Wish You Were Here: Victorian women pioneers of travel photography

In September 1835, Constance Talbot wrote to her husband asking if he would be taking his small experimental “mousetrap” cameras on a visit to Wales. She remarked, “It would be charming for you to bring home some views.”[1] Four years later, William Henry Fox Talbot announced his invention of Photogenic Drawing at the Royal Society, London, and started the extraordinary creative phenomenon we know now as positive / negative photography. We all take photography for granted: it’s an indispensable, ubiquitous

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Drawing ‘Upset Victorians’: An Interview with Artist Anthony Rhys

Over a series of emails in October our editor Lucinda Matthews-Jones (LMJ) interviewed the artist Anthony Rhys (AR) on his striking, harrowing and mesmerising artworks of ‘Upset Victorians’. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/45465982[/vimeo] As his website declares, these ‘people want to tell you something about their lives and for one fleeting moment their feelings become explicit. They are the downtrodden, poor, hapless, disenfranchised and sometimes cruel residents of farms, towns and valleys. Places blackened by smoke, sin, hypocrisy and despair’. In this interview Anthony

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The Chartist Mural: Destroyed

On the 3rd of October, 2013, the Chartist Mural was demolished. A familiar presence in the city of Newport since 1978, the mural had become firmly established as arguably the best known tribute to the political rising of 1839. Yet, despite its prized position within the affections of locals, the mural was torn down in an act of clandestine cultural vandalism. The Chartist movement has long maintained a position of significance in south east Wales, and Newport in particular. Historically,

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Selected Papers from, Strange New Today (Exeter, 17 September 2011)

JVC Online is delighted to have the opportunity to provide our readers with access to a selection of seven of the twenty-two papers that graduate students delivered at a conference specifically aimed at showcasing their research. In the past decade, there has been a welcome growth in the number of symposia that provide specific opportunities for doctoral students to share their work not only with their peers but also with established scholars who can offer supportive feedback. Such events can

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St David meets the Victorians

by Mike Benbough-Jackson (Liverpool John Moores) The Welsh are entitled to feel a little self-satisfied on the 1st of March. For one thing, St David was born and bred in the land that would, eventually, become Wales. Unlike England’s national saint, who was Greek, or Ireland’s, who was Welsh, St David is a home-grown saint. The day also has an innocent air. Local and national Welsh papers are crammed with photographs of children bedecked in various forms of national costume.

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