Outdoor Photography


When Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the earliest surviving photograph in 1826, the materials he used were so insensitive it took 8 hours of sunlight for the image to be fixed on the pewter plate he had prepared. Niepce's heliograph ('sun drawing') was a view of his courtyard, taken from a top floor window. In 1839, when photography was first introduced to the world, camera exposure times ranged from five to fifteen minutes and so the only suitable subjects were buildings, landscapes and arrangements of still life. The majority of the pictures made by L.J.M.Daguerre himself are of buildings and views in Paris.

Artists and amateurs may have been content to use the new invention to produce a pleasing landscape or record an interesting building, but astute businessmen knew that financial reward and commercial success would lie in portrait photography. Every effort had been made to reduce camera exposure times so that the daguerreotype process could be used to make portraits. By the early 1840s technical advances in photography meant that a sitter would only have to hold a pose for a number of seconds rather than a number of minutes. When Richard Beard, the patentee of the daguerreotype process in England and Wales, sold licences authorising the setting up of 'Photographic Institutions' in provincial towns, the purchasers were mainly interested in using the invention to "take likenesses."

Outdoor Photography in Brighton Before 1854

The journalist who in November 1841 welcomed the opening of William Constable's 'Photographic Institution' on Marine Parade in the pages of the Brighton Guardian, recognised that the main purpose of photography was to secure "a correct likeness without the tedium of sitting for hours to an artist."

William Constable made his living from taking "likenesses", charging his customers one guinea for "a portrait in a plain morocco case", but it is known that he occasionally took his camera on to the streets of Brighton. In the 1840s, Constable took views of fashionable houses in Kemp Town, and two daguerreotypes of houses in Lewes Crescent ended up in the photograph collection of Richard Dykes Alexander.

In the early 1850s, local artists Edward Fox junior and George Ruff senior were taking photographs of buildings in Brighton. Ruff made a daguerreotype of St Nicholas Church around 1850 and Edward Fox, who declared in later advertisements that he had "given his whole attention to Out-Door Photography since 1851", produced pictures of shop fronts, churches and other public buildings in Brighton and the surrounding area. In 1853, Robert Farmer, proprietor of the 'Daguerreotype Rooms' in North Street, Brighton was exhibiting his calotype views of the Royal Pavilion and the Railway Terminus and daguerreotype views of Brighton's oldest church.


The West Battery, Kings Road (c1850)



Outdoor Photography in Brighton 1855-1862

With the advent of the collodion process, more and more photographers in Brighton were taking their cameras out on the street to record life in the town.


Old buildings and structures scheduled for demolition were a favourite subject for photographers, who were anxious to record them for posterity. For example, a battery of eight guns was established in Brighton's West Cliff in the 1790s to protect the town from French attacks by sea. In 1857, it was decided to remove the West Battery so that Brighton's main thoroughfare, the King's Road, could be widened. Work commenced in January 1858 and from this date a series of photographs recorded the progress of the dismantling of the battery and the breaking up of the artillery ground.



In 1862, a row of old houses and shops that ran from 41 to 43 North Street, was scheduled for demolition. A set of oval shaped photographs recorded the shop fronts and the rear ends of the buildings that were to be demolished. It is not clear exactly why these photographs were commissioned, but they allow us to glimpse not only a vanished parade of Victorian shops, but also a few bystanders, some of whom would not have been able to afford the services of a photographer. Another gorup of workers whose wages probably would not stretch to pay for a sitting at the professional portrait studio, are captured on a photograph showing the entrance ot the premises of Palmer and Company, Engineers and Iron Founders.


Workers employed by Palmer & Co.Engineers stand
outside the company's premises in North Road. (c1865)



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Website last updated: 23 December, 2002

 

This website is dedicated to the memory of Arthur T. Gill (1915-1987), Sussex Photohistorian

 




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