Christina worked from the 1903-39 under the professional name Mrs Albert Broom, and was assisted throughout her career by her daughter Winifred. Broom documented topics including the suffrage movement and military life, and was official photographer to the household brigade. Her photographs regularly appeared in publications including The Tatler, The Sphere, and The Illustrated London News, and were self-published as picture postcards during the height of this industry. A selection of Broom’s work was exhibited at the Gallery in the 1994 exhibition Edwardian Women Photographers. Many of her suffragette subjects are also represented in the collection of the Museum of London, which is planning a retrospective of Broom’s work for autumn 2015.

Born in Chelsea in 1860, Broom took up photography while living in Streatham in the early 1900s as a way to make money for her family after her husband injured himself and several previous business ventures failed.

She started by selling photographs of Buckingham Palace as postcards and later became the country’s first female press photographer, notably photographing soldiers heading to fight in World War One and the Suffragette movement.

Streatham Society secretary Mark Bery organised the talk, and believes Broom is a fascinating figure in Streatham’s history. 

He said: “Christina is one of many famous well-known former residents of the area. She is of particular interest as she was a female photographer at a time when the profession was dominated by men.

“The talk will highlight how Christina managed to break into the male dominated world of photography and cover the people and events depicted in her photographs.”

Broom was undoubtedly a pioneer but many believe she does not get the recognition she deserves. 

Art historian PL Henderson, who holds a particular interest in women’s art and photography, believes this is due to sexism present within the arts.

  She said: “I believe Christina Broom was one of the most significant photographers of her era and indeed of the 20^th century itself. 

“As a woman she was a pioneer in the field and as a photographer she was remarkable in her ability to focus on subjects of particular relevance. Her body of work is invaluable and I don’t believe she has been acknowledged enough.

“The main reason is that the recording of history has not served women in many areas of the arts well. Women were often labelled as amateurs despite their obvious talents and even success.”

The talk, to be held on March 29, will largely focus on her suffragette photography, which the Museum of London describes as “some of the best photographs” of the campaign for votes for women. 

Henderson said: “I think because Broom was sympathetic to the cause of the suffragettes and as a woman this enabled her greater access to the females involved, the protests and associated events.

“I’m not sure anyone else could have documented the movement so intensely and insightfully. Broom’s work is definitely hugely significant as the visual material she created uncovers not only the movers and shakers of the movement but also the range of happenings surrounding the suffrage issues as the true social-political documentary and press photographer she was.”   

Anna Sparham, a former curator of photography at the Museum of London and writer of Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom, believes Broom’s significance is remarkable considering her background.

She said: “Her work overall managed to incorporate topographical street photography, portraiture, incredibly important news events over the course of the Great War, the Suffrage campaign, Royal deaths and coronations and society events in south west London, in particular, such as the annual boat race, which she photographed for over 30 years.

          PICTURE PERFECT: Broom’s photography is considered by many as the most important of the suffragette movement (Source: Museum of London/Christina Broom collection)

“She had no formal training or a privileged network. She carved out a role within the profession, teaching herself how to photograph, through sheer determination and skill, paving the way for other women to follow. 

“Where, who and how she photographed leaves an important legacy for British photography.”

The talk will be delivered by Beverley Cook, curator of social history at the Museum of London, and Sparham believes it will provide invaluable insight into Broom’s life and work.

She said: “I worked alongside Beverley for over 15 years, and I know she will deliver an excellent, exceptionally well-researched talk. As an expert curator on the suffrage movement as a whole, Beverley will brilliantly aid people to place these images of the campaign in context.

“It is vital to keep her work in the eye of new generations, continuing to write about her and placing her in context with her contemporaries, both men and women, and perhaps those she inspired. Or maybe even continues to inspire.”

Henderson added: “I think raising the profile of Broom in this way is fantastic. It’s not only educational but fascinating to discover and reclaim previously undervalued amazingly creative people and realise the extent of their work and talents. 

