Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) had a long and productive life, which he ultimately left discouraged in one major dimension. He was one of the fellows who joined the British Army because he took a notion to make a living, leaving his reformer mother, his surgeon father, and eleven sibs behind in England. Actually, it wasn’t the […]
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Christina Broom’s story is a bit different from Shirley Baker’s, the British photographer I wrote about recently. Born several generations earlier, Broom (1862-1939) became a photographer from financial necessity when her ironmonger husband sustained a cricket injury that put him out of work. Of course, it is anybody’s guess what makes a gal choose a […]
What a joy to be introduced to the work of this documentary photographer, unable apparently to thrive in the journalism career she’d longed for because of her SEX, yet producing some of the loveliest, most direct, and most communicative street photography on the planet. Like European and American women photographers in her cohort (think Gertrude […]
Though I am passionate about photography, it does not often move me to tears. I’ve just seen an exhibit that forced me to choke up in front of a couple of its artists. And it could hardly have been more difficult to find. The University of Westminster, by Regent’s Park in London, has mounted a […]
The Photographers’ Gallery in London, at 16 Ramillies Street, just a side alley off Oxford Street, is a destination vacation for photo fans and historians. Three active floors of exhibits in bright clean spaces, a bookstore with lots of film (and I do mean photographic film), and a pretty decent cafe on the main […]
The historian's lens 