Join us for a packed day of talks exploring early British Photography and the work of John Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot at the BRLSI and on Zoom

Early British photography was rooted in the experimentation of Henry Talbot, John Herschel and their extended family, scientific and artistic networks, and the French daguerreotype process.  Talbot’s announcement of his photogenic drawing process in 1839, and calotype process in 1841, Herschel’s cyanotype in 1842, and the commercialisation of the daguerreotype from 1841 saw amateur and professional photography flourish.  These processes were overtaken by collodion from the early 1850s.   This conference explores the contributions of Talbot and Herschel and their circles, wider themes in early photography, and the continuing legacy of this period with contemporary artists.

Video recordings will be available here shortly.

Programme

 

10.20-11.40 HERSCHEL, TALBOT AND THEIR CIRCLE                        

Introduction. Professor Mike Edmunds, President, Herschel Society

• Lacock, The Home of Photography. Dr. Andy Cochrane,National Trust Property Curator, Lacock and North Wiltshire, with responsibility for Lacock Abbey, the Fox Talbot Museum, botanic garden and grounds.
• Defining Photography. Sir John Herschel played a critical role in all aspects of the development of photography. He invented some of its chemistry, popularised some of its terms, deployed photographs as evidence, and collected them as art and technology. But photography failed to fit some of his most cherished general laws, caused him endless difficulties and resulted in numerous failures. How did Herschel help to define what we know as photography today in the face of so much uncertainty as to what it was and how it fit into science as it was known at the time? This talk discusses Herschel’s attempts to place and classify photography in his worldview. Professor Emerita Kelley Wilder
• The First Essay in Social Documentary: Hill and Adamson’s Fisherwomen and Men of the Firth of Forth. Between 1844 and 1846, D O Hill, Robert Adamson and Jessie Mann, working in Edinburgh, and using the Calotype process undertook an original exercise working principally with the fishing community of Newhaven on the Firth of Forth. Through aesthetic and technological experiments, they determined to picture the excellence and distinction of this small society. The results remain an extraordinary challenge even in our own times. Dr. Sara Stevenson
• John Herschel’s Photographic Legacy. John Herschel’s photographic legacy is as vast as it is multifaceted, yet he left only a partial and superficial mark on the historiography of the medium. Despite the limited time he was able to devote to this emerging medium, he made decisive contributions to it, both practical and theoretical. This thesis studies his presence and absence in the pages of the history of photography and proposes hypotheses to explain the gaps observed in his (re)cognition. Anne-Lou Buzot. 

Speaker Q&A with Chair, Professor Mike Edmunds

11.55 – 13.00 PHOTOGRAPHY ORIGINS AND ACCEPTANCE 1834-1861

Introduction. Charles Draper

• Silent trailblazers: four early women photographers and their studios in Bath. This talk introduces four of the earliest women professional photographers in Bath. The photographic studios of Hannah Whaite, Emma Roper, Lucy Williams and Emma Tuttell represent inspirational stories of resilience and commercial acumen at a time of widespread social restriction for women. These four trailblazers overcame professional and personal challenges to become the wives, widows and unmarried women who relocated a ‘woman’s place’ from domesticity to a photographic studio, establishing a unique creative legacy in the city of Bath. Dr. Rose Teanby
• John Herschel & Photography in the Long 1840s. John Herschel and Henry Talbot (more commonly referred to as William Henry Fox Talbot) had first met in 1824 and had a common interest in light. Both were to become pioneers of early photography.This paper will examine the social, institutional, and commercial environments in which photography evolved during the 1840s, ending in the 1851 Great Exhibition, which acted as a major catalyst to propel the medium into the mainstream. Dr. Anthony Hamber.
• Recording the appearances of the heavens: Warren De La Rue’s application of photography to astronomy in 1857. At the November 1857 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society meeting, the pioneering photographer Warren De La Rue exhibited the results of his photographic experiments using collodion so sensitive that it could show the belts of Jupiter, and details of the lunar surface that surpassed drawings in accuracy. Many original photographs from this pivotal moment in astrophotography survive in the RAS collections today and will be used to illustrate this talk. Dr. Sian Prosser

Speaker Q&A with Chair, Charles Draper

14.15 – 15.30 HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES & CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE

Introduction. Dr. Michael Pritchard

• Collaborative Practice with Nineteenth Century Photographic Processes. Artist Jo Gane will talk from her perspective as a contemporary practitioner of the Calotype, Wet Plate Collodion and Daguerreotype processes about the layers of collaboration in her work. Working with people, chemicals and places to make photographs that are often co-authored with others, she uses her contemporary collaborations to generate knowledge about the practicalities of working with early photography. This practice-based knowledge informs her research and understanding of collaborative networks of nineteenth century scientists and industrialists active in Birmingham during the 1840s.In this talk, she will discuss her experiences of making photographs and outline how the materials and technical constraints of early photographic processes force collaboration and connect early photography to specific places. Dr. Jo Gane
• Intimate Ecologies: Recontextualising Early Photographic Processes in Contemporary Art. Kristina Chan presents her paper on early photographic processes and their contemporary application in landscape practice. Drawing on Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes and Talbot’s pursuit of nature through light, Chan examines Lucid Dreams(Royal Photographic Society), Shared Latitudes (Bergen, Norway), and Habitable Climes (High Commission of Canada, Royal Geographical Society), informed by her sustained engagement with historical archives. Kristina Chan, MA
• ‘pray go on with these delightful experiments…’ Herschel, Somerville, and the Making of Colour Photography. This paper explores the collaborative nature of John Herschel and Mary Somerville’s photographic conversations. It does so by turning to art practice and processes of reenactment, and addresses two questions: how does a repositioning of Somerville as a photographer (in this instance, through her 1835 and 1845 experiments) change the way we think about the history of the medium? And how can photographic art practice contribute to the task of locating Somerville in the early history of photography? Dr. Caroline Douglas

Speaker Q&A with Chair, Dr. Michael Pritchard

 

Tickets (£18 – £36) available here.

