From Negative to Positive: Photography’s Long Road to Recognition

From Negative to Positive: Photography’s Long Road to Recognition
by Brian Slater

John Ruskin, the leading critic and aesthete, wrote in the 1850s that photography could never be Art. This lecture traces the struggle to overturn that view, beginning with the Pictorialist school of Victorian photographers and closing with the recent emergence of photographic art inspired by digital technology. Along the way we examine the contested virtues of colour images and the present revival of old-fashioned film cameras.

Brian Slater lectured at University College London for 25 years, retiring in 2021 as a Senior Teaching Fellow. His principal academic interest lay in the appreciation of architecture and he has a lifelong enthusiasm for photography. He therefore offers lectures to The Arts Society on each of these subjects. He has written on architecture for a wide range of publications and an exhibition of his own photographs was held at UCL. Brian is a former member of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography. He works with a range of cameras, including a pre-War Leica as used by his great hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many others. Brian is an engaging and amusing speaker who seeks to entertain as well as inform his audience.

€15 per person payable on the door. €12 for members of other societies.