Category: Photo Issues

Coming back finally to the current Tate Britain show, ‘How We Are’, the first section ‘First Moves’, dealing with the nineteenth century is certainly the most comprehensive and inclusive of all six chronological sections of the exhibition.

Around 120 photographers are listed for the remaining five sections, and they include some fine photographers (as well as some whose inclusion is hard to justify on any grounds.) My own selection of a similar number of photographers would perhaps have included rather under half of those chosen. It was certainly good to see a fair number of those whose work I think deserves to be better known – for example Norah Smyth and Edwin Smith in their very different genres, and obviously pleasing to see a number of photographers I know or have know with work on the wall, as well as to find some of those books on my shelves are now museum pieces. Some people – such as Bill Brandt – could not of course be omitted (although I’m assured that it was initially planned to do so.) Others, quite frankly had little relevance even to the particular view that the curators were presenting, perhaps representing strongly argued cases by some of those called in to review the plans.

In part the titles given to the different eras both indicate and dictate the omission of many fine photographers. ‘Into the Twentieth Century’ may seems pretty vague for the period 1900-1918, but appears to be a pretext for ignoring almost all of the pictorial photography and news photography of the era. As this was the first age in which cheap methods of mass reproduction led to photographically based newspapers, I would have expected more emphasis on how these new media used photography, rather than the rather specialised examples in the show. The photography of the Suffragette movement, with Christina Broom (Christina Livingstone, (1863-1939), Britain’s first woman press freelance photographer) and Norah Smyth, is a highlight of this section, reflecting the curatorial interest perhaps more in that movement than in their photography, which for both was considerably wider than the visitor to this show might conclude. Both of them are also featured in Mike Seaborne’s Photographers’ London: 1839-1994, which, despite its obvious metropolitan bias, succeeds in offering a considerably wider view of this era and others covered by the show.

By defining the period 1918-1945 as ‘New Freedoms in Photography’, the curators again choose particular work from the era rather than cover it more generally. Despite the title, there is perhaps less emphasis on photojournalism that might be expected from the era that saw the growth of the photographically illustrated magazines such as Liliput, Weekly Illustrated and Picture Post.

Again, it seems to me impossible to consider the period 1945-69 adequately as a whole under the title ‘The New Britain’; for most of us it changed radically at some point between the fifties and the sixties.

Equally it seems hard to argue that the seventies and eighties were dominated by ‘The Urge to Document’ or indeed that since then we have been making ‘Reflections on a Strange Country’. These are strange generalisations indeed, and the choices (and missing persons) they lead to make the show unrepresentative.

That isn’t to say that there is not a great deal of work of interest in this show. British photography does have a great deal to offer, and the story of British photography shown here is at time enthralling. But different curators would have made different choices of photographers and images, telling at least an equally valid view of photographing Britain.

So here are just a few names from the 70 or so who would have been on my personal list for 1900-1990 but are missing, in vaguely chronological order. Where I’ve written about them elsewhere and remember I’ll give a link.

Horace Nicholls, John H Avery, George Davison Reid, Emil Otto Hoppe, Felix H Man, Margaret Monck, Cyril Arapoff, Kurt Hutton, Thurston Hopkins, Henry Grant, John French, Eric de Mare, Raymond Moore, John Blakemore, Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin, Ian Berry, John Benton-Harris, Jo Spence…

Among the foreign visitors who perhaps have a greater claim to be included than most of those actually present are Izis Bidermanas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Sylvester Jacobs.

The final selection deals with contemporary work, and selection in this area is always going to be a lottery. The 20 or so photographers whose work appears in this section are an almost random cross-section from the several hundred whose work I find of some interest at the present time.

Although there is much to see, How We Are is a show that disappoints, as a missed opportunity. How long will it be after this before Tate Britain once again tries to tell the story of photography in Britain?

The ‘Missing Persons’ series has provided me with a little amusement although I think the point is basically serious – publicity from Tate Britain suggests that How We Are: Photographing Britain is “The unique story of British photography” when it is just one of many possible stories about British photography.

To adequately tell the story of British photography would need a larger space and a larger budget than the Tate provided. (Budget problems may also explain the rather unusual choice of images for some photographers.) As well as the particular viewpoint of the curators, these factors also helped to shape the show that we see.

This first section, entitled ‘First Moves’, and dealing with the nineteenth century is certainly the most comprehensive and inclusive of all six of the chronological sections of the exhibition. As a history it lacks some major figures, but also fails almost completely to deal with the technical, aesthetic, political and even largely the social changes that helped to change the nature of photography in Britain over the sixty years concerned.

There are of course many others apart from those already mentioned in ‘Missing Persons’ who might well be included in a proper overview of British nineteenth century photography, far too many to devote a whole feature to each one of them. So here are just a few more from the nineteenth century who I would have expected to see in any show claiming it was the story of British photography.

