benhästen

Portrait of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, c.1870 (British Library)

Photo by Lady Alice Mary Kerr

“Women photographers feature in the collection but only as a minority. This absence, in itself, says a great deal about the way women have been (and often still are) ‘hidden’ and under represented in what remains a largely male, Western art canon. That said, new material is still being discovered and Lady Alice Mary Kerr’s, Portrait of Wilfred Blunt, c 1870, see opening photograph, is one such gem.

‘Alice Kerr’s photographs are largely unknown apart from the rare examples in the British Library collections, but her intense and compelling portraits – particularly this study of the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt – merit comparison with the work of Julia Margaret Cameron.’ (From the press release)”

Via Miranda Gavin’s Hotblog - Points of View: Capturing the 19th century in Photographs – but from whose point of view and why?

“John Falconer, the library’s head of visual materials (…) hoped the exhibition would interest younger people ‘whose experience of photography is now purely digital, where there is simply an ignorance of the nature of positive and negative photography’.”

Via the Guardian

Points of View: Capturing the 19th century in photographs

British Library, London

Fri 30 Oct 2009 - Sun 7 Mar 2010