Picturing England

Photographers have taken pictures of England's buildings and landscapes since the invention of the medium. They have made images of the traces of past societies as well as photographing the new buildings around them. They have done so for many reasons: to capture the picturesque; to make a living or create a souvenir; to promote or to condemn; to record what is disappearing or to reveal what is normally hidden. Collectively, these photographers, both famous and anonymous, have changed the way we see and understand the world around us.

The invention of photography marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the way we record and understand the world around us. From it grew an expansion and democratisation of image-making and consumption. The story of the first 20 years of the medium is one of remarkable technological, artistic and commercial development, so that by 1860 the foundations of its future ubiquity had been laid. The picturesque remains of historic buildings were prominent subjects for early photographers, although new architecture, the construction of new feats of engineering and industrial sites were also recorded. 

Photography became a popular phenomenon between the 1860s and the First World War. Commercial photographers enjoyed a steady source of income from portrait photography, but many branched out into topographical and landscape photography, particularly to serve growing numbers of tourists. One such photographer was James Valentine, an enterprising Scottish artist and portrait photographer, who expanded into the production of topographical views in the 1860s. By the 1880s his firm was advertising over 20,000 views of Great Britain and other countries.

The development of photography as a commercial medium was matched by its growth as a popular hobby. Those who could afford the time and money to pursue photography could now demonstrate their wealth and social standing by taking pictures of family members outside their country houses and around their estates in a manner that echoed the portraiture of earlier times. Technological advances made photography accessible to a much wider spectrum of society. By 1905, a tenth of the British population was using a camera. The new amateur photographers tended to record much the same subjects as their wealthier predecessors: home, family and leisure time continued to dominate.

The evolution of specialist architectural photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is associated with ideas of progress, modernisation and industrialisation. It coincided with extensive urban growth and redevelopment. Photography displayed grand new buildings and redeveloped older buildings as evidence of prestige. It demonstrated the confidence of growing businesses, the development of new building types, and the wealth and aesthetic tastes of the nouveau riche.  As camera technology progressed the style of architectural photography moved too, with the influence of avant-garde art theories and the arrival of Modernist architecture stimulating new ways of recording buildings and interior spaces.

Great Britain was slow to create a state-sponsored programme to protect and record the historic environment. Concerned individuals and groups helped to fill the gap. The pressure they brought to bear encouraged the gradual evolution of nationwide programmes to record and care for historic monuments, and to build up the remarkable collections which now serve to document the nation's past. An early group was the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. It was formed in 1875 to record historic buildings threatened by development, and made copies of its photographs available to subscribers.

The first aerial photograph was taken from a balloon over Pairs in 1858, and the first in England in 1863. The First World War advanced photography and flight, and after the war commercial aerial photography and aerial photography as a tool in archaeological discovery and investigation emerged and blossomed. The wealth of aerial photography enables us to record buildings, sites and features from all periods across many areas, opening up new ways of looking at the relationships of features across landscapes and across time. The illustrative power of the aerial photograph has permanently shaped out understanding of both our present and our past.

While a single photograph may be valuable for any number of reasons, a series of images illustrating the same site or place at different dates can reveal additional meanings and provide new insights into the development of landscapes and the built environment. The value of an archive that brings together all this photography is beyond doubt. The following two photographs show how the Church of St Andrew Undershaft in the City of London once dominated its surroundings, and how this dominance has been diminished by its near neighbour, 30 St Mary Axe, formerly the Swiss Re Building and popularly known as The Gherkin.