NOTEBOOK SPOTLIGHT: Face-Off 25 March 2007 marked 200 years to the day that a Parliamentary Bill was passed to abolish the slave trade in the British colonies. Set All Free, an exhibition held that year at the Grant Bradley Gallery in Bristol, displayed work by 11 contemporary artists presenting individual responses to this anniversary. Here …
This month I’ll be speaking at the University of Oxford’s seminar series ‘The Bible in Art, Music, and Literature’, with a talk entitled ‘Pick & Mix: the non-linear Bible as modern artists visualise it’. I’ll be exploring a few artists discussed in my recent journal articles, but also introducing some thoughts on Francis Frith. Frith’s …
Earlier this year, my first journal article from my doctoral thesis on the Bible in photography was published in History of Photography. The journal itself has been a prompt many a time for my research – its articles shine so many lights into the past, with deeply attentive and close looking into histories that haven’t …
How a Victorian vicar used photographs to explain the Bible Read More »
I’m continuing a blog series which is exploring more experiential ways of engaging with art and theology, with particular reference to photographic technologies. Today, I completed a two-week course from FutureLearn with the University of Edinburgh, ‘Stereoscopy: An Introduction to Victorian Stereo Photography’. Free to access, and wonderfully user-friendly, I checked in over a period …
The season turns, and it’s time to re-emerge again in a more public frame for practice and research. It has been two years to the week since the last blog post, in which I declared a ‘going-to-ground’ period on arrival in Lacock, Wiltshire. The characteristics of such a long withdrawal are far from being blank, …
Coming up in the middle of June, I will be presenting a paper at the ‘Rethinking Early Photography’ conference in Lincoln. Below is my abstract for Let There Be Light: Theology and Spirituality in Early Photography: Largely absent from discourses on the development and context of early photography is an examination of the religious and …
For the forthcoming Images, Icons and Idols conference at the University of Manchester, I hope to present a paper with the title and abstract below. Forming part of my doctoral research, this paper will contribute to a chapter on the iconic characteristics of the photograph, particularly as they relate to the interpretation of biblical texts: …
Missionary photography is outside the main interest of my research by virtue of its departure from biblical representation. However, it is undoubtedly a significant aspect of photography made and published in the name of religious interest, from its first occurrence in the mid-nineteenth century, up to the present day. There are certainly instances of biblical …
The Virgin Mary is a compelling and complex character for any believer, particularly a woman of the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, she was the ideal of femininity – gentle, nurturing, compassionate. If ever there was a woman who was great through love, it is the Madonna. On the other hand, as both mother …
In The Modern Public and Photography, part of a review of the Paris Salon’s 1859 exhibition, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote his famous diatribe against photography’s growing presence in the art world. Having first published on the occasion of the 1845 Salon, Baudelaire was now, as he wrote his last review, witnessing the first time that …
