Episode 1 Britain in Focus: A Photographic History

I'm Eamonn McCabe, and I started as a photographer snapping events

like this - an evening of boxing in London's East End.

I made my name when my photographs began to appear

in the Observer newspaper, capturing the sheer drama of sport.

The heroism.

Sadly, also, the tragedy.

I continued working in newspapers,

becoming picture editor of the Guardian,

developing an eye for the one great image that captures the whole story,

and became aware of how the camera, all-seeing and all-knowing,

can freeze in time our lives

and the historic moments that have shaped them.

It's an amazing photograph.

We're right in the middle of the action.

So, when offered, I jumped at the chance to tell the remarkable history

of British photography, to travel from the surprise of the very first picture taking...

Can you make me look 20 years younger?

I'll have a go.

..to the mysteries of today's digital age...

Tell an old Luddite like me, what is Instagram?

..to find out about photographers past and present,

and the unforgettable pictures they took.

Understand the science that made their art possible,

and the changing ways we have consumed the photograph

over the 182 years since its invention.

In this first of three programmes, I'm going back to the beginning,

back to the 19th century and the rapid rise of the photograph

in British life.

Back to the first sense of wonder and what the Victorians called

the natural magic of photography.

It's very, very quick.

It is Victorian Polaroid.

Victorian Polaroid. Great phrase.

In the summer of 1835, landed gentleman and polymath

Henry Fox Talbot was seen purposefully walking

in and around his country house here at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.

He was carrying with him a small wooden box,

trying to decide where to place the object.

What was Fox Talbot up to with his curious behaviour?

Well, he was inventing British photography.

And this is the mysterious device.

It's actually a replica of Talbot's first camera,

fitted with a lens from one of his own microscopes,

and with this he was to attempt to take Britain's

first ever photographs.

With one image, taken in front of this window in the Abbey's South Gallery,

Fox Talbot lay the foundations for British photography.

Inside, curator at Lacock, Roger Watson, explained to me how.

There was a fireplace across from the window.

He set the camera on the mantelpiece.

He set them around the house - that's why his wife

referred to them as mousetraps, cos she kept seeing

these little boxes all over the house.

And what was inside this tiny box?

It was very simple.

It was a piece of writing paper that had been coated first with

a salt solution and then coated with silver nitrate,

and the two mixed together to create silver chloride which is sensitive

to light and that's all you need.

Can you show me exactly what came out of this tiny camera?

It's a little disappointing when you first see it because it's so tiny.

I've got it in my pocket here.

This is a reproduction of the world's first negative.

-So small.

-Absolutely.

This little ghost of an image here is a negative that you could make

positive prints from.

And it was the cornerstone - really, up until the digital age,

we still made negatives from which we made positive images.

The detail is astounding.

People like to go in and look at this with a magnifying glass.

And you can actually count the number of panes in the window

that we're standing in front of.

And how long... Once he coated it,

how long would he have had to take the picture?

For a long time we thought it was about 15 minutes,

but we've experimented here and it looks like it was closer

-to two hours probably.

-Incredible.

The sensitivity of the paper was really slow.

It just took a long time for the light to act on it.

For a number of years Fox Talbot had nurtured an ambition to permanently

capture images,

motivated by his shortcomings as an amateur artist.

He frankly admitted his sketches were melancholy to behold.

Fox Talbot could see the beauty in nature,

but was frustrated by his own failure to replicate what he saw

with his own eyes.

He speculated...

"How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these

"natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed

"upon the paper."

The 19th century was the era of the gentleman scientist like Fox Talbot.

He was part of a network of enthusiasts,

aware of the latest developments in chemistry and optics,

so could turn to these to find a solution to his artistic dilemma.

But, shy and retiring by nature,

Fox Talbot was slow in coming forward about his experiments.

Until, at the beginning of 1839,

there came unsettling news of competition from across the Channel

in France.

There was a man named Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre

in Paris who was experimenting with the idea of photography

at the same time. And on the 7th of January 1839,

it was published in the Paris press that he had created a photographic

process and that the images were little miracles in and of themselves.

Talbot meanwhile had not really made an image since 1836 and he was

probably sitting down to breakfast sometime about January 12th

when he read the newspaper that the news had come through.

