To 1920
The years 1839 to 1920 have often been called the formative years of photography. Bound by no single unifying vision but rather a multitude of uses, photographic commerce, art, and technology developed in many different directions. From the beginning, photographers in England and Wales were involved in all aspects of this development.
In the first decade of photography after January 1839, there was a great impetus to invention and experimentation, driven to a large extent by the inventor of photogenic drawing, Henry Talbot. Having sent out more than 800 photographs and written numerous papers by the close of 1839, he was the most prolific photographer and writer on photography. Consequently, his circle of family and friends, concentrated in London and at Penllergare, near Swansea, were among the best-informed and most active early amateurs. This circle, among them the Llewellyns, Nicolaas Henneman, Sir John Herschel, George Bridges (1788-1868), and Calvert Jones, played a crucial role in the development of photography on paper. While Henneman and Henry Collen were notable exceptions, these amateurs were of a similar class and financial independence, and photographed in a strictly private sphere, ‘untainted’ as they saw it, by commerce.
The practice of the daguerreotype was different, being confined largely to cities and commercial portraiture. It was first demonstrated in September 1839 by M. de Saint-Croix (or Sainte-Croix) in his lodgings in London and later at the Adelaide Gallery. Shortly after, and with the sanction of the patent holder Miles Berry, John Thomas Cooper Jr. (1790-1854) demonstrated the process at the Polytechnic Institution. These two locations became intimately connected with early photography in London. In 1841, studios were opened by Richard Beard (1802-85), who purchased the patent rights from Berry, and Antoine Claudet, who gained permission directly from Daguerre. Despite the presence of these and other portrait studios in Cardiff, Bath, Plymouth, Bristol, Liverpool, and other cities, commercial photography strained under the restrictive patents covering the calotype and daguerreotype. Although photography was added to the curriculum of King's College London and taught to Royal Engineers at Woolwich and members of various polytechnic institutions, no practitioner could set up in business or sell photographs without permission from either Talbot or Beard. Photography in the 1840s remained a largely genteel and scientific pursuit.
What was needed to create a larger market was a patent-free, fast, and economical process, and a large public forum for its dissemination. All this arrived in the 1850s, transforming and democratizing photography. Frederick Scott Archer's invention of the wet-plate process was crucial to this change. His publication of the unpatented process led directly to the relinquishment of Talbot's patents in 1854, and bypassed Beard's daguerreotype patent by offering a practical alternative for portrait studios. Moreover, Archer's process made it possible to print thousands of photographic positives from a single negative. This last development provided the backbone for the stereoscopic and carte de visite industries.
It is unlikely, however, that the advent of the wet-plate process alone could have raised public awareness of photography so quickly without the Great Exhibition of 1851, which introduced some of the newest processes and most important international photographers to over 6 million visitors, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whose enthusiasm for photography further boosted its appeal. Two years later, when the Photographic Society of London (later the Royal Photographic Society (RPS)) was formed, photography gained a regular ‘establishment’ capable of maintaining the momentum. Photographers from many societies were stimulated to exhibit work, and interaction between amateurs and professionals grew.
The impact of stereoscopy in England and Wales should not be underestimated. While carrying a whiff of the aristocratic Grand Tour, it was available to armchair travellers of all incomes. Equipment and publishing companies like the London Stereoscopic Company and Negretti & Zambra sprang up to meet the growing demand, and photographers like Roger Fenton, Claudet, and Lady Clementina Hawarden produced stereo images. Stereoscopy in various forms would remain a significant branch of popular photography for many decades. Meanwhile, the Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, became an important user of photographs, whether of engineering wonders like the Crystal Palace or Brunel's Great Eastern, or of topical events. However, until the half-tone process became available much later in the century, the pictures had first to be converted into wood engravings, with the paper's in-house artists often adding their own modifications to liven up the image.
