In June 2002, after months of careful and sometimes frustrating negotiation, John Hannavy, accompanied by an interpreter – and an armed Kremlin guard – stepped out on to the ledge high on Ivan the Great's Gatehouse at the entrance to the Kremlin's Cathedral Square, to stand exactly where Roger Fenton had stood a century and a half earlier to create his iconic image The Domes of the Cathedral of the Assumption.  Fenton's original image, and John's 2002 version of the same view can be seen above. These two images reflect a century and a half of photographic evolution, from the blue-sensitive waxed paper negative used by Fenton, to the high quality colour images possible today. As John struggled to get his modern 645 outfit and shoulder bag up the narrow spiral staircase, the greater challenge which must have faced Fenton – getting a whole plate wooden-bodied camera, tripod and other paraphernalia up to the same position – was suddenly brought into sharp focus.

John Hannavy has been collecting and writing about early photographic images for over thirty years. His interests cover the period 1835-1910, and range from the history of the medium itself, to exploring our view of history as accessed through early photographs. Scroll down for information on images wanted, images for sale or exchange, etc.

As can be seen elsewhere on this website, he is a well known writer and broadcaster on the subject, and edited the two-volume 2007 Routledge Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography.


    

John Hannavy's latest research paper to be published covers the early daguerreotype patents in Scotland and ireland, and it was published in April 2009 in the delayed Daguerreian Annual 2007, the yearbook of the Daguerreian Society of America.




   

Every once in a blue moon, a project comes along which is so absorbing that it takes over your life! The Great Photographic Journeys project was one such. From an initial idea  about ten years ago – that a good way of trying to understand more fully the challenges faced by Victorian photographers might be to recreate their journeys – finally started to come to life in 2001 with the opportunity to make a journey from Cairo to Abu Simbel, walking in the footsteps of Francis Frith. The award of a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship in 2002 enabled journeys to Russia and the Ukraine, in the footsteps of Rofer Fenton, and to China Hong Kong and Macau in the footsteps of John Thomson to be completed. In 2003, it was a journey across India from Kolkata to Shimla in the footsteps of Samuel Bourne. In 2004 and 2005, further journeys to Scotland, France, Cyprus completed the travel and photography aspect of the project, and the resulting 256-page full colour book was published in November 2007 by Dewi Lewis Publishing. The book is not just about travel photography – although it offers an enlightening comparison between the challenges, opportunities and constraints which faced the Victorian pioneers, and those which face today's independent traveller – it is also about the changes which have taken place in culture, in travel, in living conditions, and in attitudes since the first photographers left Britain with their cameras more than a century and a half ago. For sample pages, click on the 'Books' bar above, and 'Great Journeys on the books page side bar.


   

While in Kiev as part of the Great Photographic Journeys project, John tracked down a long-lost album of images by John Cooke Bourne, who had travelled with Fenton to Moscow and St Petersburg, and who had been the official photographer on Charles Vignoles' project to built the first permanent bridge over the River Dnipro for the Czar. The story of the rediscoverey of these images – hitherto it had been believed that all Bourne's pictures had been lost – and the discovery of a patent he had been granted for a new design of camera for the travelling photographer – was published in the journal History of Photography in 2004.


   

John has a particular interest in the cased photographic portrait, his most recent publication on the subject being the 2005 book Case Histories - the Presentation of the Victorian Photographic Portrait (Antique Collectors' Club 2005).


     

Hidden Memories, looking at the history, design and evolution of the Victorian cased photographic portrait appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of Antique Collecting, the journal of the Antique Collectors' Club who published Case Histories.


  

The Daguerreotypes of the Exposition Universelle, Paris 1855 The chance discovery, in an antique shop in the north of England, of a pair of fine stereoscopic images of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, 1855, triggered several years of fascinating research into these very early souvenir photographs. The outcome of that research, including many images of the Exposition being reproduced for the first time, was published in summer 2006 in The Daguerreian Annual 2005, the yearbook of the Daguerreian Society. The Society was established to promote the study of early photography, and the publication of material relating to the daguerreotype process.


32 images from the Great Photographic Journeysproject were exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society's Fenton House Gallery in Bath during March 2008.



On a return visit to the University of Bolton on January 28th 2008, John Hannavy presented the University Library with copies of Great Photographic Journeys, and the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography



A bit of personal history........

In 1984, John Hannavy was awarded a doctorate for his researches into the Waxed Paper Process in Britain, 1850-1865, and his Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society was awarded in photographic history.

In the 1970s, John curated the Scottish Arts Council's first major photographic exhibition The Camera Goes to War which opened in Edinburgh in 1974, toured the UK, and completed its run at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1975. He also curated Thomas Keith: Photographs for the Scottish Photography Group at Stills Gallery Edinburgh, A Moment in Time for The Third Eye Gallery in Glasgow in 1983 – to coincide with the four-part tv series of the same name which John had written and presented for BBC Scotland – and Pencils of Light and Present Recollections for Impressions Gallery in York in 1985. A further tv series The Past in Focus for BBC North West explored the work of Frith, Fenton and other photographers born or based in the north west of England.

John Hannavy's first major photo-historical publication was Roger Fenton of Crimble Hall, volume 3 in the Gordon Fraser Photographic Monographs series published in 1975, followed in the following year by Masters of Victorian Photography – designed as a primer for students studying towards the recently introduced A-level photography – and in 1980 by Thomas Keith's Scotland. It may be over thirty years since the Fenton biography was published, and almost thirty years since the Keith biography, but those two photographers still dominate John's research interests. Several papers on both men have been published since the books first appeared, and a revised edition of the Keith book – embracing the work of John Forbes White and several of Keith's other contemporaries – is currently in preparation.



Photographic Collecting

If you collect cased images, or just the cases themselves, email me and I will pass your email address on to other private vendors - not dealers! The following union cases are available immediately:


 

Berg No 1-22 THE CAPTURE OF MAJOR ANDRE 1/4 plate. condition average with some chipping and corner rubbing. This example has the plain oval 3-17 on the reverse. No image. £50

 

Berg No2-48 THREE ROSES IN AN OVAL 1/6 plate. G condition but clasps broken and some corner rubbing. The American-made case contans a label for 'Patent American Union Cases' which was added for the British market. Contains a 1/6 plate ambrotype of a coach party arriving at - or leaving from - what has been identified as the Dyke Hotel, Brighton, c.1865. The ambrotype emulsion shows extensive crackling, and the image is rather darker than it appears here, but despite the fact that it has been in the wars, this is a rare and unusual image. £120