Early photography

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 14

Early photography

Pre-Raphaelite Photography. At the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, until August 13. Reviewed by J. N. Mane.

Truth to nature was one of the central aesthetic doctrines of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood founded in London in 1848. The sharp focus, hard-edge realism and minute literalness of their early paintings were clearly influenced by that new-fangled mechanical invention, the camera, which could record images with an unprecedented degree of fidelity to visual fact. Likewise, photographers, turning to painting to validate their endeavours, discovered a more natural affinity with Pre-Raphaelitism than with any other Victorian High Art tendency, as the large and handsome exhibition, PreRaphaelite Photography, clearly demonstrates. Colour was not, of course, available to these photographers, nor (thankfully) were their images as densely layered

with symbolism as early Pre-Raphaelite painting. But many other aspects of later Pre-Raphaelitism are apparent in their photographs: medievalist, especially Arthurian, subject matter and themes; poses adapted from Italian Renaissance art; wistful expressions; reverence for the poetry of nature in general and geology and botany in particular; and melancholic, introspective moods. Indeed, the pervading atmosphere of PreRaphaelite Photography is rather dour, and the solemnity and preciosity of some images will strike today’s viewers as ludicrous, if not downright repellent. Nevertheless, the exhibition is significant on a number of counts. .

First, a real connection is established between painting and photography, as the juxtaposition of photographic plates with reproductions of paintings and drawings reveals. In fact, reduction of the latter' intensifies the images p such a degree that they

are distinguished from the "real” photographs only with difficulty. Second, the photographs are notable as social and period documents. Some portray major PreRaphaelite painters such as Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti (taken by Lewis Carroll) and Arthur Hughes; their mentor and champion, Ruskin; and members of their circle. Rossetti’s camera studies of Jane Morris are of particular interest as a resource for his paintings and drawings. Above all, such major contributors to Victorian photography as Julia Margaret Cameron, Francis Frith, Roger Fenton, Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson are represented by typical, and sometimes brilliant examples of their work. And their achievements serve to remind us, as we commemorate the one hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of photography as a marketable process, how rapidly the art had advanced within a vefy few years.