Some of John Thompson's Work

Photographer Research: John Thompson

John Thomson was born on 14 June 1837 in Edinburgh, Scotland to William Thomson, a successful tobacco spinner and retail trader, and Isabella Newlands.He was the eighth of nine children, although only he and his two brothers, William (b. 1835) and Thomas (b. 1844), survived to adulthood. John's early years were spent in the family home, first in Portland Place and by 1841 in a larger flat on Brighton Street in the Old Town of Edinburgh. After some degree of primary education in Edinburgh (most likely at the Bathgate academy), Thomson was apprenticed to an optician and scientific instrument maker (probably James Mackay Bryson) in 1851. Thomson finished his apprenticeship in 1857 or 1858 after having attended two years of evening classes at the Watt Institution and School of Arts (formerly the Edinburgh School of Arts) from 1856 to 1858. He attained the "Attestation of Proficiency" in Natural Philosophy in 1857 and in Junior Mathematics and Chemistry in 1858.
On 29 April 1862, Thomson set out for Singapore where his older brother William was a watchmaker and photographer. Arriving no later than 12 June, he and William began jointly operating a business making chronometers and optical and nautical instruments. With his studio in Singapore as his base of operations (excluding a period when Penang, an island some 360 miles from Singapore, served as his base), Thomson embarked on extensive travels throughout the mainland territories of Malaya and Sumatra, as well as a brief visit to Malacca. It was during this period that Thomson began to explore rural villages and city streets, taking a keen interest in recording people in their daily activities. From October to November of 1864, he traveled to Ceylon and India, photographing the destruction wrought by a recent cyclone.
In the following year, Thomson decided to sell his studio and move to Siam. Traveling aboard the steamer Chow Phya, he arrived in Bangkok on 28 September 1865, where he lived for six months, photographing the King of Siam and a ceremony with the King's eldest son. From Siam, Thomson departed on a dangerous trip overland on 27 January 1866 to Laos and Cambodia with student interpreter H. G. Kennedy of the British Embassy at Bangkok, during which time Kennedy saved Thomson's life when the latter contracted jungle fever. After photographing the King of Cambodia and visiting Saigon, Thomson returned to Siam; he left for England (with a brief visit to Singapore) in May or June.
While in Edinburgh, Thomson joined the Royal Ethnological Society of London (1866), was elected to the Royal Geographical Society (1866), gave lectures before the British Association, published his first book, The Antiquities of Cambodia, in early 1867, and met his future wife, Isabel Petrie, a devout Methodist.
In July 1867, Thomson again returned to Singapore, then traveled to Saigon (where he stayed for three months), and finally settled in Hong Kong in 1868; here he began his project of photographing the people of China. After a series of ventures with various magazines, Thomson set up his own makeshift studio in the Commercial Bank building in Hong Kong. Soon after, Isabel Petrie arrived, and on 19 November 1868, the two were married. In the following year, Thomson made an important photography trip to Canton with his wife, had his first child (William Petrie), published some of his photographs, and assumed responsibility for the debts of his brother William.
On 23 June 1870 Isabel Thomson, pregnant with her second son, left for England, picking up Thomson's brother William from Singapore en route.
In the course of that same year, Thomson traveled up the North Pearl River, published an illustrated book, and put his studio up for sale in preparation for extended travel in China. He traveled extensively in the Foochow region from late-1870 to early 1871: up the River Min by boat with the American Protestant missionary Reverend Justus Doolittle and then to Amoy and Swatow. Thomson traveled to Formosa with Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell. They first landed in Takao in early April 1871 and then departed for Taiwanfu, the capital, aboard a steamer. He and Dr. Maxwell then departed from Taiwanfu on 11 April to visit the plains aborigines villages on the west plain of Taiwan, where he shot a number of photographs.
After leaving Taiwan, Thomson returned to Hong Kong; visited Shanghai in August and Peking in September; traveled up the Yangtze River for three months, reaching Hupeh and Szechuan; revisited Ningpo and Snowy Valley in April; returned briefly to Hong Kong, and then left for England.
Thomson settled into Brixton, a suburb of London, living with his family, publishing the results of his travels and giving papers. While in London, he continued to photograph, collaborating from 1876 to 1877 with Adolphe Smith in producing the monthly Street Life in London (February 1877 - January 1878). Thomson and Isabel's last child was born in 1878. They had a total of three daughters and three sons.
Beyond an excursion to the new British colony of Cyprus in 1878 and occasional trips to France (in at least 1875 and 1889), Thomson remained in England for the rest of his days. He set up a portrait studio at 78 Buckingham Palace Road (in 1881, but later moved to 70A Grosvenor Street), and was appointed a photographer to the British Royal Family by Queen Victoria on 11 May 1881. Thomson initially worked alone at the portrait studio but was later joined in the enterprise by two sons and a daughter. In January 1886, Thomson began instructing explorers at the Royal Geographical Society after convincing the Society that the camera was a critical tool in documenting their journeys "in a trustworthy manner." After retiring from his commercial studio in 1910, John and Isabel spent most of their time in Edinburgh until he died of a heart attack on 7 October 1921 at the age of 84.

