NEPN

Joseph Swan & Photography in Sunderland

Date: Thursday, November 17, 2016, 7:30 pm
Venue: Athenaeum Building, 27 Fawcett Street, Sunderland, SR1 1RE

NEPN and Breeze Creatives are pleased to present an event with a difference about Joseph Swan and Photography in Sunderland on Thursday 17 November at 7.30pm – 9.30pm at the Athenaeum Building, 27 Fawcett Street, Sunderland, SR1 1RE

Most people know Joseph Swan as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. But he was also a photography entrepreneur and businessman, with connections far and wide. We’re celebrating this story in Sunderland, the town where he was born and grew up and where he encountered photography for the first time.

Join us for a Victorian Athenaeum evening, where we will combine ‘learning and entertainment’, with (brief!) photographic talks, demonstrations of old and new photographic processes and the opportunity to chat and socialize. It’s our version of ‘steampunk’ photography: 19th century techniques and inventions with a contemporary twist.

Bring your cameras and mobile phones to help us celebrate this story and find out more about how Joseph Swan is inspiring a new generation of photographers, artists and historians in the North East.

Featuring:
Artist Karolina Maciagowska will demonstrate her new work with the collodion process.

Lucy Carolan and Richard Glynn invite you to experience their ‘Lostness Cycles’: kinetic, interactive photographic works that investigate crossovers between digital and traditional practices.

Have your portrait taken in a Victorian photo studio with a Mawson & Swan camera; Andy Martin will be creating ambrotype glass plates.

Try out our Victorian Selfie-Station.

Take part in our unique photographic experiment, when mobile phones and traditional process collide.

Architecture and design historian Michael Johnson will talk about the history of The Athenaeum Building and Fawcett Street.

NEPN Programme Manager and Senior Lecturer at the Northern Centre of Photography at University of Sunderland, Carol McKay, will introduce a new photography research project by the Northern Centre of Photography.

Paul Cordes, Founder of the Newcastle Photography Festival, will talk about Joseph Swan’s many photographic patents and the processes that inspire him.

“It’s great to be doing this event in Sunderland’s Athenaeum Building, for it was here that Swan came first as a young apprentice chemist to find out about the brand new science of photography. Here in Sunderland he was inspired to make his first photographic experiments”. (Carol McKay, Programme Manager, NEPN)

Produced by Breeze Creatives and NEPN.

With special thanks to students and staff at the Northern Centre of Photography, University of Sunderland.

Image ©Karolina Maciagowska