Fox Talbot was now forced to go public.

Barely three weeks after the announcement in Paris,

a paper by him was read to the Royal Society.

"Some accounts of the arts of photogenic drawing or the process

"of which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves

"without the aid of the artist's pencil,

"a method which I had devised some time previously."

In the grounds at Lacock, photographer Richard Cynan Jones

showed me what practical steps Fox Talbot then took

to improve on his process.

Here, Richard has taken an image of the Abbey

using a replica of the bigger camera that Fox Talbot had ordered,

equipped with better lenses.

No f-stops on the lens.

Thanks for reminding me. There we go.

-F/44.

-So that drops the exposure time down, does it?

-It does, it stops the light coming through.

-Yeah.

Makes it much sharper as well.

The larger format camera also allowed for a much larger

final image than Talbot's first photographs.

So what is this now, essentially? This is a negative?

It's a piece of ordinary paper,

treated with light-sensitive chemicals.

It's sandwiched between two sheets of glass to keep it moist.

-Yeah.

-Basically a light-sealed cassette with a kind of slide

at the front there exposes the plates at the inside of the camera.

So you've focused up already, you've done your aperture.

Lens cap's on. Aperture's in.

You've got a good idea of exposure time.

Yeah, 20 minutes.

Because of improvements to the chemical coating of the negative,

exposure time shortened from hours to minutes.

Here, Richard exposed the photographic plate for 20 minutes

and here's the result.

And I think what Richard has produced is truly magical.

In 1841 Fox Talbot patented the whole process,

calling it the calotype,

Ancient Greek for "beautiful picture".

In the courtyard he took photographs that showed a grasp of composition

and framing. For example, the ladder.

And this homage to Dutch painting, the open door,

with its atmospheric use of light and shadow.

And now there was a word for capturing images with a camera,

first used by astronomer Sir John Herschel.

Herschel called it photography, Greek for "light drawing".

Beyond Lacock, others took up the calotype process.

In Scotland, painter David Octavius Hill and chemist Robert Adamson

used it to produce portraits rather than images of buildings and nature,

like these wonderful photographs of Newhaven fishermen,

who appear so confident in front of the camera.

But Fox Talbot's technique had its limitations.

It was unpredictable,

with the positive prints from his negatives often muddy or grainy.

One artist struggling to make a living

was disappointed by the calotype.

Butcher's son Frederick Scott Archer was a sculptor who wanted to make

a record of his work to help it sell.

In a former Manchester cotton mill, photographer John Brewer

demonstrated how Archer also used recent advances in chemistry

to develop his own photographic process.

Revealed in 1851, this was wet plate photography.

First of all, you need to cut the glass and then it has to be

immaculately clean.

Instead of flimsy paper,

Archer used the more solid medium of glass to make the negative plate.

-So you're coating this glass all over?

-That's right.

So it literally is a wet plate.

It is. And if it dries out you wouldn't be able to develop it.

So everything has to be done quite quickly from now on?

-It does.

-We can't mess about.

Archer introduced a newly discovered chemical solution being used

in medical dressings, collodion.

So what's it in now? What's this box it's just gone into?

That's silver nitrate. So the silver nitrate is mixing with some of

the chemicals in collodion to make it light-sensitive.

Because the plate is so light-sensitive, this first stage

of the process ends in the dark.

The next stage takes place on the studio floor where I have

my photograph taken.

The prepared wet plate is exposed to record an image of my ugly mug.

Just checking the focus onto the eyes.

How long do you have to take my picture?

Really, just a couple of minutes.

-Wow.

-So we need to work really fast.

So I'm going for an exposure here of 20 seconds.

So I'll shut up now and not move, right.

-No, you can breathe.

-I can breathe!

-And you can blink.

-Oh, right.

OK. So we use a...

..top hat as a shutter.

I love your shutter cover. It's brilliant.

OK. Three, two, one.

Wet plate photography greatly speeded up exposure times.

Within a decade we'd gone from 20 minutes needed by Richard at Lacock

to the 20 seconds it's taken John here.

Well, that was painless.

The last stage, back in the dark, is where the image finally appears.

We've taken a photograph.

We've beetled it back to the darkroom.