Some of Jacob Riis' Work

Photographer Research: Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis, the third of fifteen children, was born in Ribe, Denmark, on 3rd May, 1849. He worked as a carpenter in Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States in 1870. Unable to find work, he was often forced to spend the night in police station lodging houses.
Riis did a variety of menial jobs before finding work with a news bureau in New York City in 1873. The following year he was recruited by the South Brooklyn News. In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Aware of what it was like to live in poverty, Riis was determined to use this opportunity to employ his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate".
In 1888 Riis was employed as a photo-journalist by the New York Evening Sun. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder, which enabled him to photograph interiors and exteriors of the slums at night. He also became associated with what later became known as muckraking journalism.
In December, 1889, an account of city life, illustrated by photographs, appeared in
Scribner's Magazine. This created a great deal of interest and the following year, a full-length version, How The Other Half Lives, was published. The book was seen by Theodore Roosevelt, the New York Police Commissioner, and he had the city police lodging houses that were featured in the book closed down.

Lewis Hine

These are some of Lewis Hine's photographs of child labour in America.

Photographer Research: Lewis Hine

Lewis Wickes Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on 26th September, 1874. He studied sociology in Chicago and New York (1900-07) before finding work at the Ethical Culture School. Hine, who had purchased his first camera in 1903, employed his photographs in his teaching and established what became known as documentary photography.
Hine also used his camera to capture the poverty he witnessed in New York. This included a photographic study of Ellis Island immigrants. In 1908 Hine published charities and the commons, a collection of photographs of tenements and sweatshops. Hine hoped he could use these photographs to help bring about social reform. He told one meeting that he believed his photographs would encourage people to "exert the force to right wrongs".
As a school teacher, Hine was especially critical of the country's child labour laws. Although some states had enacted legislation designed to protect young workers, there were no national laws dealing with this problem. In 1908 the National Child Labour Comiitee employed Hine as their staff investigator and photographer. This resulted in two books on the subject, Child Labour in the Carolinas (1909) and Day Laborers Before Their Time (1909).
Hine travelled the country taking pictures of children working in factories. In one 12 month period he covered over 12,000 miles. Unlike the photographers who worked for Thomas Barnardo, Hine made no attempt to exaggerate the poverty of these young people. Hine's critics claimed that his pictures were not "shocking enough". However, Hine argued that people were more likely to join the campaign against child labour if they felt the photographs accurately captured the reality of the situation.
Factory owners often refused Hine permission to take photographs and accused him of muckraking. To gain access Hine sometimes hid his camera and posed as a fire inspector. Hine worked for the National Child Labour Committee for eight years. Hine told one audience: "Perhaps you are weary of child labour pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labour pictures will be records of the past."

Sunnyhurst Cottages

Morton, amongst other artists, was fascinated by Sunnyhurst woods. Amongst his research was an oil painting of the original cottages that were built in Sunnyhurst woods. unfortunately they were demolished in 1911 to make way for the kiosk.

The Morton Book

Book will capture lost work of Lancashire artist James Hargreaves Morton

 

 

A self-portrait of Morton

A BOOK on the life and times of Darwen artist James Hargreaves Morton will be launched in April.
The Friends of Darwen Library have spent months tracing his lost works, more than 400 of which were auctioned off 40 years ago.
Morton, who trained in Darwen and then at the Royal College of Art in London, lost his life in the Great War just five days before the Armistice in 1918.
He died in a field just north of the town of Pont-sur-Sambre, France, aged 37.
He left behind more than 400 oils, watercolours, pastels and drawings. His wish was for his work to be kept together but following the death of his last sister Alice, in 1967, her executors found her small house crammed with Morton's work.
Her heir, James Morton, a textile worker and half-cousin of the artist, decided there were too many pictures for him to look after and some went on display in galleries. The whole lot was eventually auctioned, with no record surviving of who bought what.
But the Friends group has managed to trace about 150 of them after a six-month trawl in preparation for the book.
Paintings have been found all over the country, with water colours in York and Cambridge, pastels in the West Country, oils in the Ribble Valley, pen drawings in Manchester and etchings in Lancaster.
A number of paintings have been turned into prints and sold to finance the publication and buy books for the library.
The book will be launched at a coffee morning at the library in Knott Street on April 13 and copies will sell for £10. The book has been edited by Darwen journalist Harold Heys, who has written most of it.
He said: “It started off as a book on James Morton and his work but it has developed into a life-and-times book and will be probably double the size we originally envisaged.

“Many of the photographs are amazing and the book will bring Morton’s legacy to a new generation of Darwen folk.”
Friends group chief John East said: “From what I have seen of the early proofs, it will be bring back a lot of memories. It’s packed with nostalgia and, of course, will have a lot of wonderful pictures.”
Mr East also thanked the Lloyd Trust, the Co-op Community Fund and Herbert Parkinson Ltd for their help with funding the book.

