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The British Silent Film Festival and Symposium: an Overview Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Bryony Dixon, Laraine Porter, Neil Brand, Lawrence Napper
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)
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Designing Russian cinema: the production artist and the material environment in silent era film Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Oksana Chefranova
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Fulfilling his debt to civilization: American filmmaker Harold Marvin Shaw, British wartime propaganda, and the anti-Bolshevik The Land of Mystery, 1914–1920 Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Neil Parsons
The Land of Mystery (1920) was a melodrama movie based on a fictionalized life of Vladimir Lenin, made by the American filmmaker Harold Marvin Shaw. Shaw had previously made drama films with wartim...
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Boarding house blues Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Amy Sargeant
The article discusses the London boarding house as setting and trope, in film, on stage and in literature, during the silent period. It identifies recurrent character types – notably, parsimonious ...
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An archeological survey - the Norden collection at the cinema museum Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Tony Fletcher
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)
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Silent film performance: dramatic bodies on screen Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Simon Brown
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Discomfort food: the culinary imagination in late nineteenth-century French art Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Greta Perletti
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Ink-Stained Hollywood: the Triumph of the American cinema’s trade press Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Kim Khavar Fahlstedt
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)
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In Northcliffe Jail: Iris Barry, film journalist Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Henry K. Miller
A reinvestigation of Iris Barry’s work for the Daily Mail in the period 1925–30. Barry is celebrated as a critic and curator. As a founder of the Film Society in London in the 1920s and first curat...
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Early British animation and cartoonal ‘co-conspiracy’: the case of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925–1927) Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Christopher Holliday
This article examines the self-reflexive discourses of deconstruction at work in the Jerry the Troublesome Tyke (1925–1927) series of cartoons created by Cardiff-based animator Sid Griffiths. Acros...
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Sound arrives at the Tudor, 1927–1931: programming, attendance and the business of cinema exhibition Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Nyasha Sibanda
The Tudor Cinema was situated in Leicester’s West End, a thriving working-class district less than a mile from the city centre. It was built in 1914 with 975 seats, expanded to 1,250 in the 1920s. ...
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Women at the wheel: female management and workforce at the nineteenth-century funfair Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Eva Andersen, Nele Wynants
In the flourishing entertainment culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women were omnipresent on stage, showcasing their physical prowess as dancers, acrobats, trapeze artist...
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‘Twelve thrills for the screen’ or a ‘ludicrous travesty’? Harry A. Berg’s Cosmopolitan Productions Limited and Haunted Houses and Castles of Great Britain (1926) Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Llewella Chapman
The British film production company, Cosmopolitan Productions Limited, was founded in October 1924 by Americans Harry A. Berg and Ivor M. Rosenbaum. In its short life, the company produced a series...
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Transfixed by prehistory: an inquiry into modern art and time Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-10-25 A. Maggie Hazard
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)
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The art of picturing in early modern English literature Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Youquan Liu, Maximiliano E. Korstanje
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 22, No. 1, 2024)
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Muybridge and mobility with an introduction Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Naomi von Senff
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)
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Mozgó fényképek. The scandal and debate around moving images in early Hungarian cinema Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Izabella Füzi
This paper traces the Budapest staging of a very popular German play in Europe and US at the end of the 19th century that can be regarded as one of the earliest narratives of the cinematic experien...
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The silent muse: the memoirs of Asta Nielsen Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-08-01 Pamela Hutchinson
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)
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Adrian Brunel and British cinema of the 1920s: the artist versus the moneybags Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Michael Williams
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)
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Cut/copy/paste: fragments from the history of bookwork Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Anna Reynolds
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)
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An amusing optical toy for the hands?: reassessing nineteenth-century British paper peepshows through embodied knowledge Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Shijia Yu
My article examines the structure of the nineteenth-century British paper peepshow and the experience of using it. Inspired by the agenda of media archaeology, I argue that an analysis of this medi...