-What is that you're pouring on?

-That's developer.

-Right.

It's that moment of nervousness and anticipation I remember

from my own darkroom days,

that waiting for the photographic image magically to appear.

OK. Put the light on.

Wow, look at that.

So that's how fast it is. It is Victorian Polaroid.

Victorian Polaroid - great phrase.

Wow, look at the quality of that. That's superb.

Shame about the bloke in it, but it's a superb nick.

From this one negative, you could print as many positive copies

as you liked,

a mass production of images so appropriate for a Britain

experiencing Industrial Revolution.

But, sadly, no profit ever came to Frederick Scott Archer.

Unlike Fox Talbot,

this pioneer of British photography didn't have the money to take out

a patent on his own invention.

He died at the age of 43, penniless.

Yet Archer had refined the scientific basis on which

the new medium could go out into the world and create art.

One of the first to realise photography's unprecedented fusion

of art and science came here during the summer of 1854

to Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire and the surrounding Wharfe Valley.

Roger Fenton was a founder-member of the Photographic Society,

dedicated to raising technical standards,

but also to making photography into a fine art.

Fenton was trained as a painter and wanted to prove that

the mechanical device of the camera could find new ways to reinterpret

established genres of art -

in this instance, that of landscape.

He took a photograph of the abbey ruins.

When this was exhibited, Victorians,

conscious of the turbulent times they were living through,

would read it as a vision of time past, haunting and romantic,

yet also comforting.

Then, from the shore of the Wharfe, downriver from the abbey,

Fenton took this.

Contemporaries understood the quality of his vision.

"He seems to be to photography what Turner was to painting,"

wrote one critic.

The Illustrated London News praised his soft and mellow tone

and richness of atmospheric colour.

It's all the more impressive when you consider that Fenton

and his assistant had to take not only a heavy camera,

tripod and glass plates,

but also processing materials, along the river.

The drawback with wet plate photography was that Fenton

had no choice but to develop his negatives on the spot

using a portable darkroom.

Any delay with the wet plate drying spelt disaster.

So it was a real challenge to take a photograph here,

on the slippery rocks where the river narrows into a torrent

of roaring water.

Yet he made a masterpiece,

evoking the sublime and the sheer force of nature.

On the very spot this was taken,

I talked to photo historian Colin Harding.

Now, I was always told never to shoot into bright light.

When he did so up here, do you think he knew what he was doing?

I think he did. The idea was that you used light behind you

but Fenton was prepared to push the boundaries.

And if he pointed his lens towards the light,

he would create this dramatic atmospheric effect where the sky

seems to merge into the water creating this...

Almost a slice between the two banks,

reinforcing the sense of the narrow gorge.

So you get this wonderful effect of the movement of the water,

captured over the long exposure,

framed by the figures of the fishermen,

immobile on the banks of the river.

Does this photograph, taken here,

bring something new to what people would have expected?

The tradition of the figure in landscape, the romantic paintings,

German romanticism of the 19th century, he knew all of that.

But what he was able to do was to use photography,

to use the framing of composition

to create something which is different,

taking the old traditions but extending them to create new effects.

So, taking the effects that Turner created with paint,

but using light to create those effects.

So, not abandoning tradition,

but incorporating tradition

and building on it to create something new,

a particular photographic aesthetic.

I can now understand how a photograph like this

from the Wharfe Valley is a poetic, almost timeless vision.

But the camera could also capture the here and now - the news,

those truly momentous events making Britain the most powerful nation

in the world.

At Napier Yard in the Isle of Dogs in London's Docklands,

photographer Robert Howlett did exactly this.

Howlett had helped set up a business to make money out of picture taking,

with premises on Bond Street.

In 1857 he was hired to photograph the most ambitious project so far

from the greatest engineer of the time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Brunel wanted his creation of the Great Eastern steamship

to be recorded, celebrated and immortalised, not by any old media,

but by the power of photography.

Howlett photographed this site many times to chronicle the building

of what was claimed to be the largest movable object ever to sail

on the high seas.

And he rose to the challenge of conveying the massive scale

of his subjects.

This photograph's showing a ship 692 feet long

and weighing 18,000 tonnes.

