British photography
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British photography refers to the tradition of photographic work undertaken by committed photographers and photographic artists in the British Isles. This includes those notable photographers from Europe who have made their home in Britain and contributed so strongly to the nation's photographic tradition, such as: Oscar Rejlander; Bill Brandt; Hugo van Wadenoyen; Ida Kar; and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.
[edit] The 1800s: invention and popularisation
Many technical innovations in photography were undertaken in Britain during the 19th century, notably by William Fox Talbot and Frederick Scott Archer. Early aesthetic breakthroughs were made by Lewis Carroll, Hill & Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron and the Pre-Raphaelite photographers, and the "father of art photography" Oscar Gustave Rejlander. Travelling photography under adverse conditions was pioneered by war photographer Roger Fenton, and brought to a high level in England by Francis Frith and others. There were a number of local photographic societies scattered throughout Britain, often holding large annual public exhibitions, Yet photography was mostly deemed at that time to be a science and a 'useful craft', and attempts at making a fine art photography almost always followed the conventions of paintings or theatre tableau. There were also early earnest attempts at "trick photography": notably of spiritualist apparitions and ghosts.
Studio and travelling photographers had flourished in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but the developing technology eventually allowed the mass-market commercialisation of cameras. With the introduction of the Box Brownie, casual snapshot photography became an accepted feature of British middle-class life from around 1905.
[edit] 1845–1945: a century of anthropological documentary
British photography has long had a fascination with recording, 'in situ', the lives and traditions of the working class in Britain. This can be traced back to Hill & Adamson's 1840s records of the fishermen of Newhaven; John Thomson's photography for the famous book Street Life In London (1876); the street urchin photography of Dr. Barnardo's charity campaigns; Peter Henry Emerson's 1880s pictures of rural life in the East Anglian fenlands; and Sir Benjamin Stone's surreal pictures of English folkloric traditions.
This Victorian tradition was completely forgotten about once modernism began to flourish from around 1905, but it appeared again in the "documentary" (a word coined in the 1920s by John Grierson) movement of the early and mid 20th century in activities such as Mass Observation, the photography of Humphrey Spender, and the associated early surrealist movement. Documentary pictures of the working people of Britain were later commercialised and popularised by the mass-circulation "picture magazines" of 1930s and 1940s such as Picture Post. The Post and similar magazines provided a living for notable photographers such as Bill Brandt and Bert Hardy. Also very notable is George Rodger's London work for the U.S.'s Life magazine. These large-format picture magazines served covertly as a "education in what a good photograph should look like" for their readers, something that was otherwise totally lacking. The British documentary movement contributed strongly to the poetic nature of some wartime early home front propaganda, such as Humphrey Jennings' approach to film.
[edit] 1945–1965: the post-war lull
After the end of the war, photography in Britain was at a very low ebb. Due to post-war shortages and rationing it was not until about 1954 that it became easy to buy photographic equipment and consumables. As new cameras began to appear, there was debate over the ability to take 'good' pictures using old pre-war cameras. This argument was famously answered by Picture Post photographer Bert Hardy, who went to the seaside with a simple old Box Brownie camera and came back with some of the most iconic images of England in the mid 1950s. The pre-war picture magazines such as Picture Post declined rapidly in quality, and eventually closed in 1957.
Yet the desire to continue the photographic recording of everyday pleasures was evident in the 1950s Southam Street work of Roger Mayne, and also in the early 1960s in the work of Tony Ray-Jones (his A Day Off, 1974). Ray-Jones is known to have scoured London for the then uncollected photographs of Sir Benjamin Stone, one example of the piecemeal but growing awareness of the work of earlier British photographers. Ray-Jones's extensive legacy in turning the mundane into the surreal can be seen in the 1990s work of contemporary photographers of everyday life & leisure, such as: Homer Sykes; Tom Wood; Richard Billingham; and Martin Parr.
[edit] The 1960s: fashion and royalty
The tradition of working-class and political photography runs in tandem with photography of the upper classes and British royalty, and the photography of the dandy culture of high fashion.
Cecil Beaton was a fashion photographer from 1928 for Vogue, and later became the official photographer to the Royal Family. Likewise, Lord Snowdon, and Lord Lichfield continued the association of the British Royal family with photography, an association that had first begun when Queen Victoria & Prince Albert patronised the art photographers of their day, and was continued through the establishment of the Royal Photographic Society and the extensive photographic collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
British fashion photographers - such as John French, Norman Parkinson, those who worked for Queen magazine, and later Terence Donovan, Duffy, Sarah Moon, David Bailey - can all be seen as working in a celebrity tradition that intertwines with that of the glamour of the high-society and royal photographers. In late 1960s London "photographer" became one of the archetypal professions aspired to by those with social aspirations. In the 1970s David Hamilton, formerly the art director at Queen magazine, produced a highly popular series of photograph books in which he blended fashion photography with pictorialism and romanticism.
