Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

When I started taking landscape photographs, everything I read lead me to believe that it had all started with Ansel Adams. Nothing had explicitly stated this but nobody else got talked about much. The I ‘discovered’ Gustav Le Grey and started to realise that there was a history of landscape photography going a long way back. At the same time I also happened upon a book talking about the history of American photography, discussing photographer such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson. However, the story still seemed a little lopsided.. Where were the UK landscape photographers? I know the American’s had the ‘wilderness’ to discover and most of the photographs were taken as part of surveys with some few ‘postcard’ photographs to show how wild the frontier was but there must have been UK photographers drawn by the countryside.

The name that immediately cropped up was Roger Fenton, he of the cannonballs. However he doesn’t seem to be what we would currently call a landscape photographer and I only found a few examples of photographs of the British landscape. Francis Bedford’s pictures of Wales fitted the bill better, here are a selection of stereo views. However it was a photographer called George Washington Wilson who made me sit up and take notice. He was a photographer by profession, training in London during photography’s infancy, and returned to Glasgow to make quite a success photographing the landed gentry. Fortunately for us, he would also take many trips into the Scottish highlands and islands to bring us back the first steps in real landscape photography.

Interestingly Washington demonstrates some aspects of landscape composition that I have recently been talking about. He returns to the same locations again and again, tries different compositions of the same location, developers repeated themes around waterfalls, coastal rocks, overhanging trees, ramshackle cottages etc.. He has also taken some classic ‘iconic’ locations, the most surprising of which is the Storr, with a composition not disimilar to Mr Cornish’s .. (Shown alongside this blog post).

I’ll try to pick a few more of Mr Washington’s photographs, and those of other photographers from the origins of British photography, over the next few months. If anybody has any suggestions for pre 1920’s photographers who took photographs of the British landscape, please let me know..

I’ve pulled together a few different landscape photographs from Mr Wilson and made a little gallery here. Extra bonus points for spotting some more locations..

And finally – I hereby nominate Mr George Washington Wilson to be the official forefather of British Landscape Photography (until I find someone else that is)..

UPDATE: I also spotted this interesting comparison of the Bowder stone in Borrowdale.. Wierd to see two pictures where the second has a new forest in it where there was nothing before..