“It can only benefit and enrich all of us and Broom certainly deserves our attention.”

You can find out more information about Beverley Cook’s virtual talk for the Streatham Society here.

Featured image credit: Museum of London/Christina Broom Collection

I think this photographer work well to in relation to my project as the theme of feminism and the suffragette movement is really prominent.

(not finished wrtiting)

Andy changed the way we see the world and the way the world as well as the way the world looks at art. With Andies observation of cultural trends, from his rise to Pop Art fame in the early 1960s up until his death in 1987, Andie identified the images and aesthetics shaping the consumer driven post war American experience and transformed what he saw into a sophisticated yet accessible body of work.

He invented new ways of image making, expanding what was considered fine art, and also a new kind of artist, one who merged art and life, and treated painting, photography, filmmaking, writing, publishing, advertising, branding, performance, video, television, digital media—and even his own persona—as equally valid terrain for creative experimentation. Often lost in his own celebrity and myth is the fact that he is widely considered one of the most important post-war artists of the 20^th century.

Roy Lichtenstein was an American artist known for his paintings and prints which referenced commercial art and popular culture icons like Mickey Mouse. Composed using Ben-Day dots (the method used by newspapers and comic strips to denote gradients and texture).

Lichtenstein’s work mimicked the mechanical technique with his own hand on a much larger scale. He was a leading figure in establishing the Pop Art movement, along with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. “I take a cliché and try to organize its forms to make it monumental.

Lichtenstein’s first one-man show, held in New York City in 1962, was a great commercial success, and his innovative work found an international audience. In 1966 he became the first American to exhibit at London’s Tate Gallery.

By the early 1960s, he had begun showing with Leo Castelli gallery in New York, and made major breakthroughs with works such as Drowning Girl (1963), a satirical take on melodramatic pulp fiction of the era. Themes of irony and cliché prevailed throughout the remainder of Lichtenstein’s career, as evinced in his Haystacks (1969), a take on the canonical series by Claude Monet. The artist died of pneumonia on September 29, 1997 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Modern in London.

Lichtenstein continued in this vein for much of his career, and his artworks are readily identifiable by their comic-strip characteristics. Nevertheless he extended these techniques into clever and thought-provoking meditations on art and popular culture. After the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s works began to include still life’s and landscapes, and they were a dramatic departure from his earlier style in their use of brushstrokes as well as in their subject matter.

• What you want to explore?
• Why it matters to you?
• How you wish to develop your project?
• When and where you intend to begin your study?

200-500 WORDS

For my project I want to explore the themes of feminism and how through different artists, women can be portrayed in many ways. Including the similarly false reality of how groups of women are perceived through colour and through Pop Art as well as producing image similarly to the layout of a comic book.

This matters to me as I feel strongly towards how women are portrayed in media and how perspectives especially how they are portrayed im media is important, as the same image can be interpreted in many ways.

Through the theme of Union I believe that it can relate to my project as my goal is to explore togetherness/ contrasted with perception of the same group of people. I want to explore for the same main goal whilst presenting this group of togetherness and unity through objectification and known as the “male gaze”, therefore making this togetherness challenging to maintain and unite people. I plan to include inspired images through the arts of Roy Lichtenstein and how his art can create a different point of view towards women. I want to include inspired images by Andy Warhol as his famous collaged work includes the photographs of sex symbol Marylin Monroe and Andie. Juxtaposing this, I want to include the inspiration behind Christina Bloom’s work in my own photos as she focuses on the suffragette movement and women who fight for equality, empower and as well flight for other women like themselves. I would like to include her archival work and combine them in my work, potentially putting the work into pop art in itself from it’s monochromatic appearance.

I want to develop my project by creating a collage throughout my presentation of my final work similarly to Andy Warhol with his first step inspired work in order to secondly create his infamous pop art pieces. Before creating his pop art pieces he would create these black and white photo strips, almost like one out of a photobooth, to draw ideas from and almost use it as a “muse”.