With the later advent of the new romantics, glossy street-style magazines featuring strong photography emerge. Such as Blitz, i-D, The Face, and others. Implicitly focused on the time-worn idea of the dandy-esque 'English eccentric' in youthful form, these magazines often fused the fashion/celebrity tradition with the British documentary, surrealist and "documenting folk pleasures" approaches to photography.
[edit] The 1970s and 80s: the political turn
From around 1975 and into first years of the 1980s, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation funded Chris Steele-Perkins and Nicholas Battye (as 'Exit') to document poverty in the inner cities; 29,000 images and hundreds of hours of taped conversations formed a modern equivalent to the Mass Observation work of the 1930s.
Similar extensive archives of pictures of ordinary life were created by: Daniel Meadows with his travelling double-decker bus "Free Photographic Omnibus" gallery and studio in the mid 1970s (Living Like This, 1975); the 80,000 image archive of farming life by James Ravilious; and the Amber Collective in the council estates of the north-east (notably the work of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Chris Killip). Other similar photographers were: Shirley Baker (Manchester's working class), Tony Boxall (gypsy families), and Gus Wylie (the Hebrides). The anarchist Colin Ward was also notable for his photographic anthology on children's street culture. Following the lead of Chris Steele-Perkins in documenting the British youth movements (The Teds, 1979), other photographers turned their attention to documenting the implicitly political youth movements of skinheads and punk.
Various forms of leftist ideology - especially feminism, continental theory, and the polemics of Susan Sontag - all affected British thinking about photography from the mid 1970s. These political currents gave rise to feminist photographers such as Jo Spence and Marxist photographers such as Victor Burgin. Don McCullin's powerful war photography can also be seen as contributing to the intensifying climate of political tension in 1970s Britain.
Camerawork, followed by Ten.8, were magazines of Marxist photographic thought in the late 1970s and early 80s. Initiatives such as this floundered as Britain moved into the early 1980s under the growing Conservative hegemony of Margaret Thatcher. But there was a minor continuation of the documentary tradition - through documentary photography of CND and the Greenham Common camps (Ed Barber, Joan Wakelin, Peter Kennard); the miners strikes (Izabela Jedrzejczyk, Martin Shakeshaft, John Sturrock); and the new age travellers (Peter Gardner, Alan Lodge).
[edit] The 1980s: the arrival of colour
The documentary tradition in British Photography took an important turn when colour was embraced firstly by Paul Graham (photographer) with his work on the late 1970's and particularly "A1 - The Great North Road" of 1981/82 and "Beyond Caring" from 1984/85, soon followed by Martin Parr with his book "Last Resort", in 1986. This brought about a huge visual shift in what had previously been a dedicated monochromatic world. Later followers of these, many of whom were Graham or Parrs students, included Paul Rees, Anna Fox, Tom Wood, Julian Germain, Nick Waplington and Richard Billingham. Both Graham and Parr were included in a prestigious show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1990 that included Chris Killip, John Davies (photographer) and Graham Smith (photographer). Sadly this important exhibition never made it to the UK, where photography remained ill appreciated by the British art world, and museums like the Tate Gallery, who simply refused to show any work by photographers, period. Graham and Parr were highly influential on a younger generation not only for their work, but also in their determination to publish work in book form, leading to a vibrant archive of published books by many interesting photographers from the past 20 years.
[edit] 1930s–1990s: artists as photographers
A number of British neo-romantic artists have been particularly interested in photography, having first established themselves as artists: such as Paul Nash, John Piper and Edwin Smith in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. In this interest they continued the interest in photography shown by fine artists from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood through to the Surrealists.
Prior to 1985 notable artists using photography were David Hockney, Graham Ovenden, and Gilbert & George, the latter being strongly influential in validating the use of colour in fine art photography in Britain.
Into the 1980s, neo-romanticism again emerged strongly in the work of Fay Godwin, James Ravilious, Andy Goldsworthy, Preston Leigh and Jem Southam - although this was paralleled by an ironic post-modern concern for English landscape in the work of John Goto, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and others.
[edit] 1990–2000: staged photography
From around 1990 staged fine art photography became seen as valid as art in the commercial art world, and was accepted by many (but not all) gallerists. This form of photography, with its heavy synthetic input, proved easier to digest for a wider art audience, confused by the seemingly 'observational' nature of straight photography. Whilst many would dispute this value system, which marginalises most of the 20th centuries profound photographic works, its leverage in opening the doors to the broader art world is widely accepted. This process took about a decade and the breakthrough year in Britain was around 2000. The Director of The Photographers' Gallery said in an 2005 interview with Photowork magazine: "...especially in 2000, photography had begun to be shown in private galleries and larger public museums, and there was a fundamental shift in terms of the fine art culture in the UK".
