Tag Archives: photography

The happiest day of your life (#ArchivesAreYou)

20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Event, Humanities, Modern, Photography, Spotlight, Women, , , , , ,
A bride in wedding dress and veil posing for the camera holding a corgi dog, c. 1960s

Bride + corgi, c. 1960s, ©Bodleian Libraries

Helen Muspratt (1907-2001) was a skilled experimental and documentary photographer of the 1930s who produced haunting photographs of pre-war Russia and Ukraine as well as the Welsh valleys in the depths of the Great Depression. For most of her life, however, she was a hardworking studio photographer. From her studio on Cornmarket Street in Oxford she staged lively portraits of everyone who crossed the threshold, from playful toddlers to students celebrating degree days. And she was also a skilled wedding photographer, a job which consumed many Saturdays. Our collection of her wedding photographs spans the 1940s to the 1970s and showcases ordinary people, usually unnamed, in a beautiful array of wedding fashions.

 

Henri Cartier-Bresson comes to Oxford

20th century, Modern, Photography, ,

Hello! I have just started a new job at the Bodleian.

I have been here for 65 days and it’s been quite strange. There are documents and books and unusual things scattered across 28 libraries, and 3 museums jammed with treasures, and botanical gardens with the biggest leaves I’ve ever seen. I haven’t yet visited everywhere, or begun to understand the vast collections that I’m now responsible for.

As Curator of Photography, I am fascinated by all the photographs that have seeped into the library over the years, through legal deposit, and literary papers, and political archives, and sprawling collections of ephemera. It’s well known that the Bodleian holds the archive of WHF Talbot and many precious photographs from the dawn of photography, but did you know that we also have the Talbot family seed bank? – hundreds of little folded envelopes with scribbled handwriting describing the plants that were grown in the Lacock Abbey Gardens. I discovered that we have six copies of the 17th century translation of Ibn al-Haytham’s treatise on optics, the book that brought the modern science of light to Europe. And we have two beautiful portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron that were once owned by Anna Atkins, the great pioneer of early botanical photography. We have Helen Muspratt’s own cameras, and a Daguerreotype of Maria Edgeworth taken at one of the first portrait studios, and who knows what else?

I will write more blogs and introduce everyone to all the wonderful things in our photography collections, but today I would like to tell you about the time that Henri Cartier-Bresson came to Oxford.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. He thought of photography as the art of capturing a single fleeting moment that articulated something profound about the people and places he saw. And so he would wander the streets, looking for a fragment of life crystallised in a split second. If he was quick, he’d catch it and create an impossibly perfect image. And so he captured children and horses; a cyclist on the move with a newspaper in front of his face; a figure in flight, leaping across a puddle; a fire breather spitting flames into the air; a smiling infant balanced on her father’s outstretched palm. Photography made into the search for a decisive moment.

The Bodleian has a fine collection of his photobooks – Images à la sauvette, Les Danses à Bali, People of Moscow, Les Européens, China in Transition, Man and Machine, and more – but we had no original photographs.

At least, we didn’t until Heather Rossotti contacted me a month or so ago with a signed photograph that Cartier-Bresson had given to her mother in 1975.

Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1938; © Henri Cartier-Bresson; © Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos.

 

Sunday on the Banks of the River Marne is a beautiful photograph of a group of people having a nice picnic by the river. Looking down the bank towards a boat; picnic hamper open; man pouring wine into a glass tumbler. The scene is lovely and the Rossotti family kindly wanted to donate it to us, along with a small parcel of documents.

The donor’s mother was Dr Hazel Rossotti, a chemist and Fellow of St. Anne’s college. In 1974, she had nominated Cartier-Bresson for an honorary doctorate. He was delighted, writing back right away to accept the honour.

Dear Sir,

I want to thank you for your very kind invitation from the Hebdomadal Council of the university to accept an honorary degree of doctor of letters. – I want to let you know how honoured I am. –

May I accept it on behalf of a particular conception of photography which perhaps may be summarised as an expression of the world in visual terms and also a perpetual quest and interrogation? It is at one and the same time the recognition in a fraction of a second of a fact and the rigorous arrangement of the forms visually perceived which give to that fact expression and significance. – A conception of photography which is shared by many.

Very sincerely yours,

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photo: Hazel Rossotti, 1975; by kind permission of the Rossotti family.

 

In the summer of 1975, Cartier-Bresson came to Oxford and attended the ceremony in a bright red robe and mortar board. A bewildering Latin eulogy was read to him. He did not understand a word of it, but John G. Griffith, the university orator, still took great pains to craft a speech worthy of the photographer; corresponding back and forth with Dr Rossotti to craft phrases and sharpen ideas.

He has indeed gone one better than Homer’s Odysseus, who ‘saw cities of many men and sensed their casts of mind’, in that he has left behind brilliant evidence of his glimpses of even the most chance-sent moments, now recorded for the unending delight both of his contemporaries and of posterity, whether the fancy gazing at Danses à Bali or From One China to Another or whatever else he has captured in the briefest of split seconds and rendered eternal by his art.