With six masts and five steam engines generating 8,000 units

of mechanical horsepower, this was being built to carry

up to 4,000 passengers across the oceans of the world.

I think Howlett showed great skill in his choice of angles to capture

the grandeur of the ship.

But he showed great courage, too.

To get this bird's eye view of the ship,

Howlett had to haul his camera and his tripod high up

onto the wooden scaffolding - quite a feat.

Each stage of the construction was eagerly reported on by the press.

With newspapers growing and a circulation war underway,

the photograph was in demand.

Now it would be seen by greater numbers than ever before.

Howlett's work was bought by the Illustrated Times and included

in a special edition.

Each photograph had to be copied by an engraver who made a wood block

version of the image.

Until later printing techniques,

this was the only way a photograph could appear in a newspaper.

Howlett's role was not only one of an observer but also reporter,

especially when Brunel's great project started to go wrong.

He was present to record the ship's difficult,

drawn-out, sideways launch into the Thames.

At the first attempt on the 3rd of November 1857,

the monstrous structure was renamed Leviathan.

But it moved barely three feet.

There was a second, then a third failure to float.

During this troubled period,

Brunel's portrait was taken by Howlett in front of the ship's

launching chains.

This has become the iconic image of Victorian power and glory.

But for Howlett's biographer, Rose Teanby,

there is much more to learn about it.

If you understand the context,

does it help you understand the photograph?

Absolutely. It's a man struggling against the odds,

vilified by the general public,

and under enormous stress...

..but defiant in the face of that stress.

There's a certain swagger in the picture, isn't there,

with the cigar and the jauntiness of it?

I don't agree.

-No?

-No. He always smoked a cigar.

He smoked 40 cigars a day.

He always wore a stovepipe hat.

So all this was, was a portrait of the real Brunel.

It was the Brunel that you would see on site every day.

The trousers show a dockyard worker...

..and that didn't bother him at all, he was not a vain man.

And Howlett caught all of it.

Why is this photograph so different?

Well, quite simply, it's an absolutely fantastic example of...

..breaking the rules,

having your conventional, classical portrait

reinterpreted by photography.

Your country gentleman in his grand estate...

It's a muddy shipyard in Millwall,

and his thoroughbred horse is now a wall of chain and his giant ship.

It was revolutionary in its own way,

mirroring how revolutionary the ship was.

In the end, Brunel got fourth time lucky with the launch

of his great sea monster.

The Leviathan made its maiden voyage on the 30th of August 1859.

But, by this time, Brunel was dead and so was Howlett,

another photographic trailblazer at 27, dying young.

The Great Eastern photographs taken together are a record of Britain

as a mighty industrial nation.

But photography could also be a witness to Britain

as an imperial power, especially when it went to war.

In the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle

there are original prints of photographs Roger Fenton

took in 1855 of the conflict between Britain and Russia in the Crimea.

Head of photographs Sophie Gordon shows me the first images

ever commissioned of a war zone.

This photograph shows Roger Fenton's mobile photographic van.

The man sitting on the van is Fenton's assistant Marcus Sparling,

and it's essentially a mobile darkroom.

He also needed a way of telling the other soldiers,

the other people out there, who he was and what he was doing,

because this was a really unusual sight at this time.

No-one was used to seeing a photographer taking photographs

on a battlefield.

This portrait of Fenton is revealing of a man who wrote in letters home

how dust and heat spoiled many photographs,

about the flies and the awful commotion.

How he was often bad with the cholera.

How, under fire,

he was covered in brains and blood from a poor fellow standing nearby.

So it is remarkable that out of 700 glass plates Fenton took

to the Crimea, over half came out.

Many of these, penetrating portraits of soldiers of all ranks.

I think if you look closely at Fenton's portraits you get a sense

that he is trying to depict some of the horrors that the soldiers

have seen on the battlefield.

And some of them are almost psychological portraits.

You get a sense of the horrors that the men have witnessed.

They almost seem to be affected by shellshock.

In this particular photograph of De Lacy Evans,

who was one of the leading commanders in the Crimea,

you really see a very haggard expression.

He is looking directly at the camera,

and I find it quite a moving portrait of someone

who has experienced battle.

Fenton is creating this new genre.

