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Royal Engineers (RE). While civil engineers were quick to realize the potential uses of photography as a recording tool in their profession, it was not until the mid-1850s, in Britain, that the medium was adopted by the military. After largely unsuccessful attempts at photography during the Crimean War (1853-6), the involvement of RE personnel in the construction of the South Kensington Museum was seen as a good opportunity to widen the photographic skills within the corps and led, in 1856, to a number of sappers receiving instruction in photography from the museum's photographer, Charles Thurston Thompson (1816-68). Shortly afterwards, courses in photography were officially established under Captain Henry Schaw at the RE Institution at Chatham, and henceforth until 1904, when it was absorbed into the Survey School, the Photographic School retained an independent status.

While the main purpose of this photographic work was to support the technical demands of the corps in both its day-to-day operations and on campaign, sappers were also officially encouraged to use the camera for more general photography. As a result, between the 1850s and 1870s, they produced some remarkable work, both in the course of their military duties and on secondment to other projects. The photographic influence of the Royal Engineers was thus felt well beyond the corps itself: in addition to producing photographers and photographic chemists of the international standing of Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney, the Photographic School at Chatham was also involved in training photographers for expedition work (such as two members of the Nares Arctic Expedition of 1875-6); sappers with photographic training were routinely attached to survey parties (such as Corporal Lawson, who accompanied Charles Gordon on his Russo-Turkish border survey of 1857), while the photographic department of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI; f. 1870) was heavily reliant in its formative years on the expertise of the sappers who undertook much of the technical work. Already by 1860, John Donnelly, writing on the military applications of photography, was able to enumerate RE photographs taken in places as varied as Panama, India, Singapore, China, and Russia. While Sergeant John Harrold (who was to spend his later years with the ASI) produced over 15, 000 prints of maps for use during the Abyssinian Campaign of 1867-8, his photographic record of the progress of the campaign itself and the country through which it passed is of far greater historical interest. Arguably the most significant work of RE photographers was of a semi-military or civilian nature, where their skills were placed at the disposal of scholarship in a variety of fields: the two sappers (Corporals B. L. Spackman and J. McCartney) who accompanied Charles Thomas Newton's British Museum expedition to Halicarnassus and Cnidus in 1857-9 made one of the earliest detailed records of a major archaeological investigation, while in the survey field sappers produced an exhaustive record of the Canadian Boundary Commissions of 1858-62 and 1872-3, concentrating their photography as much on the people, landscapes, and daily life of the country as on their professional operations. Perhaps the most distinguished of the many photographers who received their training at Chatham was Colour Sergeant James McDonald (1822-85), who in the course of Ordnance Survey operations in Jerusalem (1864-5) and Sinai (1868-9) produced a magnificent series of technically assured and evocative views of the topography and architecture of the Holy Land, which remain a documentary resource of major importance.

— John Falconer