[edit] The photographic book in Britain
Before the mid 1960s, few photography books were published. They rested heavily on the conventions of travel-books and literary topographical guides, and examples of these were Bill Brandt's Literary Britain (1951), Edwin Smith's England (1957), Hugo van Wadenoyen's Wayside Snapshots (1957), Antony Armstrong-Jones's London (1958). Apart from these few books, and one notorious book of nudes (Nudes of Jean Straker 1958), nothing of note was otherwise produced in book form in the 1950s. There was, however, Norman Hall's magazine Photography (1952-1962). His Photography magazine was vital in keeping alive the flickering flame of serious creative photography in Britain, and would feature European photography such as that by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
From 1965, when David Bailey (photographer) and Lord Snowdon published successful books, a far wider variety of books of photography began to be published throughout the 1970s, including Creative Camera hardback annuals. Dedicated photography book publishers such as "Travelling Light" (1980) and "Cornerhouse" (1987) began to start up.
The book format was later to be a vital element in the growing amount of British photographic scholarship, particularly that undertaken by Graham Ovenden in the late 1970s and early 80s, which was to recover entire photographic traditions that had formerly been completely lost to sight. This was greatly aided by the huge collection of 300,000 photographs that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London had quietly acquired since 1850, and which by the mid-1970s was becoming accessible due to the appointment of the V&A's first 'Keeper of Photographs', Mark Haworth-Booth.
From 1995 it became increasingly possible to accurately present fine photographs on the web, but commercial photography book publishers such as Dewi Lewis Publishing have continued to thrive in Britain. Collecting fine photography books has become a major, although increasingly expensive, alternative to collecting the photographs themselves.
[edit] Supporting photography in Britain
Until the mid 1960s the moribund Royal Photographic Society and its associated photographic clubs dominated British photography. The RPS understanding of photography was of it as an amateur pursuit strongly embedded in pictorialism. This went hand-in-hand-with a wider assumption in Britain that photography was a "mere craft" - suitable only for scientific use, advertising, snapshot portraiture, and newspaper press photography.
Newer approaches to photographic education slowly emerged after the Second World War. Hugo van Wadenoyen had led the "Combined Societies" breakaway split from the Royal Photographic Society after the war, and Ifor Thomas introduced a new aesthetic approach to teaching photography at the Guildford School of Art.
Two important magazine outlets for photography emerged from the mid 1960s. Firstly, from 1966 the The Sunday Times colour magazine (and its later imitators), and secondly the highly influential magazine Creative Camera (1968 onwards). Creative Camera was, until the early 1980s, strongly influenced by the humanist and spiritual approaches to photography of Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Minor White, and John Szarkowski, and by a general belief that one had to travel to America to find out 'what photography was really about'.
The Arts Council had only funded three photography exhibitions from 1946 until 1969, although London's ICA had given some support to creative photographers. Small independent photography galleries only began to appear from 1970; most notably "The Photographers' Gallery" in London, and later the "Side Gallery" in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
British photography was slowly reviving by 1970 and, alongside magazines like Creative Camera, education would become its main vehicle. In 1970 the first British university degree course in photography was established, and so from 1973 the Arts Council employed a new Photography Officer, Barry Lane, to deal with requests for exhibition funds from the first crop of graduates. The influential photography diploma courses at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, and the Derby College of Art were combined from 1971, and the combined Trent/Derby course was highly successful. There was also a notable course at the Newport Art School in Wales. The Glasgow School of Art began a course in fine art photography in 1984, under Thomas Joshua Cooper. From the mid 1970s important lecturers began to set up short-term forms of advanced creative photography education. The first of these was in 1976 when Trent lecturer Paul Hill established the first residential photography workshop, "The Photographer's Place", in the Derbyshire Peak District. Paul Hill's course-in-a-book Approaching Photography was also widely influential. The advent of such intensive photographic education nurtured a number of lecturer-practitioners whose creative work reached new heights and received strong media attention: such as Raymond Moore; Paul Hill; and Thomas Joshua Cooper. One of their joint concerns was with making fresh approaches to picturing the British landscape.
Since the 1980s, photographic education has failed to break out of further-education colleges and the universities. There has been very little penetration of photography education into schools, beyond activities such as providing schoolchildren with disposable cameras for basic snapshot photography.
Today a number of major London galleries show photography, including the Tate Modern and the Victoria & Albert Photography Gallery. There is the National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television) in Bradford, established in 1983. Despite decades of arts funding cuts, there are still a handful of small photography galleries around the country, and "The Photographer's Gallery" survives in London. There is the annual Hereford Photography Festival, and the Brighton Photo Biennale. Dewi Lewis Publishing in Stockport produces a wide range of books, and finding second-hand photography books has been revolutionised by the internet. Since 2000, a half-dozen new British print magazines have appeared, dedicated to providing a space for creative photographers, such as: ei8ht; Photoworks and Next Level. The Jerwood Photography Awards and the CitiGroup Photography Prize have raised the profile of photography in the British press.
[edit] Further reading
- Martin Harrison (Ed.). Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965. Cape, 1998.
- John Benton-Harris & Gerry Badger (Eds.) Through the Looking Glass — Photographic Art in Britain, 1945–1989. Barbican, 1989
- David Brittain (Ed.) Creative Camera: thirty years of writing. Manchester University Press, 1998.
- British Photography: Towards a Bigger Picture. (Entire issue of Aperture magazine; Issue 113, 1988)
- Susan Kismaric (Ed.) British Photography from the Thatcher Years. MOMA, 1990.
