Photography

PHOTOGRAPHY

I'm kicking myself that I forgot to mention the British Library's Points of View exhibition on 19th Century photography, which I visited a couple of weeks ago. There's a lot to see here - not so much on London, but it does include Fox Talbot's famous shot of Nelson's Column under construction from the 1840s. There's also a nice blog of the exhibition, including some videos of early photographic methods, in case you fancy trying your hand at the wet collodion process. My first book London Dust deals with early Victorian photography, as it happens ... along with a couple of murders, a pornographer and a music hall star ...

Picture Libraries

PICTURE LIBRARIES

There are some great commercial picture libraries on the web, which the casual browser can enjoy, even if they don't want to buy the pictures. I've listed some on my Links page but a new one (for my list, at least) is the British Library Picture Library. To take a very random example, a search for 'Maskelyne' (the famous magician of 'Maskelyne and Cooke' fame) found four striking advertisements for his shows (see example, right). I hope no-one at the BL minds me linking to the small-scale image for demonstration purposes (if so, let me know!) ... all such digitised material is, of course, copyright of the library.