Discuss the Art Photography of the British Linked Ring Brotherhood

Discuss the Art Photography of the British Linked Ring Brotherhood

The term ‘Art Photography’ was not really recognised during the early days of Victorian photography when the camera was employed and regarded as a medium for purely recording and ‘for looking at’ objects and considered a scientific device. ‘Art Photography’ was the name that was given to the work produced by the very few photographers who found themselves interested in producing photographs in the late 1880’s that had other qualities in mind than just recording information like P.H.Emmerson who took pictures that conveyed mood and feelings. The development of photography as art took significant strides forward with the idea of pictorial photography which emerged around 1896 when the Victorian writer and photograopher Henry Peach Robinson identified the camera as a tool for expression and creativity. More simply he argued strongly that it could be an artistic medium, combined with the dark room, equal to the hand and the brush. His work reflected his ideas about pictorialism which were based on the idea that a photographer could produce a picture that reflected the expression of an individual and an artist and in doing this they leave a particular signiture or mark of the artist that the content or style would suggest. He achieved much of his pictorial work through combination printing, a dark room method of developing several seperate images and combining them into one image that appeared to be a single photo, a creative process that is the forefather of today’s universally recognisable computer features “cut and paste”. One of his most effective and striking photographs and an excellent example of Robinson’s skilled method of combination printing is ‘Fading Away’ where the image is so smooth and so perfectly put together, in particular the shadowy figure at the window, that you can’t imagine it being made up of five prints.

The picture also conveys a very real sense of death and with the knowledge that this is a combination print it comes across as though Robinson has assembled his characters and has arranged them in this tableaux to express his idea of death. There were many like minded individuals living in London and some abroad at this time and it was becoming a growing trend within photogrophy to form a society (an early model for the Ring was the “sette of odd volumes”) with others who shared the same views.