Pole Lane Test shots

Amongst the research was a line drawing that Morton had done of the cottages on pole lane, Darwen. In the original drawing there are only a few cottages, now there is a new housing estate either side of the row of cottages... i think that these images would have benefitted from the use of a tinted filter. there is a slight lack of detail in the sky and hills in the background.

Dictionary Deffinition 2.0

pic·to·ri·al·ism

[pik-tawr-ee-uh-liz-uhm, -tohr-] 

noun

1.

Fine Arts. the creation or use of pictures or visual images, especially of recognizable or realistic representations.

2.

emphasis on purely photographic or scenic qualities for its own sake, sometimes with a static or lifeless effect: The movie's self-conscious pictorialism makes it little more than a travelogue.

Compare representationalism.

Origin:
1865–70; pictorial + -ism

Related forms

pic·to·ri·al·ist, noun

Dictionary Deffinition

impressionism

 

im·pres·sion·ism

[im-presh-uh-niz-uhm] Show IPA

noun

1.

Fine Arts.

a.

( usually initial capital letter  ) a style of painting developed in the last third of the 19th century, characterized chiefly by short brush strokes of bright colors in immediate juxtaposition to represent the effect of light on objects.

b.

a manner of painting in which the forms, colors, or tones of an object are lightly and rapidly indicated.

c.

a manner of sculpture in which volumes are partially modeled and surfaces roughened to reflect light unevenly.

2.

a theory and practice in literature that emphasizes immediate aspects of objects or actions without attention to details.

3.

a late-19th-century and early-20th-century style of musical composition in which lush harmonies, subtle rhythms, and unusual tonal colors are used to evoke moods and impressions.

Origin:
1880–85; impression + -ism; compare German Impressionismus, French impressionnisme

Collins

World English Dictionary

impressionism
— n
1.	( often capital ) a movement in French painting, developed in the 1870s chiefly by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley, having the aim of objectively recording experience by a system of fleeting impressions, esp of natural light effects
2.	the technique in art, literature, or music of conveying experience by capturing fleeting impressions of reality or of mood

Pictorialism

In the late 1800s, a group of photographers, who eventually became known as Pictorialists, sought to differentiate their artistic work from amateurs' snapshots. They altered their images by hand scratching the negatives and using brushes to soften and blur parts of the photographs during the printing process. The Pictorialist's main concern was not their subjects but, rather, to ensure photography was a viable art form.

By this time, the novelty of capturing images was beginning to fade, and many were now questioning whether the camera was in fact extremely accurate and detailed. This, in addition with the fact that painting enjoyed a much higher status than this new mechanical process, cause some photographers to look for new techniques that, as they saw it, could make photography more of an art form.
The term Pictorialism is used to describe photographs in which the actual scene shown, is of less importance than the artistic quality of the image. For Pictorialists the aesthetics and, the emotional impact of the image, was much more important than what was in front of the camera.
To accomplish their task, the Pictorialists used different techniques:

· Combination printing (from several negatives)

·The use of soft focus in the camera,

·The manipulation of the negative (scratching or painting over the negative)

 ·Gumbichromate, which greatly lessened the detail and produced a more artistic image.

Henry Peach Robinson was a pioneer of pictorialist photography, and one of the greatest photographers of his time. His most famous photograph is “Fading Away”, is a composition of five negatives, in which he shows a young girl dying of tuberculosis surrounded by her family. It was very controversial, because many felt that it was acceptable for the painters to approach this kind of tragic and intimate moments, but it was not appropriate for a photographer to do so.

Henry Peach Robinson
 “Fading Away” (1858)
 The introduction of the first amateur camera by Kodak, in 1888, changed photography forever; George Eastman made photography accessible to millions of people with no technical knowledge, or artistic background. Ten years later, more than 1.5 million roll-film cameras had reached the hands of the American public.

 A small group of photographers who believed that photography was not a scientific curiosity, but an art, adopted some labor-intensive processes like platinum printing, which involved hand-coating papers with homemade emulsions and pigments, and produced rich, and delicate images. The most prominent representative of these photographers in the US was Alfred Stieglitz, who spent his life fighting for the recognition of photography as a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture.

Stieglitz was not only a pioneer photographer, but also an editor and gallery owner. He and other photographers who shared his conviction founded a group called the Photo secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography.

  
The Terminal, 1892
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946)
Photogravure; 4 3/4 x 6 5/16 in. (12.1 x 16 cm)
Gift of J. B. Neumann, 1958 (58.577.11)

Impressionism Research

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists. Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant Impression Sunrise, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari.
Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature.


Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting. They constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugene Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They also painted realistic scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were usually painted in a studio^. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, and used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration.
Impressionism emerged in France at the same time that a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, were also exploring plein-air painting. The Impressionists, however, developed new techniques specific to the style. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it is an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.
The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style.
By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism is a precursor of various painting styles, including Neo-impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism, and cubism.

Morton Trees

I first heard about the cotton town impressionist, James Hargreaves Morton, when my Grandfather asked me to take pictures of a Painting he came across whilst doing some research.

Morton never signed or dated his paintings making this very difficult.