Titanic Unseen Images from the Bell and Kempster Albums

The work of two passionate photographers, Philip Bell and John W. Kempster, offer insights into what it meant to build, deploy and operate the great White Star ships in the era of Titanic. Kempster was a director at Harland & Wolff and Bell was a White Star officer. Their important photographs reveal the surging spectacle and excitement of a launch, lazy days of a long homeward haul from Australia, intimate details of life on-board ships of the period, and the ever-present dangers of an industrial shipyard. RMS Titanic was from the gene pool of an ever strengthening fleet of vessels that eventually extended to a globe-girdling enterprise. These rare pictures, from a pair of extraordinary albums, provide her context.