Free and open to all, note the change of address for the next event

Wednesday 9 March 2016 – 6-7:30

*Clore Lecture Theater, Clore management Centre, Torrington Square (opposite main building), WC1E 7JL

Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University & Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities)

Picturing Modernization: Vision, Modernity and the Technological Image in Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium
​Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium: Coming of the Machines is one of the earliest histories to compose the historical narrative of modernization as a series of ‘images’ in popular historical imagination. The book consists of a scrapbook compilation of writings from 1660 to 1886 that Jennings collected and annotated between 1938 and 1950, when he died (aged 42). Never brought to completion during his lifetime, excerpts were published in 1938, in an issue of the London Bulletinedited by Jennings, but it was only finally published as a book in 1985, over thirty years after his death. (The director of the London Olympics opening ceremony, filmmaker Danny Boyle, said he was inspired by images in Pandaemonium in his effort to tell a story about Britain’s place within the modern world). In this talk Dr Tucker will explore the nature and significance of Pandaemonium as a source in the long history of the visualization of modernity, considering the ways in which science and technology, through the Industrial Revolution, not only shaped the natural and industrial topography, but also informed ideas, language, perceptions, emotions and imagination of the inner landscape.

Thursday 9 June 2016, 6-7:30 pm

Room 112

Luke Gartlan (University of St. Andrews, Editor of History of Photography journal)

Before ‘White Australia’: The Singleton Family Photo Albums and Early Australian-Japanese Relations

Monday 27 June 2016, 6-7:30 pm

Room 112

Tim Satterthwaite

Spiritualising the machine: the modernist photography of UHU magazine

Saturday 2 July 2016 times and location TBC

Workshop

Law and Photography

In collaboration with London School of Economics