MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

Evening Star, Issue 22892, 25 February 1938, Page 11

MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

11 SMILE PLEASE" PERIOD HAS PASSED Eighty-two years ago Roger Fenton, the world’s first war photographer, stood in his cloth-covered portable dank-room near a Crimean battlefield, struggling against heat and fumes to develop the world’s first war photograph, says a writer in the London ‘ Observer.’ Two years earlier in 1858, the Royal Photographic Society had been founded. Fenton was its first secretary. The latest of his successors, Mr H. H. Blacklock, stood in the Russell-equare headquarters recently, turning over the heavy cardboard pages of Fenton’s great Crimean album. Great is the word for it, in size as well as achievement. Each photograph, yellowing a little, but remarkably clear still, was the size of the generous plate cut and sensitised by Fenton in the field—loJ by 14J inches each; no enlargements then. And no scramble either. Fenton, sent out by the War Office, returned to compile his album at leisure, dedicating it to Queen Victoria and inscribing its title page —“ Landscapes and Views Photographed in the Crimea during the Spring and Summer of 1855.” But from his shiny surfaces rises the very shimmer of the Crimean seaboard, the arid heat of its shallow valleys. Horse lines, neat, white tent rows—they look as if a peaceful Coronation camp had been pitched in Kensington Gardens after a severe drought. Cavalrymen in pillbox hats, men of the Light and the Heavy brigades, artillery men of the mortar battery stretched out for a nap between rounds, cannon balls littering the stony dip of “ The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” orderly, settled general’s quarters with nothing to fear from bomb or mine or any other fardropping projectile. Mr Blacklock closed the album. “ There’s the beginning for you, he said. “Now think of photography to-day. I wonder if there’s any part of life it doesn’t touch—clothes, food, water supplies, boobs, _ newspapers, industries heavy _ and light, medica services, mapmaking, education, astronomy, archaeology, zoology—every kind of research. i “ Photography tests the purity of water and’ food, helps to make aeroplane parts and castings safer, discovers planets for the astronomer, saves the archaeologist’s time and patience. Another branch of it—tomography—may soon help ,to bring about a great advance in the surgical treatment of tuberculosis. You can probably think of dozens of other uses.”

No wonder the Royal Photographic Society wants to expand. After twentyeight years in Russell-square desire has become compulsion. London University needs the site. The society proposes to move to Kensington. There it will have double the space to house its museum, its permament collection of photographs, its library of 7,000 books, to give more room to its thirty exhibitions every year, to provide lecture halls and a cinema theatre.

With one eye on the past and most of bis mind on the future, Mr Blacklock went on explaining what the _ Royal Photographic Society means. It is difficult not to look back and forward at the same time in his surroundings. On the one hand is a treasure house of the photographic past from pre-Daguerre exposures to Victorian poses; on the other are the very latest cinematic inventions. “ This,” said Mr Blacklock, “ is reallv the home of photography. Not only is tho Royal Photographic Society the oldest of its kind, but no other country has anything comparable with it. Distinguished photographers in every part of the world are always glad to have the society’s fellowship. “ Our library is believed to be the most complete single collection of books on photography in the world—seven thousand of them. Even Chinese students have been delighted to find bonks in their own language here. “ Our proudest possession? I should the engraved plate of Niepce’s

photograph of the Cardinal d’Amboise, the first photograph Niepce made when he was experimenting in 1826, a photograph of an engraving of the cardinal. That was' before Niepce met Daguerre and worked jointly with him. “Then here are some of the photographic portraits made by Julia Margaret Cameron, the first woman photographer. We have about three hundred of them.” • > '' Again Mr Blacklock turned the pages —Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Watts, Jowett, Darwin, Carlyle, all_ the great Victorians. Miss Cameron seized them all, made their characters bristle from every print, line by line, wrinkle by wrinkle. There was little pose about those monumental profiles, dignified full-faces. Never a toothy flash, and hardly ever, a smile. Self-conciousness had hot yet cursed photographer. The “ smile please ” period had not yet arrived. Now the “ smile please ” period has passed. Over five million amateur photographers in Great Britain alone inherit, every time they click a shutter, the skill and energy of Herschel, Fox Talbot, Scott Archer, Sir Joseph Swan, Miss Cameron, and other British pioneers. And the Royal Photographic Society, an infant when Roger Fenton sweltered in his Crimean tent, finds itself the respected but strenuously worked servant of every branch of education and scientific research.