Author Archives: Robert Bickers

Everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same: HPC update

You might, from today, spot that Historical Photographs of China looks a little different in places. That’s because it is. Over the last two years our friends in the University of Bristol’s Research IT team have been rebuilding our platform … Continue reading

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HPC: A Change of Pace

It is 15 years since the launch of Historical Photographs of China. In that decade and a half we have copied about 170 mostly privately-held collections of photographs, which has generated just over 62,000 unique images in our databank, and … Continue reading

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About scratching, they were never wrong, the old masters

OK, that’s not what W.H. Auden actually wrote, but while I have been enjoying the selections of photographs made by Tom Larkin for our new Instagram feed — @hpcbristol, go on, follow us — Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ … Continue reading

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A round up of recent posts: internment, a church, a shipwreck, three missing Spanish diplomats, Wuhan

This blog has hosted a fair few guest posts recently, and we have been writing our own as well. Just in case you missed them I thought I might recap a little, and flag up the fact that in the … Continue reading

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Happy birthday to us!

It’s our birthday! Fourteen years ago today, Historical Photographs of China welcomed its first and longest-standing employee, Project Manager Jamie Carstairs. A professional photographer, sometime cheerful bookshop assistant (so he told us), TEFL teacher and graduate of the postgraduate Photojournalism … Continue reading

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Wuhan photographed

Over the past month Wuhan has been much-discussed, but its history is still largely misunderstood. I wrote about its long and intimate relationship with world markets in this blog post. It was of course, like most of the Chinese treaty … Continue reading

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Reversing Robert Capa’s gaze: Wuhan, 1938

Ooo, look: our eagle-eyed Project Manager Jamie Carstairs spotted this wonderful photograph taken in 1938 by Robert Capa in Hankou (Wuhan) and recently published in MAGNUM China (Colin Pantall and Zheng Ziyu, eds, Thames & Hudson, 2018): This is one of … Continue reading

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Defend Wuhan!

We spotted this on Ebay, and bought it along with a small group of prints evidently taken in Wuhan during the Sino-Japanese war. They came from an album of prints that was being sold, page by page. A little research … Continue reading

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‘Finding Wee Paddy’ … and finding Riflemen Mellon, Howard and Delaney

‘Finding Wee Paddy’ is a new documentary that has its first showing on 21 October at the Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast. It tells the story of the relocation of the grave of Rifleman Patrick McGowan, Royal Ulster Rifles, who was … Continue reading

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No Great Wall

The latest book to use one of our photographs on its cover has just arrived in the post. Felix Boecking teaches modern Chinese economic and political history at the University of Edinburgh, and his volume, which grew out of the … Continue reading

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