Professor Clive Ruggles, University of Leicester

The image is © English Heritage/André Pattenden,

The connection between Stonehenge and summer solstice sunrise is well known, but decades of over-speculation, by both astronomers and archaeologists, concerning the use of the monument for observations of the sky have led many to steer well clear of the subject. In the first part of this talk I will describe what we can sensibly say about the relationship of Stonehenge to the sun, how this relates to more conventional archaeological evidence that has been uncovered in recent years, and what it might have meant to the people who built and used Stonehenge.

But what about the moon? We have just passed a major lunar standstill, an event occurring every 18.6 years around which time the moon can be seen at fortnightly intervals exceptionally far to the north and south. Was this — as some have suggested — known to our prehistoric forebears and was it marked and celebrated, along with the sun and the seasons, at Stonehenge and elsewhere?

I will describe some of the challenges in exploring these questions and what we can conclude with reasonable confidence about the cultural significance of the sun and moon to those who built and used Stonehenge.

Professor Clive Ruggles, University of Leicester

As Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester, Clive has spent a lifetime investigating ancient people’s knowledge of the sky and the uses they make of what they perceive there. A lot of this involves studying the astronomical orientation of prehistoric monuments in Britain, Ireland and Europe — Stonehenge being a prime example. But Clive has also worked extensively on Hawaiian and Pacific star knowledge and in Peru, where in 2005 he co-discovered the 2200-year-old monumental solar observatory at Chankillo, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021. In 2017 he was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Agnes Mary Clerke Medal for a “lifetime of distinguished work in the overlapping areas of archaeology, astronomy and the history of science”.

This lecture is not available as a recording.

Dr Claire Davies, University of Exeter

Friday 5th September 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The image shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Accredited to NASA.

The field of exoplanet detection and characterisation has bloomed over the past couple of decades and a wide variety of systems have been discovered, often widely different from our own. These have presented challenges to our understanding of how stars and their planetary systems formed, which were based on our neatly configured Solar System, where the planetary orbits align with the Sun’s equator. In this talk, I’ll present an overview of theoretical predictions of how planetary systems can become misaligned, as well as observational evidence that suggests a planet’s skew-whiff axis may originate from warps and tears in its natal proto-planetary disc.

Dr Claire Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Exeter. She obtained a PhD in Astronomy from the University of St Andrews in 2015 and has a research background in high angular resolution observational studies of star formation. Claire is an outspoken advocate for supporting under-represented groups into science through outreach and equality, diversity and inclusion work. She founded and leads the PRISM Exeter network and has worked with the likes of the BBC and Disney Pixar on The Sky At Night Question Time Special 2023 and science exhibitions to mark the release of the 2022 film “Lightyear”, respectively.

Tickets (£6 or £3 for BRLSI or Herschel Society members and students, proceeds to the BRLSI) available here.

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.

Professor Mike Cruise

The image is an artist’s impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars.
Credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL

In 1916 Albert Einstein predicted that his new theory of gravitation, now called General Relativity, included wave modes which could propagate in vacuum a little like electromagnetism. These modes- the “gravitational” waves- were predicted by Einstein to be so weak that they would “never be detected”.

Professor Mike Cruise

Mike Cruise has been active in Space Science for more than 50 years. He received degrees from University College London in 1968 and 1973 and went on to do research in X-Ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory using sounding rockets launched from Woomera, South Australia. In 1980 he was appointed to a lectureship at UCL and worked on Ariel VI and HIPPARCOS before leaving to join the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in 1986. First as Group leader for Astrophysics and then Division Head and Associate Director of RAL, Mike was involved in the management of ROSAT, SOHO, Cluster and Spectrum RG. He served on many national and international space policy and review committees.

In 1995 Mike was appointed Professor of Astrophysics and Space Research at the University of Birmingham and set up the gravitational wave group at Birmingham in 1996. He led the Birmingham work on LISA Pathfinder in addition to continuing his own research on the interaction of gravitational waves and electromagnetic fields. Mike was appointed Head of Physics and Astronomy at Birmingham in 1997 and then Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the University in 2002.

Mike Cruise has chaired space policy committees in STFC, the UK Space Agency and ESA. He was appointed Professor Emeritus on his retirement from Birmingham in 2012 and has subsequently served as Treasurer and President of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Mike has written over 200 scientific papers and co-authored one book.

Dr Emily Winterburn

Wednesday 3rd April 2024 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, can be attended either in the BRLSI or remotely on Zoom

Meet John Herschel,  much less famous today than either his father or his aunt yet in his day he represented the very definition of what a scientist should be.  In 1824, as the BRLSI began, he too was just starting out. On the 8 June, there will be a Conference dedicated to every aspect of the life & work of this great man, but for today let’s just get to know him. What did he do? Why should we care about him? What were his politics? What was his family life like? Come along on 3rd March and find out.

This introduction to John Herschel will prepare us for the all-day conference on Saturday 8th June 2024,

Emily Winterburn is one of the authors for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to John Herschel. She is also the author of a biography of John’s aunt, Caroline Herschel (The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel, 2017) and completed her PhD on the Herschel family in 2011. She is the former curator of astronomy at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Today she is a teacher and writer living in Leeds. She is also honorary vice president of the Society for the History of Astronomy.

Tickets (£6/£3), proceeds to the BRLSI) available here.