So thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here. And today I'm going to talk about the research that I've been doing.
I call it the Ysabel project uncovering 19th century institutional photographers.
One woman at a time, Isabelle Agnes Capital, was recently identified as the South Kensington Museum's official museum photographer.
Now, the Victorian Albert Museum or the BNA from 1868 to 1891.
And she's one of the central figures in shaping its institutional photographic practise.
Up until recently, capital was excluded from the prevailing institutional narratives put forth by photography and institutional historians.
In talks such as this, I often focus on the biographical details that define the life and career of Kalka,
employing her biography as a case study to argue a model of what a 19th century female institutional photographer's practise looked like.
In the process,
I assess the socio political context that shaped their careers and subsequently perpetuated their exclusion from the prevailing histories.
In this instance, I will also interweave my own personal narrative,
describing my work to uncover Calgary's story as well as those of her female peers.
I have been a catalogue of photographs at the BNA since 2010.
I was brought in as a part of an ongoing project to reunite and catalogue the original photographs collection of the museum,
a programme known as the Factory Project, as a late baby boomer.
The Warhol illusion appealed to me.
Shortly after joining, I was in conversation with Christopher Marsden, senior archivist at the BNA, as the newest member of the team.
I was looking for interesting projects and he suggested a group of album imprints documenting the early construction of the museum.
Christopher was in the early stages of developing his 2018 display, designing the BNA,
and he was keen to access the 19th century photographs taken by the museum's photography studio at the Museum
Buildings catalogue and would not only identify the extent of photographic material available as a resource,
it would also make these documents available to tag and search within the museum's
collection management platform and also on the museum's public collection web page.
Search the collection.
These photographs have always been part of the museum's collection, but were held within the National Archive Library since 1850 three,
which contain the photographs collection prior to the establishment. In nineteen seventy seven of the BNA National Collection of Photography.
Up until recently, many such photographs, often categorised as topographical or documentary,
were found outside the boundaries of the stores of the curatorial section, accumulating in offices and documents,
store rooms as overspill from the original library collection or as part of the dispersal of
photographs that were left behind in nineteen seventy seven when the collection was formed.
Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, they had been rendered what Elizabeth Edwards has termed transparent.
But recent research into institutional archives by scholars such as Edwards has resulted
in a reassessment of photographs found outside of the official collection rehabilitated.
They enhance our understanding of the museum's institutional history and stimulate new research into the rich,
hidden narratives that surround the collection. And cataloguing photographs in the collection.
My first action is to consult the original photograph registers.
These volumes document the title and are content of the images, the data acquired and from whom.
In addition to the official museum photographer from the earliest days of the museum's founding in 1852,
photographs were acquired from a range of sources, including international institutions.
Independent commercial for time first. And directly from artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, in this instance,
while looking for the details of acquisition over and over the name Mrs. Kalpa was listed as a
source despite the significance of the images documenting the institution's unique early history.
I was surprised to find no information of Cowper on Cowper in the photograph section files entry.
I went back to the earliest photograph registers, where I discovered that from 18 March 1868, character's name,
rendered in a neat Victorian hand, is listed as the source of photographs acquired by the museum over a period of twenty three years.
In light of evidence suggesting the presence of hundreds of photographs produced by Cowper,
I found it curious that her recognition was virtually non-existent.
Equally surprising, existing official histories histories of the VNS photographic service offered scant information.
Only one historian makes a passing reference to her that spelled her name incorrectly to
assemble a biography of Kalpa as a case study for female institutional photographers.
I have been investigating the circumstances of her employment at the museum and the institutional structure within which she operated.
This involves looking at what and Laura Stolar refers to as the archives.
Ragged edges searching for examples where official records contradict or question documents that museum historians have discounted or ignored.
This includes a wide range of material, internal museum correspondence.
Museum staff diaries, census and probate records. Negative records.
Copyright records. And, of course, a material analysis of the photographs themselves.
The earliest recorded receipt of a photograph by Cowper coincides with the death in January
1868 of the museum's celebrated first official museum photographer Charles Thurston Thompson.
Yet official records of the Department of Science and Art under the auspices
of which the photographic service operated and all the existing histories,
report that no individual took on the role after Thurston Thompson's death.
