Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 18))

PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY *

THOSE who think that pictorial photography is a product
of the last quarter of a century would do well to study
the work of David Octavius Hill,† a Scottish painter, who
turned to photography in 1842, originally to help him in
his painting. He soon became fascinated with his new
method. Some of his portraits are not surpassed by any-
thing that has been done since, although Hill had no other
process than calotype at his command. A volume of his work is in the
possession of the Royal Photographic Society, and his negatives are still in
existence, so that it is possible that one day they may be published. After
Hill, the history of pictorial photography in England shows a long gap.
The wet collodion process was being perfected, and the extraordinary detail
and delicacy of the pictures obtained with it, took photographers away on a
totally different track. Mid-Victorian tendencies were shown as strongly in
photography as anywhere, and able workers lost themselves in morasses of
false sentiment, and swamps of elaborate theatrical unrealities. Rejlander, a
Swede, who came to England after an adventurous career on the Continent,
studied as a sculptor and painter, but, turning photographer, endeavored to
get a living by professional work, and at the same time to practise photography
as an art. Rejlander and, later, H. P. Robinson carried combination printing
as far as it was possible to do, one of the former's most notable pictures
having more than twenty figures, separately arranged and photographed. It
is easy to sneer at such things now—we have traveled far since “the Railway
Station” and " the Derby Day”—but in their time, and amongst their
generation, these men did much to keep up the recognition of photography
as an art, whatever may now be thought of the lines on which they worked.
Contemporaneously with them lived a lady, Mrs. Julia Margaret
Cameron, who exercised a considerable influence upon those who came within
her circle, and was fortunate enough to include in this category many of the
well-known men of the time—amongst others, Herschel and Tennyson.
Mrs. Cameron realized what few could then appreciate, the difficulty of
dealing with the critically sharp definition of the portrait lens, and it was to
meet her requirements that instruments were made with an adjustment by
which the required degree of spherical aberration could be introduced at will.
Her portrait work is characterized by a breadth and force seen in that of no
one else since the time of Hill, and it is only by one or two modern workers,
of whom Steichen may be noted in particular, that the succession is
maintained.
Mrs. Cameron died in 1879, just as the dry plate was being perfected,
and during the next few years there is little to note in pictorial photography,
except that the modern amateur movement was gradually gathering force,
By 1885 it was in full swing; photography had once more become a craze,


*Reprinted with the author’s special permission from R. Child Bayley’s “The Complete Photographer.”
† See Camera Work No. XI.— Editor.

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