By way of thanks, Cartier-Bresson gave Dr Rossotti a signed photograph of a Sunday picnic at the edge of a river. The letters, and ceremonial booklets, and a transcript of the orator’s address were all kept by Dr Rossoti. They help us to tell the story of Cartier-Bresson’s visit to Oxford and to explain how this photograph came to exist.

It’s not very much in the scheme of the Bodleian’s treasures, but it’s a fitting tribute to him – a photograph and a small archive that illuminates a fragment of time; a little moment in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s own life.

New catalogue: Archive of John Hungerford Pollen and the Pollen family

19th century, 20th century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Cataloguing, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2022), Women, , , , , , ,

The archive of John Hungerford Pollen and the Pollen family has now been fully catalogued and made available to readers. The catalogue is available to view online via Bodleian Archives and Modern Manuscripts.

The collection contains a wide range of correspondence, including letters sent between John Hungerford Pollen and John Henry Newman. While most of these letters relate to the creation of Newman’s University Church in Dublin, they also bear testament to a lifelong friendship. Other notable correspondents in the collection include Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Evelyn Waugh, and the poet and artist David Jones.

The archive also contains many visual pieces such as numerous sketchbooks belonging to John Hungerford Pollen and various photographs, including a portrait of John Hungerford Pollen by the renowned early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron as well as family photographs of home life at Newbuildings.

Photograph of the Pollen Family (John and Maria Hungerford Pollen with their ten children)Photograph of the family of John Hungerford Pollen (with beard, standing centre), unknown photographer, Archive of John Hungerford Pollen and the Pollen Family, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 17906 Photogr. 3.

Personal records in the collection include: an account by John Hungerford Pollen’s wife Maria of the aid she and her daughter Margaret gave to Italian police to recover some stolen Burano lace; a transcript of the diary of Anne Pollen between 1870 and 1881 detailing her life prior to becoming a nun at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton; and the wartime diaries kept by her sister Margaret between 1914 and 1919.

More information on the collection and Pollen family can be found in a series of blogposts posted in November 2020 to mark the bicentenary of John Hungerford Pollen’s birth.

-Rachael Marsay

What’s The Catch? Before Daniel Meadows’ Free Photographic Omnibus there was his free photographic studio, Moss Side

20th century, Exhibitions and displays, Humanities, Modern, Newly available (2019),

The first version of the catalogue for the Archive of Daniel Meadows, photographer and social documentarist, is available here. Meadows is distinguished for his tour of England in the Free Photographic Omnibus, 1973-1974, amongst many other works. This was a project he returned to in the mid 1990s to rephotograph those he had met and taken pictures of around England in the 1970s, culminating in his series of National Portraits: Now & Then, which have been exhibited both at home and abroad.

The portraits and related material from Meadows’ archive, such as national and international press coverage, are currently on display for a special exhibition in Blackwell Hall, where admission is free and everybody is encouraged to come and see. But for now, let’s take a look at what drove (pun unintentional) Meadows to tour England in a double decker bus for fourteen months.

dirt, smoke, rain and people

Meadows was born and raised in Great Washbourne, Gloucestershire, and although his time spent as a photography student at Manchester Polytechnic did not negate his appreciation of where he came from, it is clear that Meadows revelled in instilling his independence and resourcefulness in new environments. In January 1972 he rented a dilapidated barber’s shop in Greame Street, Moss Side and converted it into a photographic studio in which any local people who wandered in could have their picture taken, free of charge.

In a typescript, arranged with prints interspersed from his studio at Greame Street, titled ‘What’s The Catch?’, Meadows writes

‘Before coming to Manchester I had always lived in the most isolated and luscious countryside that this country had to offer. Moss Side Manchester is the extreme opposite, and yet, far from yearning for the sight of a cow or the smell of freshly-mown hay, I have come to love it for what it is; dirt, smoke, rain and people.’

On the next page, referencing the coming and going of the people, he writes

‘This is what I particularly like about the shop. As an [sic] habitual photographer of street life I am used to a constantly changing environment . A shop environment, then, seems to be contrary to the candid picture-making of the street. The opposite is true; the shop is merely an extension of the street and the people come in and go out in the same way as they walk the paving stones.’

(MS. Meadows 46, folder 1, ‘What’s The Catch?’)

Daniel Meadows outside his free photographic shop on Greame Street, with Moss Side residents, 1972.
MS. Meadows 46, folder 2. [photographer unknown]

‘I feel that, as a photographer who lives in the area, it is my job to make a record of a way of life which is to be destroyed’

Rather than Meadows actively seeking out photographic subjects for the Greame Street studio, he would take photographs of anybody and everybody who asked.  This is a significant characteristic Meadows would retain throughout the tour of the Free Photographic Omnibus. Through the nights of the tour, Meadows would develop the film and produce two copies of the portrait: one of these copies was always given to the person photographed.