But perhaps the terms of enquiry need rethinking because despite the official records
and prevailing histories stating that no photographer replaced Thurston Thompson,
I found Kalpesh resignation letter clearly stating her role as official museum photographer.
She she writes, I resigned the post of official photographer, which I have held for twenty three years.
I shall be obliged by your accepting my resignation from the thirty first of December next, just to be clear.
This letter is catalogued and archived within a file titled Mrs. Kalpa resigned her post as official photographer.
In this instance, not so ragged and Edge remembered the histories as well as official records state that the position was abolished in 1868.
Callipers, resignation letter from the supposedly redundant position of official Musim
photographer correlated with another clue found in the Diary of Henry Cole,
a key figure in the history of British institutional photography and the founding director of the South Kensington Museum.
On the evening of eight February 1868, he records a visit to his home by Charlotte Thompson.
Her husband, Thurston Thompson, had died two weeks earlier.
His death left the museum without an official photographer, and his widow had an important message to convey.
Cole writes, In the evening, Charlotte Thompson came and resolved to have nothing to do with photography of future
proposed to our Thompson that Mrs Campero should take up their artistic work,
but not the trade. I found this reference to Mrs Cowper and the suggestion she take on photographic responsibilities at the museum.
Very compelling. Who is Mrs Cowper? What is her relationship to the network of museum professionals?
Where does the material evidence of her work reside and how to locate it?
What were the circumstances of their production? What role within the image production networks did she play?
What were the curatorial and administrative decisions and practises in place that have kept your story hidden?
And finally, how has the South Kensington Museum Photographic Ecosystem incorporated gender into the organisation to address these questions?
I've taken special care to focus on what Edwards has referred to as the defining subjective noise that
attends the photographing of objects and foregrounds the social biographies of the photographs themselves.
In this way, previously hidden women's stories and a more nuanced institutional history which includes these narratives, reveal themselves.
Looked at this way. Photographic collections expose underlying intentions originating from institutional authority.
The roots of the South Kensington Museum photographic service line, the 1851 Great Exhibition,
Cole was involved in the organisation of the event, putting Thurston Thompson in charge of the exhibition's photographic arrangements.
Cole saw early on the potential of photography to dramatically extend educational resources up and museum.
You conceived of a forward thinking photography policy that included enhanced photography, documenting museum objects and temporary exhibitions.
In 1856, Cole recorded to Dorking and walked with R.A.
Thompson, discussed for the latter the terms for making negatives and positives officially.
Later that year, when Cole installed Thurston Thompson as the official museum photographer and a dedicated photographic studio,
the first museum photographic service came into being.
Photographs were available to artists and scholars as reference in resource material through the museum's publishing activities.
The images were also circulated amongst national schools of design and institutions further afield beyond education.
Cole also understood the value of photography to support a range of curatorial and administrative activities,
including conservation and exhibition design.
Here's an image from a series of photographs of mirrors from Thurston Thompson's tenure on the left hand side,
showing the official photographer reflected in the glass. I like to show this to illustrate how systemic gender bias is.
A reinforced Thurston Thompson's Thompson's conscious recording of himself at work in the newly
minted profession suggests pride in his work and an increasing public recognition of the vocation.
Thompson was widely recognised in his time, and subsequent histories have only served to elevate his status.
By the time of his death, the work of the official museum photographer had become an integral part of the museum's operations.
Viewing this image alongside an image of a mirror taken by Kapper, it's easy to see how history has rendered her invisible.
I began digging into the correspondence records at the museum.
The first letter from Kalpa, an official museum records documents her application for employment on 10 February 1868,
two days following Charlotte Thompson's visit to call on March 18 of that same year,
an entry in the photograph register records receipt of six mounted album photographs of Hatfield Hatfield House presented by Mrs.
I, a kalpa from that date on entries with reference to Kalpa or numerous by July.
Her address is recorded as the Residences South Kensington Museum onside a combination accommodation reserved for senior museum staff,
including Cole and his family. Cupper and her children occupied Unit three.
Further evidence of calories role was found in the museum's negative archive.
