Tag Archives: kersting

John Ramsey: Church of St James the Great, South Leigh

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Text Version

While digitising a box of photographs of Oxfordshire churches with fellow volunteer Muny, we found a wonderful wall painting in a Kersting print; a welcome surprise after the usual mix of white-walled naves and pillars.

CON_B00607_F007_005. The Courtauld Institute of Art. CC BY NC.
CON_B00607_F007_006. The Courtauld Institute of Art. CC BY NC.

In the Middle Ages, it was common practice to paint the walls of churches. Few people could read, so it was necessary to teach by using pictures. During the Reformation, these images were covered over as they were considered symbols of Popish idolatry.

The painting is on the wall which separates the nave from the chancel, and is an example of how certain images became assigned to specific positions in the church. One of the most common is Doom, or the Last Judgement. The symbolism explains the positioning of the Nave as representing the ‘Church militant’ and the chancel as the ‘Church Triumphant’, separated by the judgment before which all souls must pass.

The Last Judgment in South Leigh follows a traditional pattern. Two angels with trumpets are waking up the dead. On the left, an angel in white is calling to the saved, with a scroll above announcing ’Venite Benedicte Patris Mei’ (Come you blessed to my Father). They then move towards the north wall where (not visible in the photograph) St Peter awaits them at the gates of Heaven. On the right, the angel wears dark clothing and summons the damned, the scroll above saying ‘Discedite Maledicti’ (Depart you cursed). They are bound together with what looks like barbed wire and are being pushed towards the jaws of hell, which are just visible on the south wall.

The image is clearly designed to scare the wits out of the congregation:

“The damned are dragged into the mouth of hell propped open by a devil.”
Image courtesy of www.wasleys.org.uk

The original paintings were discovered in 1870, when the old layers of whitewash were removed after the new vicar, Gerard Moultie, decided the church needed restoration. The work was carried out for £85 by Messrs Burlison and Gryllis, a firm heavily influenced by William Morris. This is particularly evident where the originals were too faint to copy and were effectively replaced by 19th-century design, for example in the painting of flowers and birds beneath the Last Judgment.

The original artists were probably trained in monasteries. They were not necessarily monks, but young men who showed artistic ability and were trained in monastic scriptoria. There is also evidence of a growing number of itinerant painters who were associated with the Guilds of Painter-Stainers in London and other cities.

For a small village church, South Leigh has several associations with the famous. The ancestors of William Morris owned land there, and it is only 10 miles or so from Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s country house.

In 1725, John Wesley preached his first sermon from the pulpit (he returned in 1771 and was refused entry).

Between 1947 and 1949, the poet Dylan Thomas and his wife lived in the village and maintained an eccentric lifestyle. This was many years after he wrote ’It is the sinner’s dust tongued bell claps me to churches’, though it would be wonderful to imagine him seeing the Last Judgment through an alcoholic haze and wondering which way he would go.

 


John Ramsey
Courtauld Connects Digitisation Volunteer

Can Tony Kersting Take You to Your Home Town?

Audio Version

Read by Tanya Goodman-Bailey

Text Version

Managing the digitisation project of one of the most varied, mysterious, and extensive photographic collections in the world, in one of its most prestigious art institutes can look a lot like this:

and not much like the constant carousel of wonderful architectural detail that one might imagine. The volunteers, busy sorting through the images and penciling the accession numbers on the mounts, or zooming in to check the focus in the digitisation studio, are the ones who get to really see the collection, really make serendipitous discoveries. I have to make the time to go and explore, and be sure to do it too or else I might get to the end of whole months having only seen filenames, spreadsheets and conversion code on Terminal.

Belluno_Ponte della Vittoria e Duomo_Anthony Kersting Archive

Today I thought I’d go looking for my hometown – Belluno, in the Italian Dolomites – and see it through A.F. Kersting’s eyes. The 4293 Kersting negatives, which we plan to digitise as part of our project, are numbered sequentially and neatly stacked in their cases. To every negative number corresponds a handwritten entry on a ledger, so if you were to pick a number from the shelf you could easily look it up in the ledger and find out where the image was taken. It’s a bit more difficult to start your search from a specific city; on the negative there are only accession numbers and entries on the ledgers are also sequential by number, not by location. Besides, part of the mystery surrounding photographer A.F. Kersting is that he would travel so extensively: opening a page at random of his ledger you can see that one day he was in Jersey, the next in Scotland, the following entry would be in Munich, then Dubrovnik, then Madrid… which makes tracing his steps and locating a particular town very tricky – and transcribing the ledgers (another fascinating task reserved for our volunteers) very necessary!

