About This Event

All our unique lecture mornings include a friendly lecture where you can meet our guest lecturer, have coffee and a sweet treat. Why not make a day of it at Lauriston and have some lunch at Mimi’s café on-site after your lecture experience? The Problem of Alice Kerr: Tracing a ‘Lost’ Victorian Photographer To Celebrate for World Photography Day Lady Alice Kerr (later Gaisford) was an amateur photographer working in Britain the 1860s. Kerr and her work are largely unknown, and there is no scholarship devoted solely to her. However, there is evidence to suggest she was photographing alongside the likes of Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Gustave Rejlander at Little Holland House, the centre of Kensington’s social and artistic society in the early 1860s. In this lecture Meg will present her findings on Kerr to shed light on her life, work, and networks. She will also explore Kerr as a lens to identify ways in which we can resurrect histories of ‘forgotten’ photographers, and to detail the challenges that stand in the way. Meg Dolan completed her doctorate in History of Photography at the University of St Andrews in 2025. She researches early art photography, particularly allegorical portraiture, and her chapter “Romanticising the Irish Landscape: The Dundrum House Images of Clementina Lady Hawarden” in Colonising and De-Colonising the Irish Nineteenth Century is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press later this year. She also is Collections Development Manager of the Permanent Collection at Edinburgh Printmakers.

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