Photographer's class

A place to talk about photography, the meaning of life and anything that doesn't quite fit elsewhere
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Charles Twist
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Photographer's class

Post by Charles Twist » Fri Aug 05, 2011 7:49 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

I have been asked to photograph the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge for its centenary and offered to do so with period glass. The client is also suggesting that period dress wouldn't be out of place. That got me thinking about where photographers came in society. I imagine the professionals would have a fair bit of entrepreneurial spirit in a middle class, ambitious kind of way. But I can also imagine some better-off folk being gentlemen-photographers. I struggle to believe that working class folk could have afforded the gear, especially if we are talking tripod mounted LF, either to set up professionally or as a hobbyist. But who were the portrait photographers at fairs?
I would also have thought there would be differences between the field and studio photographer, either because of purpose or practicality. I am not at this stage talking about the inventor type, but the type who is wanting to make a living from his pictures.
1911 was a period of change with more and more mass-produced goods and better wages, so I am guessing there would have been greater access to the technology. And the developments in new recording media would have made it easier to take good pictures with less training. (Sounds a bit like today?) I can't work out if the photographers would have been more like teachers or more like craftsmen in their background. Or something else; or even the bewildering variety you get today.
It's funny how there are plenty of histories of photographY, but histories of photographERS are much harder to find. Any ideas or recommendations?
Regards,
Charles

Ed Moss
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Ed Moss » Fri Aug 05, 2011 8:00 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

If you email me I can pass it on to one of my friends who researches photo history, maybe she can help.
I guess we rated a lot higher than today, I got accused (again) of killed Diana a few weeks ago, seem to remember I was in bed when it happened :?

Neil Barnes
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Neil Barnes » Fri Aug 05, 2011 8:48 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Charles,

I did a little research before posting this: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2689

I'd venture to suggest that at the time, you were either a professional photographer, and/or you were a gentleman of independent means. You certainly weren't a working stiff... the magazines of the time suggest that many professionals in other fields - lawyers, doctors, engineers - were keen amateurs but very few of the lower middle classes.

Neil

acs
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by acs » Fri Aug 05, 2011 9:42 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

A little later than the time you're after (30s) but this might give you some idea of the status of some: http://www.mersey-gateway.org/chambreha ... File.26926

In the 50s he seemed to be making a lot of money as a portrait photographer, though his interests were much broader.
_______
Andrew

Lynne Evans
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Lynne Evans » Sat Aug 06, 2011 4:02 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Hello Charles - an interesting task, but don't think it was only 'gentlemen' photographers. I picked up this on the BBC website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/norfolk/7657741.stm about a Norfolk photographer who was given a camera as a gift from her sister and they have recently found a collection of her work. I was actually looking for an item I'm sure was on Look North a while back, about a woman in the late 19th/early 20th century who was sent by her parents to work in a local photographer's shop. She went on to take over the business and become a locally renowned photographer herself. I can't remember the details of the story, but I think she was a Bradford girl?

Good luck!

Neil Barnes
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Neil Barnes » Sat Aug 06, 2011 5:17 pm Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Hmmm, I'm reminded also of the book 'A Richer Dust: Echoes from an Edwardian Album' by Colin Gordon, or if you can find it the BBC Look North film 'Atkinson Huby' which relates the author's researches to find the details of the Atkinson family of Huby, based on his discovery of a box of plates in Wakefield Market.

I read the book in the mid-eighties when I was working for BBC Leeds and suggested it as a program idea; I was gently pointed to the archives and told to watch the film they'd made ten years earlier!

Neil

Fourtoes
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Fourtoes » Sun Aug 07, 2011 11:51 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Hi Charles,

I have a book called " Amateurs, Photography and the Mid Victorian Imagination" that may be of use to you, or may be a little too early.
I'll take it to the studio on Monday and you can pick it up from there.
Not sure if John got back to you or not but I'll be there most of the day just call my mobile when your around.

Tony

Charles Twist
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Charles Twist » Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:27 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

@Ed: Thanks a lot for your offer of help. It'll be interesting to see what comes back. I am desperate enough to welcome information from a Diana-murderer and alleged child-molester :wink: . Tsk, photographers :roll: .
@Neil: I half-remembered that thread but couldn't quite trace it; so thanks for the link.
@Lynne: ah yes the other half of the picture. I stand corrected although this was in the good ol' days before women could vote. Just needling :) . You're right and please accept I wasn't excluding anyone.
@Tony: thanks for the books. The general feeling is that photography has always been open to all sorts of people provided they could afford it. Some professionals muddled along and some made a lot of money, others found fame for their art and amateurs happily just took holiday snaps, even back in Victorian days. I don't feel there's been much change - there must be a thesis out there somewhere, riding the mantra of classless socialism. Just a matter of finding it.
Thanks all,
Charles

Neil Barnes
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Neil Barnes » Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:53 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Re Women photographers: Julia Margeret Cameron?