Belluno_Piazza Duomo_Anthony Kersting Archive

What I do have to go by in my quick morning search is the prints collection, the selected negatives for which we have prints, and which are arranged by country. These prints were created by Kersting and are unnumbered but annotated in pencil at the back. I ventured to the Italy box and looked for my small town almost as a challenge, and there, to my delight, I found the squares and fountains of my childhood, almost untouched by time, with the only exception being the clothes of the passers-by and the cars parked where they shouldn’t be.

Belluno_Piazza delle Erbe_Anthony Kersting Archive

We are not there yet with the digitisation so what you see below are just some quick group snaps, but hopefully they will give you a taste of how wonderful a photographer Kersting was, and how extensively he documented every corner of the world he could reach. When we’ll have completed the digitisation of the whole collection you’ll be able to search by place and by date, as well as by accession number, and the collection will be truly open. For now, enjoy this small selection as a Friday treat.


Faye Fornasier
Digitisation, Database and Cataloguing Manager

Courtauld Connects

Alia Ahmad: The Man Who Wasn’t There

Audio Version

Read by Francesca Humi

Text Version

Observing portraiture through the eyes of Anthony Kersting

 

When I first started my internship, I was in awe at the large collection of archives kept everywhere around the Witt and Conway library which is situated in the basement of The Courtauld Institute. I was so intrigued that I simply wanted to open every archive box I could without being tagged as the new nosey intern. I am happy to say that I now proudly hold that title even before I opened all the boxes. However, being nosey can somehow have its perks! After asking so many questions regarding the stacks of blue labeled boxes around the staff section of the Conway, I was introduced to the mysterious and yet enchanting world of the British photographer Anthony Kersting. What struck me most was the number of boxes labeled with the name of one person, and also the number of countries mentioned under his name on the boxes. I was curious about how much this man achieved, traveled and explored throughout his life.

Kersting’s journal entries [36- Tangier, Morocco on 7/11- Beeston, Nottingham on 15/11…]
Anthony Kersting was a photographer whose interest around the world focused on religious monuments, landscapes, portraits and sometimes private homes. Tony, for short, was born on the 7 November 1916 and died on 2 September 2008. Although frequent traveling was still unusual in his early years of activity as a photographer, and the breadth of his travels rather hard to believe, his photographs and journal entries represent irrefutable proof of his gallivanting around the world. I was really impressed by the number of places he visited in a short period of time, especially in the 1930s when traveling was expensive and, more often than not, hazardous. Indeed, he traveled to places such as Norway, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco and The Bahamas. Kersting’s photographs perfectly find comfort within their habitat. I was quite intrigued as to what methods he used to create this effortless relationship between him and his subjects. I chose to analyze portraiture as a theme because it reflects reality through the eyes of the beholder; as it is, in effect, a window to Kersting’s personality.

Kersting’s camera reel (random selection)

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Sharing and Caring. Beautiful Damaged Negatives.

KER_NEG_G1402.

 

Audio Version

Read by Elena Vardon

Text Version

As we process more and more boxes of negatives from the Anthony Kersting archive – that’s over 3000 sheet negs in 19 days – I become convinced that the smell of acetic acid in the studio will be an inextricable part of the memories of Summer 2017, both for me and for the volunteers handling and imaging the negatives.

Although most of the negatives in the archive are in very good condition, many have suffered some temperature variation in the past 50-70 years, and are in various stages of decay. This is where digitisation comes in and saves the day. At the heart of any digitisation effort are two main purposes: sharing and caring.

At the heart of any digitisation effort are two main purposes: sharing and caring.

Sharing, because these images have been kept shelved away for a very long time. How many people, since the negatives were created, would have known where to look, who to ask, what to look for, and how to find what? An insignificant number compared to the people searching the internet for historical pictures of their hometown, of monuments and buildings destroyed by war and natural disasters, of factory workers in Jamaica (those are great, can’t wait to share them!), and of generally wonderful looking places.

But digitising is also caring for the object, giving it some rest, allowing a newer, more robust and accessible version of it to take its place. In the sprint relay that’s the photographer’s vision, where the image is the baton, negatives and prints are the first runners. Exhausted after 70 years on the track, they are ready to exchange with the digital files, which will carry the image into the future.

