Talk: Joseph Swan: A New Vision

22 November

2pm, Pottery Gallery

A free public talk about Sunderland born chemist and inventor Joseph Swan, in relation to light and photography by photographic historian Dr Carol McKay and photographic artist Dr Liza Dracup.

Most people know Joseph Swan as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. Few know he was also a photographic pioneer, an entrepreneur and businessman, with connections far and wide. We’re celebrating this story in Sunderland, the place where he was born and grew up and where he encountered photography for the first time.

This event is part of the Being Human Festival, the UK’s only national festival of the humanities, taking place 14–23 November and programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Observe Experiment Archive.

FREE / No booking required 

About Liza:
Liza Dracup is a photographer based in the north of England. Her work questions how photography made in response to specific (northern) landscapes and natural histories can operate within the field of landscape aesthetics and align with the wider cultural debates about the value of the ‘local’ from an environmental and personal perspective. Her wider research extends to re-positioning a wide range of historical collections-based research material across photographic, artistic and scientific disciplines, also underpinning her PhD at the University of Sunderland (2017).

 

Image Credit: LM 3 from Light Matter, Liza Dracup 2019