There had never been a photographer photographing war before this

to such a degree.

He's not taking images of the battle unfolding,

but he's taking photographs that interpret and that present

and that comment on war, and that is essentially war photography.

This photograph is of the main British cemetery on Cathcart Hill.

Sophie encourages me to see it through Victorian eyes.

In the middle ground we have a group of officers who are looking down

towards Sevastopol, and it's that

interesting juxtaposition between active,

on-duty soldiers, who are then standing next to

the graveyard where the bodies of their dead comrades are now buried.

That is so striking in this particular image.

It's a very moving portrait, I think, when you think about

that juxtaposition.

This is the most celebrated photograph that Fenton took

during the Crimean War - the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Yet there is no fighting here, no dead bodies,

just a landscape with cannonballs.

This is an extraordinary, almost iconic now, image of war,

and it shows such a stillness and silence on the battlefield.

We can see a ravine that runs between the British lines

and Russian fortifications, and there are cannonballs

scattered along the path.

Now, there is some controversy over this image because there is in fact

a second image, almost identical,

apart from the fact that there are no cannonballs in it.

And it's often discussed as whether Fenton manipulated his images.

And obviously he either put the cannonballs there

or he removed them.

But I don't think that really matters.

But that is the one question every photographer wants to know, isn't it? Did he move them?

Well, you have to remember that in the 1850s, all photographs

would have been staged. Everything was deliberate,

was carefully prepared, carefully stage-managed,

even the portraits were very thoughtful and well prepared.

And Fenton is creating a work of art.

He's not there to necessarily portray a realistic,

objective view of what's happening, he's trying to do more than that.

And when you consider the poetic title as well, which comes from the

Psalms, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it's more than just a record

of the battlefield, it's a comment on war.

In 1860, Roger Fenton returned to Yorkshire.

His brother-in-law was the estate manager at Harewood House,

and Fenton was asked to record its recent extension and modernisation.

I wonder if, coming back from the chaos of war,

Roger Fenton found it restful to work in a genre of photography

where the Victorian desire for the natural order of things

might be satisfied...

..that of architecture.

However, barely two years after his visit to Harewood,

Fenton gave up photography.

It was announced in October 1862 that all his camera equipment

and large format negatives were for sale.

Over 11 years, taking nearly 2,000 photographs,

Fenton had wanted to elevate his medium of expression to the point

where it could be accepted as an artform.

But this life's work was coming under threat because, by the 1860s,

photography was not so much concerned with art,

but with commerce.

Evidence for a boom in commercial photography could be found

on every high street, like here in Lewes, East Sussex,

where Edward Reeves opened for business in 1855.

For Reeves and others,

the wet plate process had made photography

a sound economic proposition.

And as prices dropped, for the very first time in history,

people of even a modest income could afford to own

a portrait of themselves.

To cope with the demand,

Edward built a glass studio at the back of his shop.

His great-great-grandson Tom still works here.

With Tom, I found out what it was like to be photographed

Victorian-style.

Of course, I was suitably dressed for the occasion.

Pleased to meet you, sir. Would you care to sit for your portrait?

I will, sir.

-Why the clamp?

-Well, in the very early days of photography,

exposure times were probably between half a minute

and a couple of minutes, which means that in order to get a sharp image

you would have to sit very, very still for that time.

Is that why many men in the photographs look grumpy?

Absolutely.

I mean apart from cultural considerations,

you can't keep a muscular smile going for that sort of time.

-You should be able to feel the...

-I can.

-..clamp in the neck.

It feels comfortable.

It shouldn't be too bad.

It's a well-to-do Victorian drawing room.

The biggest aspidistra in the world.

I mean, all the props are also there to aid stability,

so you can rest your arm on the table

which gives you a little bit more of a brace for the long exposures.

Was this a nervous time for sitters?

Oh, I think it was.

Fear of the unknown, I suppose.

I mean, the process,

the collodion process was based on pretty nasty chemicals,

and there would probably be a smell of fairly powerful solvents.

It was alcohol and ether and guncotton, all these things.

Some sitters probably didn't really know what was going on,

they didn't know if the camera was giving out...

..rays of some sort.

Some almost aboriginal fear, you might imagine.

But it was all very much the unknown, it was an enormous novelty.

