Talking pictures: DMU experts back on BBC Radio 3


BBC Radio 3’s Essay series on The Five Photographs That (You Didn't Know) Changed Everything, edited and curated with De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) expertise, proved so successful it is being repeated.

From tonight, five images that altered perceptions of reality, and our understanding of our place within it, will again go under the microscope in late-evening broadcasts.

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Professor Elizabeth Edwards

Of special interest are explorations by series editor Professor Elizabeth Edwards and Dr Kelley Wilder, both part of our Photographic History Research Centre.

Professor Edwards will explain how a photograph of humble cottages launched a scheme to preserve Britain’s past, while Dr Wilder opens the series, at 10.45pm tonight, with Anna Bertha’s Hand – an image that astonished science while alarming the public.

A Financial Times review called the first series run ‘good history and good fun’ and praised Dr Wilder’s ‘virtuoso account’ of the X-ray, which took in airport security, the idea of the invisible, Thomas Edison and the schlock classic X: The Man With X-ray Eyes.

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Anna Bertha's hand

Professor Edwards won praise for her account of photography as a highway into the past.

She said: “The series of short essays aims to show how apparently unremarkable photographs changed the way people could think about their world, and experience the world.

“The essays each take their starting point from a photograph which has activated networks that changed the way the world was understood, and which continue to resonate today.”

A preview of Anna Bertha’s Hand is available here and our guide to the first run of the series is available here.

Posted on Wednesday 27 July 2016

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