Drawn by Light

A wet and chilly winter day in London, grey skies, grey streets and thousands of tourists squelching along under sodden umbrellas, determined to squeeze every ounce of experience from their holiday. In South Kensington, hundreds were waiting to enter the V&A and Natural History museums, shepherded into long lines, experiencing at first hand the very British experience of queuing in the rain.

Fortunately, the tourist tsunami had not yet reached the Science Museum where the Drawn by Light photography exhibition is temporarily housed.

Back in 1983 the National Media Museum, part of the Science Museum, was opened in Bradford, West Yorkshire - probably a wonderful place but about as far away from Brighton as the planet Saturn. Sadly, the National Photography Collection - including the world famous Royal Photographic Society's (RPS's) collection of 250,000 prints acquired in 2013 - is held by the National Media Museum, on Saturn - sorry, in Bradford.

But...in a rare act of generosity, the Science Museum in London is hosting an exhibition called 'Drawn by Light,' comprising 200 gems from the RPS's collection, open until the 1st of March 2015.

Why call it 'Drawn by Light'?

Well, photography was invented in the 1820s and the exhibition has three of the oldest 'photographs' in the world on display. They were made by exposing asphalt-coated pewter plates to light and letting the insoluble asphalt crystalize the lit image, the soluble asphalt being washed away, leaving an image of the item on the pewter that looks (to me) like a fine pen etching in silver. The process was called 'Heliography' (meaning 'drawn by light'). Check out the fine portrait, circa 1826 - almost 200 years ago - of Cardinal Amboise.

The next oldest photographs in the exhibition are from the 1840s. There is a fine c1840 salt print of a botanical specimen by (William Henry) Fox Talbot but I particularly liked the c1845 prints (by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson) of Newhaven (near Edinburgh) fishermen and fish wives, the men grizzled and worn, the women, well, equally grizzled and worn. They still fish commercially out of the Newhaven along the coast from Brighton, and European fishing policy contributes to the grey hair and lined faces of the current fishermen.

There is a fine portrait of Fox Talbot himself, taken by Antoine Claudet in 1844, a daguerreotype, the first photographic process to be announced to the general public and popular from the 1840s to the 1860s (when they invented albumen prints). Daguerreotypes involved a silver-coated copper plate that was made light-sensitive by exposing it to iodine vapour. After the photo was taken, the image was developed using mercury vapour and then fixed in hypo. For those of us growing up in the age of darkroom developing, there is a sense of continuity and fellowship - but give me a digital camera any day!

Other early pho prints that I recall include one of the hippopotamus at London Zoo, taken in 1852 and a wonderful portrait of Lady Eastlake taken by Hill and Adamson circa 1845.

Speaking of London Zoo, it had its own official photographer by the turn of the century. After the death of the zoo's ostrich in 1927, they did an autopsy and the photographer took a photograph of the ostrich's stomach contents - which included a glove, handkerchief, coins, staples, hooks and a four-inch nail. Wonder if it suffered much from indigestion?

What a joy it was to see the original prints from famous names such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Larry Burrows, Don McCullin, Ansel Adams and a host of others.

Here are five of my favourites (apologies for the lack of photographs, I suspect they are mostly covered by copyright, but you can look them up on the internet or buy the catalogue which has about 80 of the 200 prints for £20):

Roger Fenton's 1855 The Valley of the Shadow of Death, a scene from the Crimean war taken after a battle, no corpses but quite a few cannonballs. The sight may resonate with those of us who learned Tennyson's poem 'Charge of the Light Brigade' (but there is some controversy over whether the cannonballs were found in situ or added later to improve the photo!) By the time of the American Civil War, a few years later, battlefield photography was in vogue and that conflict is well illustrated.

Frederick Henry Evans' 1895 portrait of Aubrey Beardsley, eccentric and illustrator, leading member of the Aesthetic Movement and developer of Art Nouveau who died at the age of 25. The profile emphases Beardsley's fine aquiline nose and long tapering fingers  - every pore proclaims aesthete!

Yousuf Karsh's famous 1941 print of Winston Churchill, claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. Churchill is sullen, glowering, defiant, the perfect image of the man who stood up to Hitler and defeated him. The story is that Karsh requested Churchill to put away his cigar for the photo, Churchill refused  - so Karsh snatched it away from him - and the resulting picture is of a seething Churchill, bereft of his famous prop.

Ansel Adam's 1958 Aspen, Northern New Mexico. Probably the most famous American photographer ever, inventor of the Zone System, his black and white prints have an amazing clarity and depth.

Steve McCurry's 1984 Sharbat Gulu, Afghan Girl. This is an amazing photo that has rightly entered the public consciousness. Compared to the Mona Lisa, it was voted the 'most recognised photograph' in the history of the National Geographic magazine. Orphaned at the age of six during Russian bombing of Afghanistan, Sharbat walked with her grandmother and siblings across the mountains to a refugee camp in Pakistan where Steve McCurry came across her a few years later (and took the photograph on Kodachrome 64 using a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105mm f2.5 lens).

The most striking part of the photo is the green eyes; direct and intense, they seem to blaze with a light that transfixes. It is a cliché, but the eyes also follow you around the room like the Mona Lisa's do (and I've seen both!). 

If you can, catch this exhibition!