And am I worried about my soul as I sit here?

You might well have been. I think most Victorians were, yes.

Despite this nervousness,

the celebrated letter writer Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote to a friend...

Blessed be the inventor of photography.

It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity

in my time or is like to.

This art, by which even the poor can possess of themselves

tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones.

Did people want to look really good?

Say you make the negative and I'm upset about my broken nose,

can you do something about that?

Absolutely. You're using a glass plate of about so big on this camera

which means that you can actually physically retouch it with a pencil

or a paintbrush. You can fill in those bags under the eyes,

the little wrinkles, mend a broken nose or fill in...

Everything was possible. This sort of commission photography

was commissioned to flatter.

No use taking a picture that looked wonderfully realistic but nobody

was going to buy. So, yes, it was all about making people look good.

Can you make me look 20 years younger?

I'll have a go.

The image is focused on a ground glass screen at the back,

-so I go under the...

-So you're going under there to focus on me?

That's right, that's right.

Under the dark cloth, I can then see you upside down

on the ground glass screen.

Yeah, very nice.

Trouble is, that camera doesn't actually work.

This one does, so can I take your picture?

It seems a sacrilege to do it on digital, but let's do it.

Excellent. And...

Photography was being assimilated into daily life

at astonishing speed.

Lady Eastlake observed that a photograph could be found...

In the most sumptuous saloon and the dingiest attic.

And it had one most regal fan.

There was perhaps no more sumptuous saloon in the land

than Osborne House,

Queen Victoria's summer residence on the Isle of Wight.

From the very beginning of her reign she was an enthusiastic collector

of photographs that filled the rooms of her royal palaces.

The Queen was not only fascinated by looking at photographs,

she became the most-photographed woman of the century.

When facing the camera,

the Queen showed both a public and a private face.

In May 1857,

society photographer Leonida Caldesi was summoned to Osborne House

and took this group portrait of Victoria, her husband Prince Albert,

and nine children.

A photograph like this was either framed or gathered together

in a family album, on view only to the Queen and family

in her private quarters.

But Victoria also understood that photography had a vital role

in projecting her public image,

and that a single photograph could have real power.

With Sophie Gordon again,

it is fascinating to see in the Royal Collection

the kind of photographs the Queen agreed to be released,

allowing the Victoria brand to be sold nationwide.

In 1860 something fairly momentous in photographic terms occurred.

For the first time the Queen gave permission for a photograph

of herself to be released to the public.

The photographs were issued in the format known as cartes de visite,

collected here by the Queen in this album.

The carte de visite was a very small photograph,

about the size of a modern business card,

and it's almost always a portrait of someone.

And in the late 1850s the taking of these and the collecting of these

by people became a craze.

People bought them in their hundreds.

Of themselves, of their families, but also of celebrities.

So she became part of this cartomania,

this craze for collecting cartes de visite.

The Queen herself also collected cartes de visite,

and she would have her ladies-in-waiting write to the wives

of well-known men of the time,

asking them to send her their portrait so she could put them

into her photograph album.

The 1860 cartes de visite were taken by Regent Street photographer

John Mayall.

Mayall's photographs of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

are quite surprising really because they show a young married couple

that doesn't necessarily suggest

that this is a portrait of the Queen and the Prince Consort.

There's no regalia,

no crown or anything to indicate that this is the monarch.

Instead they are dressed in upper-middle-class costume,

and I think that is a very considered and careful presentation

of the monarch. It's a way of trying to engage with her population,

with the people. And perhaps a way of saying, "We're just like you.

"Almost just like you."

However, it wasn't long before photography had another function

for the Queen. In December 1861, Prince Albert died of typhoid fever.

Now, this is the mourning image by William Bambridge.

Can we talk about the detail of this photograph?

Yes, it shows Queen Victoria

surrounded by some of her children with a bust of Prince Albert

who had died a few months ago.

And she's holding on her lap another image of Prince Albert.

And it's a photograph that was subsequently released to the public.

Now, many people felt,

critics at the time felt that this was an extraordinary step to take.

Mourning was a private act,

and that the Queen chose to make this image publicly accessible

was almost a shocking thing. It was an unseemly display of emotion.