For the final project, I want to present my study in a photo book. As a result, I intend to produce many collages of the same pop art inspired images so that I will have a large variety of images that I can pick from as well. I have plans to begin my study for this project as soon as possible to allow me the most amount of time to compete.

How it relates to the past…

Critics contend that Pop Art’s juxtaposition of art and everyday objects blurs the boundaries of artistic sanctity, potentially diminishing the reverence associated with high art. By integrating mass-produced imagery, the movement challenges traditional notions of artistic exclusivity.

Union can be interpreted in various ways within art specifically in terms of combining different artistic influences, cultures, or mediums. Union in art often signifies the coming together of high and low culture, or the mixing of traditional art forms with modern, consumer-based visuals.

Roy Lichtenstein is one of the key figures in American Pop Art. His use of comic book imagery, ben-day dots, and bold lines, which transforms everyday, mass-produced imagery into fine art. Mention that Lichtenstein’s work was a fusion of popular culture and art history, which directly relates to the theme of “Union.”

In terms of the historical background of Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s, was a time of rapid industrial growth and the rise of mass media in America. Pop Art emerged as a reaction to the elitism of abstract expressionism, embracing instead the visual language of advertising, comics, and consumer culture.

Linking this to the theme of union it is emphasized how Pop Art brought together the worlds of art and commerce, merging high with low culture (advertising, comics, etc.). Lichtenstein, with his bold, graphic aesthetic, became one of the foremost artists in this movement, using visual language that was deeply connected to mass media.

Pop Art and Photography share a visual language based on consumerism, popular culture, and mass media. Photography in the 20th century became a tool to capture the realities of modern life, reflecting the increasing influence of media and consumer goods on society.

Photography as Pop Art: Pop artists, including Lichtenstein, were influenced by the emerging role of photography in capturing mass culture. Think about how photographs of advertisements, celebrities, and everyday objects became visual motifs in Pop Art.

Union of Commercial Photography and Fine Art: Many photographers like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Andy Warhol (who was both a photographer and painter) he blurred the lines between commercial and fine art. Avedon, for example, elevated commercial fashion photography to art, just as Lichtenstein made comic book art better.

Pop Art Introduced…

Although British Pop Art was greatly inspired by American popular culture, it was a rather playful and ironic exploration of what American popular imagery represented and how it manipulated people’s lives and lifestyles.

To American artists, on the other hand, Pop Art meant a return to representation: hard edges, clear forms, and recognizable subject matter now reigned, contrasting with the loose abstraction and symbolism of the Abstract Expressionists.
Heavily influenced by commercial art practice, these artists were taking inspiration from what they saw and experienced directly. Not surprisingly, many had started their careers in commercial art.

Andy Warhol was a magazine illustrator and graphic designer, Ed Ruscha was a graphic designer, and James Rosenquist started out as a billboard painter. Their backgrounds provided them with an excellent visual vocabulary of mass culture as well as the technical skills to jump effortlessly between high art and popular culture and to merge the two worlds.

Expressionism

It’s a modernist movement that emerged in early 20th-century Germany. Artists working in this style distort the reality of their subjects in order to “express” their own emotions, feelings, and ideas.

With an aesthetic and approach heavily inspired by the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch—two artists viewed as predominant precursors of the movement—Expressionists employed artificial colour palettes, energetic brushstrokes, and exaggerated textures in their works. Together, these characteristics culminate in avant-garde paintings that favour the subjective over the true-to-life in order to reveal a glimpse into the psyche of artists.

Cubism

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.

Impressionism

A major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. 

Dadaism

Dadaism was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Influenced by other avant-garde movements – Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism – its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Dada’s aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York, and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups. The movement dissipated with the establishment of Surrealism, but the ideas it gave rise to have become the cornerstones of various categories of modern and contemporary art.

