Lewes History Group

The trip to McBean’s Orchids is cancelled as we have just had a phone call from them to give us the sad news that they are closing down on the 31st October 2014.

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Hopefully you have seen and enjoyed the current Stories Seen Through a Glass Plate exhibition of 80 lightboxes in 55 shop windows in Lewes, featuring plates from the Reeves archive. This wonderful display is a precursor to a much more substantial effort to digitise the Reeves archive and records and make them more broadly available.

This broader project is dependent on a successful Heritage Lottery Fund grant application.

These have a much greater chance of success if community support and interest can be demonstrated. If you’ve seen and enjoyed the current shop displays, you could email the organisers at info@reevesarchive.co.uk and express your appreciation and support.

Alternatively, it would be fine to just drop a note off at the Reeves studio – which is also putting on an exhibition of the history of their studio on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons until 2nd November.

The lightbox exhibition runs from 4th October until the 2nd November.

More details on their website.

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Edward Reeves took his first studio portrait in 1855. Today his great-grandson Tom takes photographs in the same studio on Lewes High Street.

The Reeves Studio is thought to be the oldest continuously operated photographic studio in the world. Its archive of over 100,000 glass plate negatives with relating paperwork is both a unique and living record of the daily life of this market town and the history of photographic practice. There are roughly another 100,000 photographs on film and shot digitally.

The archive is of international significance, and important in the history of commercial photography. The original ledgers and account books allow us to caption, date and locate any of the 100,000 glass negatives, and identify the subjects, customers and their addresses.

Cataloguing and digitising the archive

Brigitte Lardinois, Senior Research Fellow in photography and Deputy Director of the Photography and Archive Research Centre of the University of the Arts in London, is working with the Reeves family on the cataloguing and preservation of this archive. They are developing a long-term strategy to make this valuable historical resource accessible to the wider public and researchers.

Brigitte is applying to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant to enable the photographing and transcription of the existing ledgers and account books, in order to map what is in the archive and help prioritise the digitising of the negatives. The result of this work will be a public website with selected images in a good enough resolution to aid research.

Brigitte hopes to do this work with the help of groups of specially trained local volunteers, and she may be turning to the Lewes History Group for such assistance.

Exhibitions in Lewes

Brigitte and colleague Matt Haycocks have curated an exhibition of images from the Reeves archive for the Brighton Photo Biennial 2014, titled Stories Seen Through a Glass Plate.

Archive images are displayed as light boxes in fifty shop windows along Lewes High Street, near to the location where they were originally taken. The historical images have been juxtaposed with the present townscape, and brings the work to a wider public. This ‘outdoor’ exhibition makes a trail from Lewes railway station up Station Street to the bottle neck and down to the bottom of Cliffe.

In addition, there are exhibitions at the Reeves Studio and the Barbican House Museum, organised with Emma O’Connor, Curator of the Sussex Archeological Society.

There are maps and information available from the  Tourist Information Centre, and to coincide with these exhibitions, the featured theme for the Viva Lewes October issue is “photography”.

The event runs from 4th October until the 2nd November.

Parade of trade vehicles in Lewes High Street c.1922
(Image © Edward Reeves, via the BPB website)

BBC coverage on the Reeves project

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