A recently initiated survey of the 19th century glass negatives has revealed many signed by Calcutt,
one possibly dated to 1867, when Thurston Thompson was still alive, suggesting she was employed with him before his death.
Here's another example of the way in which countermarch negatives. Other clues to authorship include the faint initials IAC.
She read that she frequently wrote in pencil on the corner of the mouse, discovering her neat signature on her work, similar to Thurston.
Thompson's recording of its reflection implies a consciousness of her role as a professional or perhaps a subtle strategy of resistance.
Though it's more likely her mark was part of a system of annotations devised to track her work for billing purposes as a public institution,
the South South Kensington Museum employees were civil servants.
In 1868, the civil service was still closed to women as such campers compensation was on a per piece basis,
calculated at three pence per square inch of glass produced. There are many invoices in the archive raised by Mrs PAB Cowper.
Photographs taken by Kapper represent a wide range, including objects in museum collection, lone objects building construction and even a still life.
Research has revealed this image was distributed to art school examiners,
along with test papers, as a model when assembling items for still life examinations.
Part of the national curriculum.
What's fascinating about this image is that most of the books included in this view are illustrated with canvas photographs.
The number of photographs is impressive.
Considering them the late eighteen sixties, Capra would have relied upon the laborious, wet collodion process,
which involved the handling and storage of delicate glass material and was dependent upon natural light,
which often meant photographing outside and coping with fickle English weather.
In terms of composition, Colquitt emulated formal consideration similar to those established by Thurston Thompson,
presenting museum objects against plain light backgrounds with scant contextualising information uniformly lit,
perpetuating what Svetlana Alpers has referred to as the museum effect.
It is important to understand the full range of activities that constituted the South Kensington Museum's early institutional photographic.
It's the establishment. This included printing, mounting labelling, classifying and circulation of photographs,
activities that were synchronised with the registration notation and cross referencing of object numbers,
photograph numbers, negative numbers and the storage and care of prints and the delicate glass negatives.
Cowper was also called upon by coal to provide expert opinion on photographic matters and was tasked with photographing coal's children.
Running the studio was a considerable undertaking and by the end of the 19th century,
no other institution matched South Kensington Museum in terms of scale of photographic operations.
My research has yielded the fact that Kalpa was the sister of Charles Thurston Thompson.
Isabel Agnes Thompson was born 1826 to the eminent Wouldn't Graver John Thompson and his wife Harriet,
like their father, Isabel and her siblings worked, as would engravers from the late 18th thirties.
Through the eighteen forties, Kalua engraved illustrations for the critic John Ruskin's only work of fiction.
The King of the Golden River, a children's fairy tale written for 13 year old Effie Grey.
Part of the famous Victorian love triangle that included Ruskin, whom she left.
You married the pre Rafina life painter John Everett Malenko.
And recall was a significant presence in cappers life even before she moved into the museum.
His diary records many visits during the eighteen forties with John Thompson and his talented children who live near to the museum in Kensington.
A diary entry for 31 March 1841 records.
Called it the Thompsons with drawings and asked Mr. T. to let his daughters engraved, which he assented to do.
Isabel was 16 years old. Isabel married Charles Kapper in 1852.
Charles, his background and training, regarded alongside that of Thurston Thompson's,
illustrates the multiple entry points that she had for establishing a photographic practise.
Charles, trained as a chemist, had deep roots in the world of printing, photography and publishing.
Charles, his father, invented a steam powered press shown at the Great Exhibition,
which was later used to print the Times of London, as well as the illustrated London News.
Charles worked as a chemist for the glass manufacturing firm Chance Brothers of Birmingham,
well known for their glazing of the roof of the Crystal Palace.
But the chance for him is also noteworthy for its role in producing a pure and flawless sheet glass called Paten Plate.
According to Michael Pritchard,
whose piece examines the role of the development of British photographic manufacturing and retailing in the 19th century from 1848,
Peyton Place was the material of choice employed by the British photographic industry until it was replaced by cheaper alternatives.
Later in the century is about subsequent photographic practise as representative
of the easy flow that existed during the late 19th century between photography,
engraving and printing. And Charles settled in Kensington on 22 March 1853.
