31-48.
Marsch, Ulrich, “Strategies for Success: Research Organization in German Chemical Companies and IG Farben until 1936”, History and Technology, vol. 12 (1994): 23-77.
Mensel, Robert E. “ ‘Kodakers Lying in Wait’: Amateur Photography and the Right of Privacy in New York, 1885 -1915”, American Quarterly, 43:1 (1991), 24-45.
Moholy, Lucia, A Hundred Years of Photography, Penguin Books Ltd., 1939.
Parkes, Alex. “On the Properties of Parkesine and its Application to the Arts and Manufactures.” Journal of the Society of the Arts XIV, no. 683 (1865): 81–6.
Pritchard, Michael. The Development and Growth of British Photographic Manufacturing and Retailing 1839-1914. PhD dissertation, De Montfort University, 2010.
Ramalingam, Chitra. “Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics.” Science in Context 28, no. 3 (2015): 317–55.
Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury 2013 (Originally published in French in 2000).
Russo, Mary, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge, 1994
Rylance, Rick, “Reading with a Mission: The Public Sphere of Penguin Books”, Critical Quarterly 47:4 (2005): 49-66.
Sarvas, Risto and Frohlich, David M.,From Snapshots to Social Media: the Changing Picture of Domestic Photography, London: Springer, 2011.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. The Theory of Economic Development. London: Routledge, 2017 (originally published in German in 1911).
Scoffern, John, Stray Leaves of Science and Folklore, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, “The Memory of the Senses Part 1: Marks of the Transitory” in C. Nadia Seremetakis (ed).The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity . Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
Sha, Richard. “The power of the English nineteenth-century visual and verbal sketch: appropriation, discipline, mastery.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 1 (2002): 73-100.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”, History and Theory, 24: 3. (1985a), 247-272.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism”, Critical Inquiry, 12: 1, (1985b), 243-261.
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Wajcman, Judy. “Feminist Theories of Technology.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, no. 1 (2010): 143-152.
Walker, John Frederick. Ivory's Ghosts: the White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants. Grove Press 2010.
Ward, Janet. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Wilder, Kelley E. "Photography and the art of science." Visual Studies 24.2 (2009): 163-168.
Wilkinson, Helen. “‘The New Heraldry’: Stock Photography, Visual Literacy, and Advertising in 1930s Britain”. Journal of Design History 10, no. 1 (1997): 23-38.
Wilson, Erasmus. “Observations on Collodion in the Treatment of Diseases of the Skin.” The Lancet 52, no. 1316 (1848): 553–554.
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Zander, Patrick, “Wings over Everest: High Adventure, High Technology and High Nationalism on the Roof of the World, 1932-1934”, Twentieth Century British History, 21, no.3 (2010): 300-329.
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