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Speculative landscapes: American art and real estate in the nineteenth century Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Verónica Uribe Hanabergh
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)
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Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Aurore Spiers
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 4, 2023)
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Shedding fresh light on lanterns Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Ian Christie
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)
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MoMA goes to Paris in 1938: building and politicizing American Art Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Jamie Danis
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)
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‘In the world of movies and talkies’: Hollywood in the Yiddish Forverts, 1920-1935 Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Lies Lanckman
ABSTRACT This article investigates the presence of Hollywood film in the Yiddish newspaper Forverts in the silent and early sound era, with a particular focus on the movie page ‘In der Velt fun Muvis un Tokis’ (‘In the World of Movies and Talkies’) which was published weekly from 1929 to 1935. In investigating the coverage, I highlight the similarities to and differences from what was published in
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The moving image as an instrument of oppression and resistance in Jim Crow Era Jacksonville, Florida, 1907–1917 Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-25 David Morton
ABSTRACT This paper will examine the contrasts in racial representations in films produced in Jacksonville at the cusp of the segregation era. These tensions will be examined by exploring how motion picture consumption factored into the politics of race in one of the largest cities in the New South during cinema’s silent era. This will be accomplished by exploring how the marginalized and disenfranchised
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Working on marginalised cinema audiences with the Jewish historical press website: illustrated on the quest for Jewish patrons of the palace venue in 1920s Warsaw Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Karina Pryt
ABSTRACT As is widely acknowledged in film studies and beyond, Jewish entrepreneurs and artists contributed significantly to the rise of cinema in the US and many European countries. However, apart from some research in the American and British contexts, the extent to which Jewish cinemagoers attended screenings is largely unknown. To stimulate greater scholarly interest in this topic, this paper discusses
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White screens, Black fandom: silent film and African American spectatorship in Harlem Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Agata Frymus
ABSTRACT This article investigates Black moviegoing in the United States during the silent film era. In existing scholarship, African American moviegoers tend to be discussed with reference to race movies – that is, independent films featuring all-Black casts. However, even during their heyday, race movies were in limited supply and could not compete directly with the dominant, vertically integrated
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Silent film era and marginalised spectatorship Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Agata Frymus
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)
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Film exhibition for indigenous people in Soviet Siberia: ‘cinema-coming’ and political enlightenment in the red yurt Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Caroline Damiens
ABSTRACT How can we get insights into early Soviet cinema screenings for indigenous audiences in the Siberian taiga at the end of the 1920s? Preserved by the Grodekov Khabarovsk Regional Museum (Russia), the recently published diaries of Alexandra Putintseva, a cultural worker posted at the ‘Far Eastern red yurt’ from 1929 to 1932, are a valuable source to investigate the issue. Putintseva’s diaries
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‘There is no gallery’: race and the politics of space at the Capitol Theatre, New York Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Pardis Dabashi
ABSTRACT This essay brings developments in Black film historiography and architecture studies to bear on the study of Northern picture palaces as the period of their prominence coincided with the Jim Crow era. Taking as my focus New York City’s Capitol Theatre – which opened in the immediate wake of the US race riots of 1919 and was the largest movie theater to date – I show how Northern middle-class
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Early cinema, modernity and visual culture: the imaginary of the Balkans Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Vlastimir Sudar
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)
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The early years of television and the BBC Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-04 James Shelton
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)
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The spectacle of the moon conquest: how visual culture shaped Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune and its anti-imperialist satire Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Sabrina Francesca Crivelli
It is well-established that Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon inspired Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune. At the same time, though, the film’s writ...
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Cinema’s original sin: D. W. Griffith, American racism, and the rise of film culture Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-05-01 Patrick Adamson
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)
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Between defiance and control: wild animal performance in the interwar circus Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Sabine Hanke
ABSTRACT This article explores the mishaps during tiger and lion performances at circuses in the interwar period via the concept of losing control. It argues that accidents involving wild animals offer a view behind the scenes in the highly regulated environment of circus performances. This approach allows us to access the agency of performance animals and audiences’ interpretations of these unintended
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Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Shijia Yu
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)
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Mabel, Marilyn, and Me: writing about Mabel Normand as a feminist film historian Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Rebecca Harrison
ABSTRACT Drawing on archival research, biographical writing, and autobiography, this article explores the life of early film comedienne Mabel Normand to make a case for feminist methodologies in film history. First, it provides a meta-analysis of existing biographies of, and scholarship about, Normand to interrogate the patriarchal narratives that inform theatrical, musical, and cinematic representations
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Sapho Kiss: Queer Reproduction in Early Cinema Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-05 Kiki Loveday
ABSTRACT In 1896 ‘the Nethersole kiss’ revolutionized the stage kiss and made legitimate-stage actress Olga Nethersole a household name. This article considers Olga Nethersole’s queer influence on the early erotic genres of the kissing film and the ‘stag’ film, arguing that she originated the mainstream Sapphic tropes of the twentieth century. Leaning on foundational texts by Shelley Stamp, Charles
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Our Lady Cinema Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Andrew Shail
