(Left) Workers on the Silent Highway; The Crawlers; Cast Iron Billy 1876-77, John Thomson. © British Library
Exhibition: Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs, The British Library, London, until March 7 2010
Points of View is peppered with insights to Victorian culture and presents the discovery and development of the photographic image in the 19th Century. The interactive exhibition reveals 250 fascinating images from the library's catalogue of 300,000 photographs.
The spectator is lead chronologically from the development of photography to its use as a medium of communication, documentation and an art form, closing with its commercialisation at the end of the 19th century.
(Right) An oak tree in winter 1842-3. © The British Library
Discovery
Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot first discovered the possibility of holding an image on paper in 1834.
Without the aid of a light secure box, Talbot covered paper with light sensitive chloride to form images he used as negatives. The display of Talbot's experimentations includes a light box allowing you to create your own light sensitive images. It shows just how tricky and frustrating the process was.
Exploring and Documenting
The 19th century was a time of great exploration in science and the world at large, and photography was widely used to document these changes.
(Left) Comte de Montizon, The Hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens Regent's Park (1855). © The British Library
Without doubt one of the gems of the exhibition is The Hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. The image, taken in 1852 by the exotically named Don Juan Carlos, Duke of Montizon, shows the first hippo to be seen in England.
The beast, named Obaysch, rests in the sun whilst an entourage of onlookers stare on in amazement. Records state that visitor numbers to the zoo doubled in the year of his arrival, but soon tailed off once people realised that he didn't do much.
Explorers at home and abroad also used the photograph to chart the architecture and archaeology of their surroundings, bringing the unknown wonders of the world into the Victorian sitting room.
(Right) Cast Iron Billy 1876-77, John Thomson. © The British Library
As one of the first successful travel photographers, Scotsman John Thompson, created illustrated volumes of his travels in South East Asia in the 1860s.
Thompson became the first person to photographically document the existence of the Cambodian ruins of Angkor Wat. The breathtaking images documenting his explorations are also on display in their original bound books.
The Portrait
A love hate relationship between celebrities and the press was prevalent even in the Victorian times.
Author, Charles Dickens, tells of his fear of being photographed in public, commenting: "My excited imagination saw the detestable lens pointed at me in the street…lurking for me in the lanes."
From the 1850s onward, papers featured images of the great and the good, including royalty, who charged for sittings and could control how their image was used.
Street Life
The work of John Thompson reappears in one of the most interesting displays of the exhibition. Thompson documented social upheaval in urban life, an issue which hadn't been approached by photographers until that point.
(Left) Trilithorns B and C from the south-west, Stonehenge (1867), Ordnance Survey photographer. © The British Library
Pictorialism
With the expansion of photography to encapsulate the familiar, Pictorialism was born. The movement hoped to use photography to capture the more genteel side of Victorian life, though its staged and quaint scenes were considered distant from reality.
The exhibition concludes with the commercialisation of photography. Heralding the introduction of the snapshot camera, Kodak opened their first store in London in 1885.
This move opened the art form to a wider audience, creating a more accessible image market and paving the way for the development of moving image and film.
(Right) Charles Dickens. © The British Library
Considering the 14 million photographs uploaded to Facebook each day alone, what will future generations make of how we are documenting our world?
The British Library will also host a range of talks thought the duration of the exhibition on Fox Talbot, the stereoscope and Charles Dickens to name a few. For more information visit their website.