Pop Art

Pop art is an exciting, colourful, and vibrant art movement that emerged in the UK and the US during the 1950s. When Pop Art first emerged as a style, it was radical and shocking, a stark contrast to the abstract expressionism style that preceded it.  When it emerged on the scene, Pop art was not a popular style, as the name might suggest. Instead, the movement takes its name from the subject matters which inspired it. Film, comics, commercials, and other forms of popular culture.

Pop Art crosses mediums and is observed across sculpture, paintings, shadow boxes, mixed media artworks, and drawings. What unites Pop Art artworks is the subject matter and themes that inspire them.

Pop Artists changed the perception of what art is. They broke down the barriers between so-called “high art” and commercial art or “low art,” seen in popular culture. Pop artists took inspiration from film, comic books, advertising, product packaging, and other commercial designs.

 

Futurism

Focusing on progress and modernity, the Futurists sought to sweep away traditional artistic notions and replace them with an energetic celebration of the machine age. Focus was placed on creating a unique and dynamic vision of the future and artists incorporated portrayals of urban landscapes as well as new technologies such as trains, cars, and airplanes into their depictions. Speed, violence, and the working classes were all glorified by the group as ways to advance change and their work covered a wide variety of artforms, including architecture, sculpture, literature, theatre, music, and even food.

Futurism was invented, and predominantly based, in Italy, led by the charismatic poet Marinetti. The group was at its most influential and active between 1909 and 1914 but was re-started by Marinetti after the end of the First World War. This revival attracted new artists and became known as second generation Futurism. Although most prominent in Italy, Futurist ideas were utilized by artists in Britain (informing Vorticism), the US and Japan and Futurist works were displayed all over Europe. Russian Futurism is usually considered a separate movement, although some Russian Futurists did engage with the earlier Italian movement. Futurism anticipated the aesthetics of Art Deco as well as influencing Dada and German Expressionism.

“an act or instance of uniting or joining two or more things into one. especially : the formation of a single political unit from two or more separate and individual units.”

Words similar to it:

• Connecting
• Collaborating
• Merger
• Blend
• Combining
• Uniting
• Joining
• Partnership
• Relationship
• Marriage
• Sacrament
• Formation
• Relate
• Meeting
• Integrated
• Hooked
• Cooperation
• Organisation
• Corperation

 

noun: union; plural noun: unions; noun: the Union

1. the action of joining together or the fact of being joined together, especially in a political context.“he was opposed to closer political or economic union with Europe”
   Similar: unification uniting joining merging merger fusion fusing

• HISTORICAL the uniting of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603, of the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707, or of the parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
  singular proper noun: Union
• a state of harmony or agreement.
  “they live in perfect union”
  Similar: unity accord unison unanimity harmony concord agreement concurrence undividedness
• a marriage.
  “their union had not been blessed with children”
  Similar: marriage wedding partnership pairing alliance match
  
  2. a society or association formed by people with a common interest or purpose. “members of the Students’ Union”
  Similar: association alliance league guild coalition consortium combine syndicate confederation federation confederacy partnership fraternity brotherhood sorority society club group organization trade union
• a trade union. “the National Farmers’ Union”
• HISTORICAL a number of parishes consolidated for the purposes of administering the Poor Laws.
• BRITISH an association of independent Churches, especially Congregational or Baptist, for purposes of cooperation.
  
  3. a political unit consisting of a number of states or provinces with the same central government.
• the United States, especially from its founding by the original thirteen states in 1787–90 to the secession of the Confederate states in 1860–1.
• “California is the fastest growing state in the Union when it comes to urban encroachment”
  The northern states of the United States which opposed the seceding Confederate states in the American Civil War.
  singular proper noun: Federal Union; singular proper noun: the Federal Union
• South Africa, especially before it became a republic in 1961.

BINARY OPPOSITION

Binary opposition – a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.

Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory in Linquistics (scientific study of language) According to Ferdinand de Saussure, binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework – a set of boundaries to work within.