One of the best of the daguerreotypists was Antoine Claudet, and Calvert Richard Jones and John Dillwyn Llewelyn produced some fine work with the calotype and later wet plate process. It is hard to believe that there were no portraits by Lady Clemintina Haywarden in the show (perhaps by some error they left her out of the credits?), but she is not on the list. David Wilkie Wynfield was another of those to whom Julia Margaret Cameron turned for advice, and on who she perhaps based her approach.

A man very much after my own tastes, Henry Dixon produced some splendid records of London streets, showing both the buildings and the people. He also took some early candid street pictures, using a camera obscured by tarpaulin on the back of a cart.

Of course there are so many other interesting photographers of the period who I’ve not mentioned who are an important part of the early history of photographing Britain. What we do get – and is certainly of some interest – is a number of relatively anonymous works by rather ordinary photographers, including the work of commercial studios (some good, some bad) and others.

Viewed on its own, and for what it is – a kind of cross section of Victorian photography, seasoned with a number of choice tidbits from some of the finest photographers of the era – this section has much to recommend it. The coverage of some of the later eras – as I’ll show in later posts – is much less complete and more biased.

Peter Marshall

No proper view of British photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century would be complete without the work of Frederick Evans. At a time when most photographers with any pretention as artists were busily engaging in making their prints look less like photographs and more like paintings through the use of rough papers and special printing techniques that allowed them to work on the image.

Evans followed instead the example of P H Emerson, photographing in a technically precise manner and printing on platinum paper, which produced a linear tonal scale and was not normally susceptible to manipulation. He was noted for refusing to retouch his work, relying instead on perfecting his technique. His images owed their effect to light, and he would sometimes spend hours, days or even weeks studying the effects of light in the buildings he wanted to photograph in order to find the time of day and light that would produce the photographic effect he wanted.

He valued the clear and delicate tonality of the platinum print to such an extent that when the material went off the market he made no more prints, refusing to use the cruder and less linear tonal scale of the silver print. Some of his images were also reproduced using the Woodburytype process, which uses a relief image on a lead printing plate to produce different thicknesses of pigmented gelatin – and hence different tones – on the paper – essentially a mechanically produced carbon print.

As well as his architectural studies, which certainly include some of the finest images of English cathedrals and their interiors, he also made a number of fine portraits, including justly well-known images of Aubrey Beardsley.

Evans was a leading member of the ‘Linked Ring’ group of artistic photographers. He was also the first English photographer to have his work printed by Alfred Stieglitz in his magazine ‘Camera Work’ in 1904, and 2 years later Stieglitz showed his pictures in his New York gallery, ‘291’, along with the work of D O Hill and James Craig Annan.

Peter Marshall

Looking at the booklet for the show ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’ before making my way into the gallery I got a shock. The curators appeared to have omitted the very man who started the whole thing, W H F Talbot. I checked again – it couldn’t be true, and thankfully it wasn’t. They had simply placed him wrongly in alphabetical order under the letter F. So when I realised that H P Robinson was missing, I immediately looked for him under ‘Peach Robinson’, but he wasn’t there either.

Although Rejlander’s ‘Two Ways of Life’ showed a path for photography, it was one taken most enthusiastically by his friend Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), who, over the years, starting with ‘Fading Away’ (a ‘touching’ deathbed scene which is perhaps hard for us to appreciate, but was only too common an experience in the era before modern medicine) produced a number of impressive works using similar combination printing techniques (such as ‘When The Days Work is Done’, as well as many fine portraits and landscapes.

‘Fading Away’ is one of 12 images by H P Robinson available on the Free Information Society web site.

Robinson had trained and exhibited as a painter and was a great fan of Turner and of the Pre-Raphaelites, and he composed his works in much the same fashion, and dealt with some of the same subjects, including for example, a picture of “The Lady of Shallot“.

His use of combination printing continued to cause controversy in photographic circles, Robinson arguing that the aim of photography was to make beautiful pictures, and that the techniques used were irrelevant. He explained his appraoch in the influential book, “Pictorial Effect in Photography“, published in 1867, and was famously involved in arguments with another great photographer, Peter Henry Emerson, who favoured a more simply photographic approach to produce pictorial images.

Pictorialism to which both men contributed, remained a powerful influence in art photography for the next 40 or so years, particularly through groups such as the ‘Linked Ring’ (a strangely masonic guild established by Robinson and others when he left the Photographic Society in 1891) and various other seccesionist groups of art photographers based in other countries.

Although pictorialism was eclipsed in art photography by the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century, much of the debate between Robinson and Emerson had strong resonances in the 1970s and since, when increasingly fine artists began to take up photography and reject much of the purist orthodoxy.

Peter Marshall