But the Queen, I think,

is trying to show people the depth of her anguish

and her sorrow following the death of her husband.

Later in her reign,

the impression to be conveyed by her portraits was different again.

Sophie shows me this by Alexander Bassano,

released to mark her Golden Jubilee in 1887.

It's a photograph that is designed to show a powerful queen.

It's a very statuesque image.

The Queen is wearing an elaborate costume with jewellery

and with some insignia as well.

And of course there is the very small crown which Queen Victoria

is particularly known for.

And so the image, we look at it and we immediately know

that this is the Queen and the Empress.

In the last two decades of Queen Victoria's reign,

photographs became increasingly more staid, more formal,

so carefully composed,

and often the negatives, as well, would have been touched up,

the skin would have been smoothed,

the curves would have been accentuated.

It's a way for the Queen to exert more control, really.

Control - I think that's the right word for Victorian portraits,

from the Queen downwards.

Each an expression of stiff formality in front of the camera.

Each a display of good manners and respectability.

But one photographer questioned all this,

bringing a bohemian spirit to British photography.

This was Julia Margaret Cameron,

who in 1860 arrived with her husband and family to live in Freshwater Bay

on the Isle of Wight.

They bought two cottages from a local sailor

and knocked them into one, naming it Dimbola Lodge

after the coffee plantations they owned in Ceylon.

Cameron turned a chicken coop into a studio,

a coalshed into a darkroom,

and got down to create an extraordinary body of work.

Julia Margaret was connected with people of influence,

including the first director of what was to become

the Victoria and Albert Museum, which would buy and show her work.

In the V&A library, I met curator Marta Weiss

who began our conversation by showing me an original print

of the first photograph that Cameron felt really confident about.

Why do you think Cameron called this her first real success?

So this is her photograph of a little girl called Annie.

She was the daughter of a family who were staying in the Isle of Wight

where Julia Margaret Cameron lived,

and Cameron made this photograph in January 1864.

She'd been given her first camera at Christmas 1863,

so this is taken within a month of her receiving her first camera

as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law.

And there's something I find so incredibly modern

about this photograph.

I think when you look at it, this little girl who was photographed

in 1864 could have been photographed in 1934 or in 2004.

There's something really timeless about it, and it's also indicative

of what a sensitive photographer of children Cameron was.

There's no particular background.

The only strong detail in it is this button.

It's one of the things that's in sharpest focus in the photograph.

Now, who am I to criticise Cameron?

But this picture's out of focus.

Now, if I was to hand that in at the weekend for the Observer Magazine,

I'd never get it published.

What did people think of it at the time?

Cameron's use of focus was controversial in her own time.

She claims that she came to the technique accidentally,

but then proceeded to use it on purpose.

She said that, "When other photographers take photographs,

"they screw the lens on until the image looks sharp,

"and I just focus it until it looks beautiful."

That was her goal - she used the word beauty a lot.

And Cameron was very consciously trying to make photographs

that were works of art.

Marta then talked to me about the portrait of a man

who connected her to the birth of photography

and who first introduced her to the medium, Sir John Herschel.

Again, the photograph is quite close,

so we see her really pioneering the close-up here.

Rather than there being any sign of his contemporary clothing,

she's chosen to drape him in velvet.

He has a dark cap on his head and he's got a dark background,

and so with his fluffy kind of halo of hair he seems to just be emerging

out of the darkness. And this very dramatic use of light and dark

is typical of Cameron's style.

There's something else at play here.

Do you think she's searching for a psychological depth in her sitters?

Absolutely. She also said that when she photographed people such as

Herschel she actually felt that the process for her was a kind of

embodiment of prayer.

So she herself is, in a way, worshipping these men, in general,

that she saw as geniuses.

And her...

..photographic interaction with them was something very personal,

something very intimate.

And she really was making an effort to show the internal

as well as the external.

Cameron usually took photographs of those she knew,

but in this photograph she uses an artist's model, a Mrs Keene,

to play a character, Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty,

after the poem by John Milton.

What's really remarkable about this photograph is the way the sitter

is confronting us.

And Herschel himself was a great admirer of this photograph,

and he said to Cameron that it seemed as if the figure

was thrusting out of the paper towards us.