In the 1850s, photography rapidly entered the spheres of illustration, art, education, science, entertainment, and (albeit indirectly) news. Although the standard histories of photography emphasize the artistic achievements of photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron, Lady Hawarden, Benjamin Brecknell Turner, Charles Dodgson and Fenton, photographs conceived as art were increasingly outnumbered by a flood of portraits and views intended for a mass public. Portraiture became a considerable industry, with businesses ranging from Camille Silvy's sumptuous establishment overlooking Hyde Park to backstreet operators using touts to drum up trade and offering pornography on the side. In addition, a small army of itinerants worked villages, race meetings, fairs, and seaside resorts well into the 20th century. Commercial view photography, also using the wet-plate process, got into its stride in the 1860s, with firms like Frith, Bedford, Wilson, and Valentine photographing landscapes throughout the British Isles and marketing them on an industrial scale as railways and tourism expanded.
Scientific and documentary photography also developed in the second half of the century. Dr Hugh Welch Diamond, a leading amateur, used the wet-plate process to photograph his female mental patients in the 1850s. In 1857 the Architectural Photographic Association set its members to recording British buildings, anticipating the much more ambitious project of the National Photographic Record Association. Photographs of the moon, by Warren de la Rue, William Crookes, and others were studied at astronomical gatherings. John Thomson and Adolphe Smith's part-work Street Life in London, published between February 1877 and January 1878, was a photographic and journalistic account of the poor of London, and a pioneering example of social documentary work.
A national debate about photography's status was sparked by the commissioners for the 1862 International Exhibition, who consigned photographic images to the wider ‘Machinery’ rather than ‘Fine Arts’ section. (However, the 1862 Fine Art Copyright Act offered them protection as creative works.) As early as 1854, the Polytechnic exhibition at Falmouth had grouped photographs under the title of ‘Art’ rather than ‘Mechanical Inventions’ where they had previously resided, but the prevailing attitude held that photography was not the equal of other graphic arts. The British Journal of Photography took up this cause, establishing itself as one of the most durable forums of photographic discussion and debate. In its pages, Ruskin's aesthetics were discussed and the seeds of the first large-scale movement in art photography were planted.
The end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th witnessed the arrival of two new inventions, colour and the Kodak. The foundations for colour photography had been laid by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, when he successfully demonstrated the basis of three-colour photography, but colour photography did not become practicable until after 1907, when the Lumière brothers' autochrome process entered the market; even then, it remained the preserve of wealthy amateurs. The launch of the Kodak in 1888 was another matter, however, and tens of thousands of small roll-film cameras had been sold in England by 1914, creating big opportunities for business. A. H. Harman, for example, had founded his company in Ilford, Essex, in 1879. Although still small in 1888, it would acquire Thomas Illingworth & Co. in 1912 and become Ilford Ltd., one of Kodak's great rivals. With firms like Thornton-Pickard and Houghton Sanderson, it formed part of a substantial British industry.
While these technological changes were taking place, the first clearly defined and self-conscious movement in art photography was emerging. In 1892, a small group of dedicated photographers formed the Linked Ring Brotherhood, calling for greater recognition of art photography and espousing the pictorialist aesthetic. The movement to entrench photography firmly in the fine arts, begun in the 1860s, gained momentum, driven forward by influential photographers including Henry Peach Robinson, Henry Hay Cameron (1856-1911), George Davison, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. The Linked Ring played an important role in international art photography, maintaining close ties with continental and American groups like the Vienna Camera Club and the Photo-Secession. Although there had been debates within the photographic community before this point, for example over naturalism, and although it only lasted until 1910, the Linked Ring marked an important stage in photography's convergence with the fine arts.