Ed Moss
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Ed Moss » Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:57 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Hi charles,

M friend is a bit clueless as well, looks like very little was actually documented.

Neil Barnes
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Re: Photographer's class

Post by Neil Barnes » Fri Aug 12, 2011 8:36 am Etc/GMT-1+01:00

Charles Twist wrote: there must be a thesis out there somewhere, riding the mantra of classless socialism. Just a matter of finding it.
Thanks all,
Charles
Rather annoyingly, I just finished a Master's dissertation and now the course has ended I have lost my access to the university libraries, so I can't download anything without paying for it. Google Scholar 'edwardian photography class' doesn't produce a lot that looks helpful...
Nicole Hudgins wrote:A Historical Approach to Family Photography: Class and Individuality in Manchester and Lille, 1850–1914
Journal of Social History, Volume 43, Number 3, Spring 2010, pp. 559-586 (Article)
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.0.0298

HTML Version | PDF Version (881k)

Subject Headings:

* Photography of families -- History.
* City and town life -- England -- Manchester -- History -- Sources.
* City and town life -- France -- Lille -- History -- Sources.
* Manchester (England) -- Social life and customs -- Sources.
* Lille (France) -- Social life and customs -- Sources.

Abstract:

The historian cannot afford to dismiss family photographs as mere symbols of bourgeois hegemony as critics and sociologists have done. Workers, moreover, frequently obtained their portraits, not to imitate their bourgeois “superiors,” but to show their pride in their own accomplishments and their children’s. Family collections of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century can open up a world of life, death, aspirations, and sorrows when we investigate the archive surrounding such images. Here the author investigates the stories behind family collections in two European industrial towns, in order to discover how ordinary men and women use photography to construct their own histories.
Richard Howells wrote:National Identities
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2002
Self Portrait: The Sense of Self in British Documentary Photography
Self Portrait: The Sense of Self in British Documentary Photography
Preview
Buy now

DOI:
10.1080/14608940220143808

pages 101-118
Available online: 18 Aug 2010
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This article investigates notions of 'Britishness' as articulated in British documentary photography from 1936 to 1989. It argues that documentary photography is richly revealing of not only its overt subject matter, but also, more interestingly, of the latent cultural attitudes encoded therein. Particular attention is paid to the work of Bill Brandt in comparison with British documentary photographers of the 1980s. This latter group provide both a contrasting and, it is contended, more dependable sense of 'Britishness' than their more celebrated predecessor.
Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry wrote: Exhibition the ‘Edwardians’. An Exhibition and a Critique: History on exhibition
http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/153.extract
Searching for 'Edwardian photographer' produces a little more:
Nicholas Hiley wrote:
The candid camera of the Edwardian tabloids

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qs ... 5001670980

In the current debate on press photography and the right of privacy one mistake has been made time and again. Because the debate revolves around recent examples of press intrusion into the lives of politicians and members of the Royal Family, it is assumed that the problem itself must also be new. Yet almost all of the present argument on the rights of public figures to control their public image, and to protect their private lives, can in fact be traced to the 1890s and 1900s, when photographs first began to appear in newspapers and magazines.

Most portrait photography before the 1880s took place in the studio, where the professional photographer used the traditions of portrait painting to record not only the outward appearance of his sitters, but also their wealth and social status. Sumptuous studios, static cameras, and long exposures ensured that the process involved lengthy negotiation between the photographer and his subject, and if a portrait was afterwards reproduced without the sitter's permission the photographer could find himself in court.

Read this entire Magazine Article and more with a FREE trial.
Hmmm. Doesn't look like there's a lot out there directly examining this...
Richard Rudisill, Peter E. Palmquist, Martha A. Sandweiss wrote:Photographers: a sourcebook for historical research - Google Books Result
books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=1887694188...Richard Rudisill, Peter E. Palmquist, Martha A. Sandweiss - 2000 - History - 154 pages
Victorian and Edwardian Professional Photographers in Glasgow (Bath, ... Scotland: [Dissertation presented at the Glasgow School of Art]), 1983. ...
I'm going to stay out on my limb and suggest that amateur photography in Victorian and Edwardian times was mostly male, mostly upper-middle professional class. Lower-middle and lower classes may have had photographs made of them, but I don't believe they had either the funds, the spare time, or, on the whole, the education, to use photography as an art form themselves.

Of course, once Mr Eastman brings out his 'you push the button and we do the rest' roll-film Box Brownies then things change - but the Houghton-Butcher Vest-Pocket Carbine folding camera was still not a cheap item.

Neil

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