Museum of creepy curiosities opens in London. Hmmmmm. Has he ever been to the Horniman, which far from being a higgledy-piggedly Cabinet of Curiosities, always strikes me as being about Educating The Masses About the Glories of Scientific Understanding of the Natural World, with added benefit of the really manky stuffed walrus, taxidermied by ( Read more... )

Women Photographers in the Historic England Archive: Discover the women photographers whose work enriches the collections of the Historic England Archive.
A one-way passage from India: Hackney Museum explores fate of colonial ayahs: Indian women were often employed to care for British children, but some were abandoned on reaching UK.
Interview with ( Read more... )

Partner and I excursed to Tate Modern today to visit the Olafur Eliasson In real life - we were somewhat less than whelmed by the exhibition itself - not as good as the one I visited in San Francisco some while since - but we were actually quite impressed by the associated lunch event, Studio Olafur Eliasson Kitchen at the Terrace Bar, rather ( Read more... )

You know me, I cannot let terrible ancient jokes die, and on the lines of 'Do you like Kipling? - I don't know, I've never Kippled' I can now answer the question re Stirling.
Which was indeed very pleasant, aided by weather rather better (though with some showery outbursts) than it was earlier in the week and fairly good luck with transport.
Okay, ( Read more... )

Columnists are deploring the closing-down of women's magazines: Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever - and they’re all closing down and Marie Claire wasn’t all fluff. It filled a crucial gap in women’s lives.
And, okay, I'm glad to see that they're acknowledging the work that these magazines did, but - as ever, I'm a bit irked that ( Read more... )

But at least I have forcibly restrained myself from entering into a Twitter brawl when I saw this cross my timeline more than once.
Somebody promoting a novel which describes a young woman discovering photography as 'a new medium' in the 'turn of the century', i.e. c. 1900.
WOT.
By that time more or less anybody could be a photographer, because ( Read more... )

Got myself out to a cultural event this lunchtime: a talk on early C20th portrait photographer G C Beresford, with whom I have have had in my own research a certain amount to do as he intersected with certain persons of interest to me.
He's pretty fascinating himself, but frustratingly elusive, as the lecturer pretty much conceded.
Yr hedjog has a ( Read more... )

I am fairly hmmmm about this piece on empaths, and wonder if some of those consultant empaths are employing the cold-reading tricks attributed to psychics, but buried in it is actually an interrogation of how useful quivering responsiveness to emotion is and the suggestion that 'empathy alone is not a reliable way of coming to a moral decision', ( Read more... )

Dept of, this makes historian and archivist cringe:
Marriages are Made in Bond Street by Penrose Halson review.
This person has apparently obtained ownership of, or at least access to, the archive of the Heather Jenner Marriage Bureau: 'the agency and its archive eventually ended up in the hands of Penrose Halson, the author of this book' - ( Read more... )

In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing
You would think that somebody who opens his spiel with a quote from Susan Sontag's 1977 On Photography might have just a smidgen of historical perspective on the subject of people taking photos, but apparently not.
Was there not an expression A Polaroid Moment? - and that discussion ( Read more... )