Auto Amazon Links: No products found.
Blue plaques are being erected at the former homes of two of Britain’s earliest pioneers of photojournalism. John Thomson and Christina Broom captured groundbreaking images of street life and political upheaval during their careers.
English Heritage historian Rebecca Preston said both photojournalists were working at the forefront of photography in a time when it was less accessible than now. Christina Broom began working as one of Britain’s first female press photographers after experimenting with a box camera in her forties. She recorded the suffragette movement in the early 1900s.
Broom’s contributions to photojournalism will be honoured with a blue plaque at the house in Fulham, west London, where she lived and worked. Her photos appeared in a male-dominated newspaper industry, including images of soldiers leaving to fight during World War One and members of the Royal Family. From the early 1900s, she began to sell postcards of her photos from a stall beside Buckingham Palace.
Broom regularly photographed activists and public demonstrations in support of women’s right to vote. Her work included portraits of leading figures such as Christabel Pankhurst, co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union. John Thomson, whose plaque will be placed at his home in Brixton, south London, captured many of the impoverished characters living on the fringes of late 19th Century society in London. His photojournalism, intended to prick the consciences of the Victorian middle classes, included poignant pictures of destitute women in Covent Garden.
Thomson’s travels to Asia are also noteworthy. He took the first known photographs of the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and received a royal warrant for his work in 1881. Thomson travelled to Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong and China, documenting his trip with photographs and text. He heralded this new form of journalism as bringing pictures and stories to a new and wider audience
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More
Auto Amazon Links: No products found.