The Times recorded a stillborn son delivered to Mrs. Charles Cooper,
two sons and two daughters, followed by twenty three December 1860 when Isabel's husband died.
Isabel was 34 years old, had four children under the age of five and was pregnant with her fifth.
Trying to place Kalpa economically has led me to the work of historical geographers who are currently in the
process of reanalysing census data in order to more accurately represent the economic status of 19th century women.
The last will and testament of Charles records a legacy of around 4000 pounds, not an insubstantial sum to that time.
It also mentions business, a business partnership, railway shares and other securities,
as well as two residences, according to Dr Caroline Shout, a research associate in geography at Cambridge.
This is still quite early in the democratisation of shareholding, demonstrating that Kalka was probably upper middle class.
Not much is known of CalCars life during the period between the death of her husband in 1860 and a brother Thurston Thompson's death in 1868.
Cole's diary entry of six November 1867 provides a possible clue.
Paris Thurston Thompson arrived with Mrs. Kalpa Cappers Arrival with Thurston Thompson in Paris while he was on official museum business.
Hence that in widowhood she was working with her brothers. This is not outstanding.
The number of women commercial photographers swoon was increasing by the eighteen sixties,
though they remained relatively invisible within the professional photographic community, often hidden by their affiliation with a male relative.
Under whose name they practise their trade callipers rolled or attached to her brothers,
follows trends concerning professional female photographers from that period.
Many cases have been noted where the careers of female photographers were fostered by their relationship to a male practitioner.
Often a husband or other deceased male relative would be left for the wives or, in Capri's case, a sister to take over.
According to Steve Edwards,
the tragic event of widowhood was frequently the reason for women being precipitated into the responsibilities of studio ownership.
Kapper stable economic status, though, suggests that her photographic career was also motivated by a passion rather than
simply need Camper's experience in the printing industry producing wood engravings.
As an apprentice to her father, as well as her experience assisting her brother,
making negatives would have prepared a well for a role in the production of photographically
illustrated books that South Kensington Museum started to publish in 1868.
Negative registers record the frequent movement of glass negatives between Mrs. Cowper and the print and the printers Condole and Fleming,
who were charged with printing the photographs, including in these publications.
In addition to her role working as Thurston Thompson's assistant with her past experience as an accomplished wood engraver,
Cowper would have developed the highly specialised visual skills to see images in reverse,
as well as to swap dark for life skills that would enable her to quickly and accurately read
the quality of a negative and its suitability for print in a compelling area of research.
As an analysis of the circulation of callipers, images not only within the museum,
but also between institutions demonstrating the ways that female institutional photographers shaped photographic collection.
Cowper provided images for vines published to the museum's arrangement with the Arundell Society.
Her photographs would have also been for sale to the public, to the museum's dedicated on site sale style.
They also circulated amongst the regional art schools as part of the circulation collection.
My search to comprehend the breadth of campus influence has me identifying her photographs in the collections of international launderers,
in the archives of eminent artists such as the arts and craft designer Ernest Skimps.
Harper was likely exposed to photography through both her husband's professional experience and through her brother's post at the museum,
wherever she apprenticed. Once Canberra took over from her brother, it was not long before her skill was acknowledged in the press.
An article in the journal 1870 refers to the silver photographs of lace taken by Mrs Cowper for the South Kensington Museum,
which are considered to be the greatest success yet attained by the art.
In the same article, the critic notes that cappers producing negatives are three feet square, suggesting a high level of technical skill.
Was not without a sense of raw talent as a photographer between 1871 and 1874.
She exhibited examples of her work in the annual London International Exhibitions, the 1871 catalogue,
lists of photographs and stole directly adjacent to the celebrated for Taat for Julia Margaret Cameron in the Royal Albert Hall.
Kopper's employment was a perfect pairing of existing skills with professional responsibilities.
But beyond her technical expertise, Cappers extraordinary personal connexions served as a professional network,
searching for evidence of cappers work and sifting through the ephemera on the archive margins has
facilitated the visualisation visualisation of the web of Connexions and which Kalpa was embedded.
While these networks were often familial. It does not mean they were not commercial.