ABSTRACT This article examines eleven personifications of cinema from the UK during the period 1912–1929, personifications that unanimously ‘sexed’ the medium female. It demonstrates that femaleness was not an inevitable characteristic of personifications of this particular medium and so explores why these female personifications came about when they did, showing that they both a) unconsciously symptomatized
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Antonia Dickson: The kineto-phonograph and the telephony of the future Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Jane M. Gaines
ABSTRACT We already know that Antonia Dickson co-wrote The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-phonograph (1895) with her inventor brother William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, published as a Raff and Gammon pamphlet and now considered the ‘first’ history of motion pictures. The late Paul Spehr was one of Antonia’s champions, and he suggested what a more careful reading of the prose style of that
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“Please the women or die”: silent cinema and the construction of female desire Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2023-01-15 Laraine Porter
ABSTRACT By the mid-1920s, the top echelons of the film industry on both sides of the Atlantic were almost entirely dominated by men. Despite women becoming the majority consumers for cinema culture, male studio bosses, producers, directors and publicists mediated women’s tastes and expectations through the silent and early sound period. Taking Iris Barry’s claim that cinema ‘exists for the purpose
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Contemplating imperialism: early film reenactments of the South African War Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Alex W. Bordino
ABSTRACT This essay examines the differences between American and British modernity around the turn of the twentieth century. The author argues that American modernity tended to paradoxically embrace what was considered premodern, while British modernity sought to more clearly dichotomize what was perceived as rural primitivity and civil British modernity. To elucidate these ideological differences
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The Maréorama in the 1900 Universal Exhibition: a simulated Mediterranean voyage from the banks of the Seine Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-25 Sonsoles Hernandez Barbosa
ABSTRACT This article presents an exploration of the mechanisms that underpinned simulacrum in the 19th century. To do so, I take as a case study an attraction presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1900: the multi-sensory panorama known as the Maréorama. This device offered audiences the experience of a half-hour boat trip across the Mediterranean Sea. In this paper I shall argue that this simulation
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The visual culture of Meiji Japan: negotiating the transition to modernity Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Aonan Wu
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)
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Mary Pickford’s mugshot: early Hollywood celebrities and San Quentin Prison Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Joshua A. Mitchell
ABSTRACT On a 1924 tour of San Quentin Prison, film star Mary Pickford sat to have her photograph taken in the studio of imprisoned photographer Sid Kepford, who was responsible for taking the prison’s mugshots. Pickford was far from the only motion picture celebrity to pass through the institution, however, and this article exposes the extent to which San Quentin was a destination for Hollywood’s
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‘The Admiralty has been keeping its pictures’: photography and the British Arctic Expedition, 1875–1876 Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund
ABSTRACT When the British Arctic Expedition of 1875 under command of George Nares left in search of the North Pole, they brought with them the most up-to-date photographic equipment available to the British Admiralty. Two crew members received instruction in photography from the astronomer, engineer and photographer, William Abney at Chatham, and Abney also sourced the wet and dry-plate equipment provided
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The picture postcard: a new window into Edwardian Ireland Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)
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Movie Mavens: US newspaperwomen take on the movies, 1914-1923 Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)
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The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: a true tale of obsession, murder, and the movies Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Peter Domankiewicz
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)
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Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Jiyi Ryu
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)
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Editorial Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Andrew Shail, Rebecca Harrison
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)
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Moving at the speed of sight: before-and-after imagery in nineteenth-century American print culture and the acceleration of visual time Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Wendy A. Woloson
ABSTRACT This article explores the quickening pace of visual time in the nineteenth century from ‘slow’ portrayals, evidenced in long series showing gradual change over time, to ‘fast’ visual time conveyed through ‘before-and-after’ jump cuts. Drawing from film studies, it argues that popular image makers not only played a central role in creating innovative ways to represent people’s new experiences
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The auspicious and the mechanized: exploring transitions in temporalities through the wall paintings of Shekhawati (1750–1940) Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-28 Saumya Agarwal
ABSTRACT This article uses depictions of mechanical clocks in wall paintings of the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan to study the transition to a mechanized temporal order in a context that was both linked to cosmopolitan trade cities and separate from them. At one level, an increased visual citation of the mechanical timepiece is proof of an increased influence of clock time, while the diversity in
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Cinema on the Front Line: British Soldiers and Cinema in the First World War Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-20 Elsa Marshall
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)
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Aeroscopics: media of the Bird’s-Eye View Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Stephen Connolly
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)
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Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Emma Morton
Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)
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Serialized space: Chinatown iconography in Universal’s The Master Key Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-15 Kim K. Fahlstedt
ABSTRACT Late in 1914, Universal released The Master Key, a motion picture serial in 15 installments. Robert Z. Leonard directed and starred, and the project was marketed as the ‘most expensive serial yet’. The weekly film release was paralleled by a syndicated newspaper feuilleton, illustrated by stills from the motion pictures. Stills were also incorporated into an illustrated reissue of Fleming
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Early photographic federations and the pursuit of collaborative education Early Popular Visual Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Sara Dominici
ABSTRACT In 1899, a group of photographic societies and camera clubs in the north of England came together to form the Yorkshire Photographic Union. Soon after, five other photographic federations were founded by societies and clubs in Northumberland and Durham (1901), Scotland (1903), Lancashire and Cheshire (1905), the Midlands (1907), and East Anglia (1910). These umbrella organisations supported