This project has grown out of my volunteering at the Courtauld Institute; more specifically my participation in the digitisation project which forms part of the Courtauld Connects programme in the Conway Library at Somerset House. At it’s heart my project is a simple comparison of then-and-now scenes, with black & white photographs of buildings and…
The Musgrave Trail I’ve continued the search for ‘Kersting’s Mary’ and have found that Mary Musgrave and her parents went on another voyage the following year 1954, this time it was to Lisbon, Portugal on the Alcantara. However, after this it has been difficult to find any definitive information to follow the ‘Musgrave trail’ further.…
Having started work on the Kersting Photographic Archive as a Digitisation Volunteer in August this year, I decided to try to find out more about his life. As part of this I used an online genealogy service and amongst various records that I discovered was a passenger list for a ship called “Venus” showing an…
Audio version Read by Anne Hutchings Text version The mix of European sculpture such as a George and the dragon sculpture and a European bust, alongside a young Bahamian apprentice, busy glazing a plate, piqued my interest. Kersting’s hand-written note on the back of the photograph reads Nassau, Bahamas and Chelsea Pottery. To put the…
Audio Version Text Version One photograph that Anthony Kersting took during one of his journeys through Madrid reveals a site whose open roof, skeletal towers and central cavity would easily classify it as a plain depiction of an early twentieth century abandoned architectural project. As alluring as images of outmoded objects and sites are, they…
Audio Version Text Version I don’t know her name. I don’t know the name of the young woman who stares out at me from the photograph I hold by its slightly curved edges. I’ve stared at this photograph for days, coming back to it and to her. She is elaborately dressed, wearing beaded necklaces with…
Anthony Kersting was an expert photographer of architecture. He was clearly prolific, resourceful and much-travelled, this is reflected in the thousands of photographs and negatives he left to the Courtauld after he died. Photographs themselves have an agency that goes beyond aesthetics, not just in the way they interact with the world, but in the way they…
AF Kersting, 20th Century British photographer, traveled to Turkey at least two times, including in 1963 and 1995, and photographed much of the significant sites of Istanbul, also known as Constantinople. Hagia Sophia, the building we see standing today (preceded by two churches and a pagan temple) was rebuilt by the Byzantines under Emperor Justinian…
Audio Version Read by David Brown. Text Version My key interest for the past year has been in the figure of the “Fat Cat”[1], to which none of the images I was looking at in the Conway Library could give a literal face. Yet, the collection of AF Kersting seemed to offer some light on…
Audio Version Text Version The limited number of biographical writings on Anthony “Tony” Kersting acknowledge his place among (and arguably his supremacy over) the greatest architectural photographers of all time, having “built up a matchless archive of architectural treasures”. What has rarely, if ever, been discussed, however, is the aesthetic appeal of Kersting’s portrait works…