As a student, Meadows’ sincere interest in the people and their everyday lives resonates, and his integrity is there in black and white. Meadows writes in July 1972 that

‘The reason for making photographic portraits of the inhabitants of Moss Side is that, with the demolition of the terraced houses, the population will be dispersed since many of the tenants will not be able to afford the increase in rent […] More than just the Victorian Terraces will go: a close knit community will be split up. I feel that, as a photographer who lives in the area, it is my job to make a record of a way of life which is to be destroyed.’

He goes on to write that Moss Side

‘[…] is, however, not alone in it’s plight among places where the quality of life is threatened by necessity for social change […] Over-population and environmental pollution are the poisons of the age and never before has man been forced into the situation of having to decide what kind of a future he wants for himself and his children. […] The free photographic studio was a pilot scheme for a much larger undertaking, namely to purchase a reconditioned second hand double decker bus for around £250 and travel up and down the length of the country making a record of the quality of life in England in 1973-1974.’

(MS. Meadows 50, folder 1, a circular entitled ‘Details of proposal’ distributed for help with sponsorship for the bus, July 1972)

Daniel Meadows standing in front of his newly purchased (second hand!) Bus on 24 July 1973
MS. Meadows 54. [photographer unknown]

A year later, on 24 July 1973, Meadows purchased the second hand double decker bus from Nottingham, and the journey of the Free Photographic Omnibus’ would begin.

 

 

A sympathy for strangers: Oxfam and the history of humanitarianism

19th century, 20th century, Event, Event, Humanities, Modern, Social Sciences, , , , , , , ,

On Tuesday 31st October the Oxfam Archive Assistants attended a lecture at St Antony’s College by Princeton University’s Professor Jeremy Adelman, entitled Towards a Global History of Humanitarianism. Professor Adelman’s focus was primarily the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but his narrative had implications for the way we might view contemporary humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam.

 

Historians have not always been kind in their assessments of international humanitarianism. Alex de Waal was broadly critical of the role such agencies have played when dealing with famine on the African continent: by supplying aid externally, he argues, they inadvertently undermine the democratic accountability of African governments, disincentivizing humanitarian intervention or crisis prevention as a way of preserving political power.[1] To an extent, Adelman spoke in a similar vein: abolitionists may have helped stimulate the rise of humanitarianism in the nineteenth century but colonial penetration itself was often justified in terms of humanitarian intervention, where the white settler was morally and ethically obliged to ‘civilize’ the unsophisticated ‘native’. Humanitarian discourse, Adelman argued, is by its nature racialized, and it invariably reinforces the self-image of Western nations as occupying the apex of a civilizational hierarchy.

 

This might seem somewhat damning of all Oxfam does and stands for. However, Adelman also spoke of a ‘sympathy for strangers’ which grew out of increasing global connectedness and integration as telegraph cables, railways and steamships curtailed the spatial and intellectual distances between disparate peoples. The camera was, according to Adelman, a fundamental technological innovation in this respect and the relationship between photography and humanitarianism has in many ways been central to the development of charities like Oxfam. Borrowing from Susan Sontag, Adelman suggested that ‘moral witnesses’ – i.e., photographers – record public memories of pain, creating a connection between the ‘victim’ – the subject of the photograph – and the viewer.

 

In the 19th century missionaries armed themselves with Kodak cameras, and by producing lantern slide shows of their experiences in foreign climes hoped to raise money for future missionary work. But in the Congo Free State, rendered a personal possession of King Leopold of Belgium in 1885, missionaries began to use their cameras to record atrocities committed against Congolese rubber plantation workers. In the face of international scrutiny – which admittedly was somewhat more self-interested than compassionate – King Leopold was forced to cede Congo as a personal asset. It could certainly be argued that such photographs exploited the pain of others, titillating public interest at home without any true empathy for or understanding of the Congolese people. According to Susan Sontag, the ‘knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist’.[2]

 

 

But the power of the photograph to reinforce moral or empathetic feeling can be – and has been – used for the genuine betterment of others. From 1957 to the early 1960s Oxfam sent simple Christmas ‘appeal’ cards to its donors, featuring a simple ‘thank you’ message and photographs of individuals helped by the charity. A card from 1958 showed a huge-eyed little girl, sitting wrapped in a coat and woollen socks with a spoon stuck into a beaker of food. The caption read ‘This little Greek girl was found as a baby hungry and dying… Now she is properly fed… because Oxfam sends food, and years ago was able to plant black-currant bushes in her village which are now bearing fruit.’ This photograph does not simply broadcast the pain of strangers. It broadcasts hope, and promises resolution through charitable action. While a healthy scepticism and constructive interrogation of the conduct of international agencies is to be encouraged, we should be careful not to overlook and devalue the charitable efforts inspired by genuine ‘sympathy for strangers’.

[1] Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (1997)

[2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (1973)