It was artistic frustration that led to the British invention of photography. In 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot was on his honeymoon in Lake Como when, unable to satisfactorily capture that liquid jewel (even with a drawing aid), he determined to make images fix permanently on paper. In August 1835, he produced the earliest-known camera negative. At the same time in France, Louis Daguerre was developing the daguerreotype, which in 1839 the French government gave to the world.
Artists swiftly began using photography for creative expression. However, it wasn’t until 1972 that the National Portrait Gallery became the first British institution to appoint a dedicated curator. Momentum has since accelerated: the V&A South Kensington completed its world-class Photography Centre in 2023 – it holds several early works by Fox Talbot – and the scale and quantity of institutional photography exhibitions has noticeably increased.
This season, Tate Modern is staging Light & Magic: The Birth of Art Photography (October 14–February 21; tate.org.uk), the first major show to explore the global extent of Pictorialism (the term coined in 1869 to denote photographers whose ambition went beyond documentation). Robert Demachy, a contemporary of the Impressionists, made photographs as soft as charcoal drawings, while Long Chin-san borrowed from traditional Chinese ink painting. Peter Henry Emerson imbued his studies of rural life with atmospheric authenticity, while Edward Steichen conceived painterly landscapes, as well as portraits of figures such as boxer Primo Carnera for the magazine Vanity Fair.
Magazines contributed significantly to the development of Pictorialism, producing the wherewithal for experimentation. The Tate exhibition also includes work by Adolph de Meyer, who in 1913 became Vogue’s first staff photographer (and shot for House & Garden). Dubbed the ‘Debussy of the camera’ by Cecil Beaton for his elevation of reality into fantasy, his talent links him across the decades to Tim Walker, whose theatrically surreal work has graced global editions of Vogue since 1995.
At the National Portrait Gallery, Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends (October 9–February 7; npg.org.uk) presents a series of fantastical portraits of queer activists, artists, performers and writers, among them Ben Whishaw and Lady Gaga. Its narrative element hints at the crossover that can occur between photographic portraiture and documentary.
That intersection is emphasised at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, where Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970–Now (until January 31; kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk) chronicles a lyrical practice underpinned by a desire to challenge racial inequality and improve LGBTQ+ rights in India and the west.
There’s more to see, from exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, W1 to the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol; plus, those visiting this month’s Frieze fairs will see photographs alongside artworks. For, in an age when we’re all image-makers (and Lake Como has more than two million tags on Instagram), the intentionality of art photography is increasingly precious.