Demonstrating the creative ways 19th century women photographers engaged with the chosen profession upon retirement
and eighteen ninety one couple moved to Surrey and then later to Glasgow to join her married daughter Beatrice.
She died there on 17 February 1911 and is buried alongside her husband and three of her children at the Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
She was eighty five years old. Now that Kapoor has been found.
I've been revisiting the Vienna collection with a newly sharpened dog with an aim to uncover Helper's female contemporaries like Riggs.
I've re-examined the photograph registers in correspondence archive,
searching for the names of women working around the same time period that Capra was running the South Kensington Museum Photography Studio.
I found that the museum acquired reference photographs from other female institutional photographers,
including the Swedish photographer image Emma Chanson, based in Uppsala, Sweden.
Madrid based Englishwoman Jane Clifford, who made photographs of the Prado Louise left home, who photographed at the Louvre,
and Miss Kay and Reynolds, who also photograph installation shots at both the Natural History Museum and the Royal Institution.
It is now more than 50 years after the establishment of the Viennese photographic service that the stories of
women associated with the service are being uncovered and written into the Vienna's early institutional history.
They've been revealed by focussing a critical eye upon the embedded practises with the image making college of the museum,
which served, whether consciously or not, to marginalise the work of professional women photographers.
What I will focus on now is the impact of my research,
foregrounding not only a new institutional history but a more nuanced history of photography and women's role in it.
Since 2014, in the past, three installations in the nine photography galleries have featured work by CALLIPER Davina's newly reinstalled cast.
Kautz include many Kapre photographs as part of its historical narrative on reproductions and the BNA.
In 2018, an exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary curated by Lindor, a British artist who is internationally renowned for a photo,
montages, performances and radical feminism, featured cappers work loan from the DNA.
Be in a bookshop now, says a postcard of one a his photographs.
Over 400 Kalpa records have been added to the collections management system, feeding into the museum's public collection interface.
Search the collection with many more expected. There have been a series of blog posts on Scalper's and an article in the BNA magazine.
Two recent publications focussing on museums and feminism feature a chapter on Captain Harper even has her own Instagram account.
In fact, she recently person participated in the challenge accepted meme featuring black and white selfies promoting female empowerment.
Harper's narrative is also fitting into contemporary practises. Artist Sarah VanDerBeek, whose current series Women in Museums,
explores the roles and dress presentations of women in institutions as reference calibre as an inspiration
in an Instagram live conversation hosted by Metro Pictures and other curators are incorporating
Katherine Pearce into their research and talk similarly to this one upcoming entry on Kalka in a volume
on English in a Time photography edited by Scott Wilcox of the Yale Centre for British Arts and Cappers,
included in a survey of historical photobooks by women to be published by 10 by 10 photobooks in twenty twenty one.
There's also a chapter on Capri's role in the 19th century publishing industry,
which will be published in the twenty twenty one volume on the History of Women in print,
published by the Centre for Printing History and Culture and Culture. There is more work to be done.
I'm still frequently met with surprised that the role of women as makers in 19th
century photographic histories is not solely the purview of aristocratic women.
And disappointingly, despite the addition of Calgary to the museum's collection database,
the BNA Zone director Tristram Hunt used cappers work to illustrate a talking Ruskin without attribution,
while the male photographers illustrated the talk were clearly identified.
So I'm taking a page from the marketing manuals and applying the fundamental rule of seven.
The rule of seven quite simply states that it takes a consumer an average of seven interactions with the brand before a purchase will take place.
So I think I'm way beyond seven. So the process of assembling an archive of work by character and appears at the BNA
involves a leap of faith that includes expansion of one's gaze upon the collection,
taking specific care to include those photographs which that low in the hierarchy of museum values reaching beyond their content.
The writing of callipers and her peers biographies will be crucial in the construction of the reputations and their promotion.
The field of institutional photography.
Presently, the current installation New Photography Centre features not only a technically advanced photograph of a tune it by Kamper,
but also its accompanying signs. Negative Cappers photograph would have originally been made to inspire students in needlework.
But it also points to a new perspective that ensures that the history of photography just not remain a story of men.
Thank you.