In the couple of decades before 1914 the wider photographic scene in England and Wales was diverse and vibrant. On the fringes of art photography, Paul Martin experimented with night pictures and covert snapshots of street scenes and people relaxing on the beach. Edwardian London boasted two of Europe's leading portraitists, E. O. Hoppé and Adolphe
1920-1945
After the flurry of excitement surrounding Coburn's Vortograph exhibition at the London Camera Club in 1917, the inter-war years seem relatively unexciting. Pictorialism remained the dominant ‘art photography’ style, governing the conventions of the ‘good photograph’ at the RPS, the photo-club salons, annuals like Photograms of the Year, and amateur magazines. The eminent pictorialist F. J. Mortimer (1875-1944), who had edited Amateur Photographer from 1908 to 1918, returned in 1925-44, and also edited Photograms of the Year and other influential publications. On the other hand, Cecil Beaton and Madame Yevonde were among Europe's most outstanding portraitists, and in Cambridge and Oxford, after starting in Swanage, Helen Muspratt and Lettice Ramsey built a reputation with their portraits of the intellectual elite. (Hoppé, meanwhile, had turned successfully to landscape and industrial photography.) Although not widespread, the influence of continental modernism was perceptible by the 1930s, and affected some individuals who were not primarily photographers: the painters Paul Nash and Roland Penrose, for example, and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Bill Brandt, who had lived in Paris and made friends with Brassaï and other key figures, published The English at Home in 1936. Humphrey Spender, influenced by German Neue Sachlichkeit, joined the documentary Mass-Observation movement in 1937. Meanwhile, English photography was benefiting from the influx of refugees from Nazism. Walter Nurnberg from Berlin began in advertising, but later became a leading industrial photographer. Photojournalism attracted Kurt Hutton (Kurt Hübschmann; 1893-1960) and Felix Man and, from Hungary via Munich, Stefan Lorant, who successively edited Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput, and Picture Post. Another Hungarian, Andor Kraszna-Krausz, founded the Focal Press in 1938.
The Second World War produced much outstanding photojournalism (Brandt, Man, and many others), but also lesser-known work like the book illustrations of John Hinde, who had done important pre-war research on colour photography. But perhaps the most memorable single body of work was by Beaton, who juggled private practice with official war photography in London, North Africa, and the Far East. Despite materials shortages and government restrictions, amateur activity continued. In the 1941 edition of Photograms of the Year, Mortimer described photography as the ‘Art of peace and modern progress, something that could not be denied’. Via the RPS, the London Salon and various publications, Mortimer worked hard to encourage it, even publishing lists of unrestricted subjects for the camera, and showcased annual selections of work in Photograms. In 1945 the latter listed 361 photographic clubs and societies in England and Wales. There were also 60 postal camera clubs and six photographic federations.
Since 1945
The end of the war brought renewed freedom to photograph anything and everything, although materials shortages and import controls persisted. However, the editors of the 1947-8 edition of Photography Today argued that such obstacles (and earlier restrictions) might even be beneficial. They added, ‘Reality has come to monochrome photography; and it has come to stay. Neither the falsehoods of mediocre advertising photography, nor the shameless flattery of commercial portraiture, nor the diehards of oldtime pictorialism, can dislodge it.’ Cities were at last being photographed as ‘living organisms’ and not as postcard images; the photojournalistic interpretations of everyday life and concerns, as seen in Picture Post, Illustrated, and Life, were exemplary, ‘fairly burning into the brain of the reader’. Photography, as the Photography Today editors saw it, ‘has at last burst the ties of petty representationalism and made its first steps towards creative freedom’.
There was much wishful thinking in this. Club conservatives continued to dismiss livelier, more socially relevant subject matter as ‘snapshots of everyday life’, technically inept and not worth exhibiting; as before, the emphasis was on technical and craft expertise rather than imagination. Outside the clubs, apart from Brandt's 1940s and 1950s nudes, documentary work by Nigel Henderson, and photojournalism by Bert Hardy, Jane Bown, and Grace Robertson, not much happened in photography or English culture generally in the first post-war decade. But the pace quickened from the mid-1950s, with the efforts of the Dutch-born Hugo van Wadenoyen to revitalize the club scene, the formation of the Combined Societies Association, and the arrival of the Family of Man exhibition and a landmark Cartier-Bresson show (1958). In the background were events at the Royal Court Theatre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Free Cinema documentary movement, and the rise of New Wave cinema. Although Picture Post folded in 1957 the gap, until the arrival of the 1960s colour supplements, was filled by magazines like Queen and newspapers like The Observer, which discovered both Roger Mayne and Don McCullin before the decade was out. Other major figures at various stages of their development in the mid- and late 1950s were John Deakin, John Bulmer, David Hurn, and Anthony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon).