Caring for the object, but also caring for the original photographer’s vision. As the negatives age in challenging environments, they suffer visual decay. This means that, depending on the type of negative, the original image will be compromised and look very different from how it was intended. Digitising before this happens ensures that the photographer’s vision is preserved for posterity in digital form and that the negatives can be moved to a more stable environment to stop further decay.

But what to say about the negatives which have already suffered damage? Unfortunately, in most cases these are nearly impossible to repair. Where possible, we digitise them as they are and appreciate them for their faults. The volunteers examine them as they prepare for digitisation and record in our database the details of broken or corroded glass plates or film negatives showing channelling. When performing quality checks on the digital images, they can also flag major scratches and deal with any dye retrieval.

Although the original vision is compromised, the damaged negatives take on a beauty of their own. Here are a few favourites.

As the acetate film decays, the base of the negative can shrink and the gelatine can become detached from its support. In the examples below, the channeling and distortion make the landscapes appear as if under water.

KER_NEG_G0313
KER_NEG_G0317
KER_NEG_G244
KER_NEG_G298

In some negatives, the dyes contained in the antihalation layer can react to the released acetic acid and become blue or pink.  The images below will be processed in black and white as they were intended but in colour the scenes look dreamlike and striking.

KER_NEG_G2978
KER_NEG_G2979

Scratches are the most common type of damage. In the first example I like to imagine the scratches are jetpack contrails. In the second, the scratch looks almost like the trajectory of the jumping dolphin. The third is so surreal, such an unexpected setting, the magic would come through regardless of the damage.

Scratches. KER_NEG_G1412
KER_NEG_G1407
KER_NEG_G1402

Introducing our new digitisation project

Audio version

Read by Faye Fornasier

Text version

Hello and welcome to our Digital Media blog – so nice of you to come and visit!

This post is an introduction to the HLF Digitisation Project here at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The project is run by Tom Bilson, Head of Digital Media, Sarah Way, Volunteer Coordinator, and myself, Faye Fornasier, Digitisation, Metadata & Cataloguing Coordinator, and together with our amazing volunteers we will use this space to talk about what we’re doing and share our work and serendipity.

The digitisation pilot, running now until August, will be a journey of discovery and exploration. It will set the pace for the rest of the project, which, if funded, will run for four years and complete the digitisation of the Courtauld’s photo libraries, started last summer with the Witt Library as a separate project, and part of the overarching Courtauld Connects.

The three collections we are covering are the Conway Library, just under a million mounted photographs and cuttings of architecture and sculpture started by Lord Conway of Allington; the complete archive of black and white prints and negatives by photographer Anthony F. Kersting, covering architecture of almost every European country, Asia, New Zealand, the Middle and Far East; and The De Laszlo Gift of Paul Laib Negatives, with over 20,000 images of works of all the major artists active in Britain between 1900 and 1945. 

A red box of Conway photographs, all mounted on brown card, waiting to be labelled.
A red box of Conway photographs, all mounted on brown card, waiting to be labelled.

So far, the work has been great fun. In January we had our Volunteer Open Day, which was fantastically rewarding with over 137 registrations. In February we set up the Digitisation Studio from scratch, redecorating and building furniture ourselves; Sarah met over 40 prospective volunteers in one-to-one interviews and launched the shift booking portal, while also finding the time to go on an amazing trip abroad; Tom went shopping for a Content Management System & website for our new images, and transitioned between two fascinating exhibitions by artists working with the collections; and I got the photographic equipment up and running, tested the imaging settings and workflow for different materials, and put together some step-by-step instructions for when the volunteers arrive, on Tuesday next week.

Yesterday, we had an induction event with our first 26 volunteers and they’ve already signed up for most of the next three weeks. The volunteers will bring all sorts of different experiences to the digitisation process and and insight on the images themselves, so over the course of the project we will ask them to share their stories and discoveries. What more can I say – we’re incredibly excited. 

Some of the negatives have never been out of their box and seeing what happens when they go online will be magical – so save this page for updates but also let us know what you would like to find on this blog. We will be happy to answer any questions and post suggestions are always welcome.

Introducing volunteers to the aims of the project © The Courtauld Institute of Art
Introducing volunteers our photographs, and to the aims of the project © The Courtauld Institute of Art

 

 Faye Fornasier

Digitisation, Database and Cataloguing Coordinator
Courtauld Connects