photography

AE155 Books

Ancient Egypt: A Journey Down the Nile

Nigel Fletcher-Jones presents a richly illustrated and engaging survey of ancient Egypt’s enduring and much-examined cultural landscape. Written with an assured handling of the material, the book follows the geographical course of the Nile, using the river as a framework…

UK news in brief

Rare photographs of Second World War filmmaking revealed To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Historic England’s Archive has released a collection of photographs capturing behind-the-scenes stills of RAF film productions. The collection was put together by Dorothy ‘Knicky’…

The Ancient World

The Hill of Tara, once the seat of the High Kings of Ireland, is a site steeped in mythology and history, dating back over 5,000 years. At the centre of the image lies the Mound of the Hostages, an ancient…

Lights, Camera, Action!

Continuing his series of articles entitled ‘Travels in an Antique Land’, independent traveller Karl Harris guides us round four Theban tombs recently opened to the public.

Rafael Ruiz Fuente Guadalperal

A lost monument re-emerges

The Dolmen of Guadalperal is a megalithic tomb located in the Spanish province of Cáceres, some two hours south-west of Madrid. The site is believed to be a Neolithic funerary monument, probably constructed between the 5th and 4th millennium BC.…

Dendera: Temple of Time

REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS When José María Barrera visited the Temple of Dendera for the first time, he was left breathless by the spectacular celestial ceiling of the pronaos – so much so, he returned a few years later armed…

Christian tattoo in medieval Sudan

Archaeologists have uncovered a rare example of a religious tattoo in a burial near the medieval monastic site of Ghazali, in northern Sudan. The tattooed individual, whose skin was unusually well preserved, was discovered in 2016 during excavations of the…

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Lee Miller’s ‘fire masks’, 1941

This image was taken outside the air-raid shelter in the garden of Roland Penrose’s house in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, north London, at the height of the Blitz in 1941. Penrose was a Surrealist artist by trade, but also worked as…

The Stereoscopic Society

Stereoscopy is as old as photography itself. The techniques for tricking the suggestible brain into seeing three dimensions by placing two overlapping images side by side was first described in 1838 in a Royal Society paper ‘on some remarkable, and…

Gonbad-e QĀbus, 1934

As he made his journey through the green steppe, Robert Byron (1905-1941) could see his destination 20 miles away:‘a small cream needle stood up against the blue of the mountains’, as he wrote in The Road to Oxiana, the account…

King

Valley of the Kings, 1923

‘Yes, wonderful things’ is the oft-quoted response Howard Carter gave when, on 26 November 1922, Lord Carnarvon asked if the archaeologist could see anything through a hole in the inner doorway of the tomb of the young king Tutankhamun.

Women War Photographers

Calum Henderson explores the lives and works of war photographers Gerda Taro, Endre Friedmann, Françoise Demulder, Anja Niedringhaus, Lee Miller, and Catherine Leroy.