• Event location: The Pavillion, College Road, Stoke-on-Trent

Free. Book tickets

In the “Garden” with Darwin or Look happy, you’re having your picture taken!

David Noble’s talk considers how Darwin the naturalist, drew upon art and photography to elucidate his ideas, and how particular photographers made it into a new art, Pictorialism.

In 1872 Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Other Animals, a book that discussed how our faces reveal the mental actions of the self. Importantly for Darwin, was the relationship of how the human animal shared with the ‘other animals’ a common bond of gesture and reflex for all to see. With the invention of photography such ideas would take on a greater significance, as the ‘trace’ of our faces would, in a modern world of technological communication, perhaps be more of a mask rather than a revelation. This talk considers how Darwin the naturalist, drew upon art and photography to elucidate his ideas, and how particular photographers made it into a new art, Pictorialism.

This is David Noble’s second talk for Fringe, following on from the well received We Begin in the Dark in 2013.

David also has a new exhibition called ‘Mutability’ opening at the Emporium Gallery, Lichfield.