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"The large microhistory of a small book: the Reverend Thomas Perkins' Handbook of Gothic Architecture for Photographers (1897)"
2 October 2024 - 2 October 2024
4:00PM - 6:00PM
Concert Room, Music Department, Palace Green, Durham.
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Free to attend
Join us for the annual CNCS Welcome Event co-hosted with the Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures (CVAC). We are delighted to be joined by Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Emerita, Photographic History, who will give her lecture on "The large microhistory of a small book: the Reverend Thomas Perkins' Handbook of Gothic Architecture for Photographers (1897)" .
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Jongleur100, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Early English Gothic arches in Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, England
Join members of CNCS and CVAC for the 2024 Welcome Lecture and hear from renowned Professor Emerita of Photographic History, Professor Elizabeth Edwards
Abstract In this lecture I am going to consider a small remnant of the C19th, a little brown book on architecture written by a country schoolteacher and clergyman. I want to demonstrate how thinking through the practices and expectations of photography can thicken our understanding of how larger issues were worked through on the ground. I am terming this a large microhistory because one cannot confine the little book solely to photographic and architectural, even antiquarian, enthusiasms. Rather it is entangled with, and contributes to, debates over a wide field of C19th concerns: about the preservation of ancient buildings, about C19th models of dispersed knowledge making, about history, Christian observance, technology and rational leisure, while also addressing an emergent sense of public history. I shall argue, consequently, that photography and photographs, as exemplified by this small book, need to be integrated into the historiography and fundamental methodologies of C19th studies.
Speakers
Professor Elizabeth Edwards FBA
Professor Emerita, Photographic History, De Montfort University, Honorary Professor, Department of Anthropology, University College London Honorary Professor, University of Durham
A visual and historical anthropologist, Professor Edwards has worked extensively on the relationships between photography, anthropology and history, on the social practices of photography, on the materiality of photographs and on photography and historical imagination.
16:00-16:30 Welcome and Introductions
16:30-17:15 Guest lecture
17:15- 17:30 Respondent
Ben Thompson - PhD, Art History Northumbria University
17:30-18:00 Q&A