Although, like music, cinema, and theatre, the photography of the ‘swinging sixties’ had its roots in the 1950s, it became much trendier and more visible in this decade, with magazines and—from 1962—colour supplements its principal vehicles. Fashion photography, formerly represented by old masters like Beaton, John French, and Norman Parkinson, was galvanized by the youthful working-class triumvirate of David Bailey, Brian Duffy, and Terence Donovan who, working mainly in black-and-white, mingled fashion and documentary styles, the gritty and the cool. In his film Blowup (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni forever fixed the image of the brash young photographer-about-town with his Rolls-Royce and apparently limitless supply of (also) sexually available models (the photographs in the film were by McCullin). Meanwhile, Snowdon and Patrick (Lord) Lichfield bridged the gap between the new classless celebrity culture and England's entrenched traditional elite, including the royal family, to which they lent a new glamour. In the background, building up gradually through the decade and communicated by television, was political ferment and, especially, the Vietnam War, which attracted a new generation of photojournalists working for the colour supplements and other magazines: Larry Burrows, Philip Jones Griffiths, McCullin, and Tim Page.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s there was notable documentary work, often by photographers based in, or mainly interested in, Wales, Yorkshire, or the north-east rather than London. They included Ian Berry (The English, 1978), Tony Ray-Jones (A Day Off: An English Journal, 1974), Raymond Moore, Chris Killip, and Martin Parr; Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, who settled in Newcastle upon Tyne at the end of the 1960s, created the study of an English working-class community that resulted in Byker (1983). Important landscape photographers of this period included Paul Hill, John Blakemore and Fay Godwin, whose Remains of Elmet appeared in 1979.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, the photographic scene became increasingly multifaceted. Groups like the Hackney Flashers and the Half Moon Photography Workshop articulated feminist concerns. The Camerawork Gallery was one of several venues that worked with the Disability Movement from the 1980s. Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers, appeared in 1988, and community photographic schemes, like the turn-of-the-century ‘Milleni-Brum’ project in Birmingham, proliferated from the 1990s, especially in multi-ethnic towns and cities.
At the same time, various indicators demonstrated photography's increasingly central role in mainstream culture. Opportunities for photographic education and training were one. In 1945, training was limited mainly to clubs, apprenticeship, and vocational courses, with national service offering additional possibilities (important, for example, in the careers of McCullin and Bailey). By the 1960s, however, photography courses were appearing in schools, and in art and design colleges, and in the 1980s photography secured a niche in the National Curriculum. The Royal College of Art inaugurated a photography course in 1968, and degree-level study became possible at a widening range of institutions, from Falmouth College to the major polytechnics (later universities). Museums also increasingly opened their doors to photography. Mark Haworth-Booth's appointment as curator of photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1970 renewed the V&A's historic link with the medium and inaugurated its development into one of England's largest repositories of classic photography. Institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery (which had mounted a major Beaton retrospective in 1968), the Imperial War Museum, and the National Maritime Museum showed increasing interest in exhibiting photographs and making their own large collections available; a National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television was opened in Bradford in 1983. Photography's convergence with fine art, in England as in other countries, was reflected in the exhibiting policies of major galleries. A large exhibition marking photography's 150th anniversary was held at London's oldest art venue, the Royal Academy, in 1989, and institutions such as the Hayward and the Barbican followed the same path; another milestone was Tate Modern's huge Cruel and Tender documentary show in 2003. The pattern was replicated, on a smaller scale, at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art and city and university galleries across the country. Early dedicated galleries of photography such as the Photographers' Gallery (1971) in London and the ffotogallery in Cardiff were widely imitated. Finally, media interest in photography intensified. By the early 21st century, the British photographic press was larger and more varied than that of most other European countries. Photographic book publishing boomed from the 1960s, with art publishers such as Thames & Hudson increasingly interested in producing photographic monographs. Television, far from threatening still photography, became an important vehicle for it, from early survey series created by photographer-teachers such as Bryn Campbell to documentaries on photographers from Brandt to Mario Testino in prestige arts programmes like the South Bank Show.
— Richard SadlerRichard Sadler/Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Badger, G., and Benton-Harris, J., Through the Looking-Glass: Photographic Art in Britain 1945-1989 (1989).
- Haworth-Booth, M., Photography: An Independent Art. Photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum 1839-1996 (1997).
- Harrison, M., Young Meteors: British Photojournalism 1957-1965 (1998).
- Harrison, M., David Bailey, Birth of the Cool: 1957-1969 (2000)