It's very haunting. I'm very haunted by it.

-You can't ignore it.

-No.

-You have a reaction to it.

And then you try and work out what's going on.

-Yes.

-As you say,

is it a piece of theatre or is it a portrait or is it Mrs Keene?

By the 1860s there had emerged a photo establishment,

holding strong views on proper ways of working.

So they hated what Cameron was doing.

Her work was absolutely attacked by critics.

They accused Cameron of slovenly manipulation,

not only of her deliberate use of soft focus.

There are all sorts of streaks and smudges and bits of dust and so on

that are apparent in Cameron's photographs.

Today I think we can appreciate those

as traces of the artist's hand.

But to her photographic contemporaries these were just signs

of incompetence and carelessness.

And I also think that there was a sexist element

to the critical attacks on her.

How dare a woman come along and try and make a name for herself

in photography?

Undeterred by the attacks,

Julia Margaret Cameron continued to take photographs.

Then, 11 years after the first success of Annie,

she and her husband left their Isle of Wight home to go back

to the family estate in Ceylon.

With them on the voyage went her photographic equipment,

but also two coffins, in readiness for their deaths.

She died in 1879.

But photography was not only involved with the serious-minded

ideas of artistic beauty -

further technical improvement allowed the sheer fun of life

to be pictured, too.

In 1892, amateur photographer Paul Martin came here

to Great Yarmouth.

He was by trade a wood engraver,

creating illustrations for newspapers and magazines,

often, as we have seen, from photographic images.

But on lunch breaks near his London workplace and on holidays,

Martin always had a camera with him,

and he was greatly helped by the arrival of dry plate photography.

As a photographer, I love this old language.

"Snapshot plates, the best possible plates for rapid hand camerawork

"and all extremely quick exposures."

And this great line, "To be opened only in dull, ruby light."

And here we have them - these are called dry plates.

These made photographers' lives so much easier.

You bought them ready-made.

You took your picture, then you took them home

and processed at your leisure.

No more dragging around the portable darkroom and those horrible,

smelly chemicals.

Dry plates also led to the use of portable cameras like this.

This dry plate photography led to even quicker exposures

of a second or less.

You now needed a mechanical aid to control light entering the camera,

so the shutter was introduced.

And quicker exposures also meant you no longer needed a tripod,

and as a consequence cameras became smaller and hand-held.

With this new technology,

Paul Martin was able to take a new kind of photograph - the snapshot.

Before, photography was a self-conscious exercise,

everything rigorously staged and composed.

Now, a photographer like Martin was liberated

to be so much more spontaneous and instinctive in his picture taking.

But this in turn demanded that snappers learn the discipline

of waiting for the right shot.

It appears that Paul Martin had just the right temperament and the

patience to wait for what the great French photographer Cartier-Bresson

called "the decisive moment".

Look again at Martin's photographs and you can appreciate this.

But, as the Victorian age came to a close,

photography witnessed not only what was being gained,

but also what was being lost.

Only miles inland from the Norfolk coast,

a photographer set about recording a way of life he feared

was under threat.

And in doing, so he would create some of the most beautiful

photographic images yet seen.

His name was Peter Henry Emerson,

heir to a fortune made from sugar plantations in Cuba

and a trained physician.

Emerson loved to sail his traditional wherry boat

on the rivers and inlets of the Norfolk broads,

and this gave him an intimate knowledge of the land and the people

who worked the water and the marshes.

In 1886 Emerson collaborated with the artist TF Goodall

to produce a book,

Life And Landscape On The Norfolk Broads.

In its pages are lovely, painterly, impressionistic photographs.

Many of these are portrayals of men and women in variety of traditional

working practices,

described in their titles like this one - Ricking the Reed.

Poling the Marsh Hay.

And Gunner Working up to Fowl.

To find out about the man and his work,

I took a boat trip in the company of his great-grandson Stephen Hyde,

himself a professional photographer.

Moored up, I asked Stephen about a couple of photographs that offer up

deeper meanings on closer inspection.

Tell us about this photograph.

At first sight this photograph is just a classic Emerson beautiful

photograph and it's entitled The Old Order and the New.

And at first you might wonder why it's called that,

because to our eyes it seems like all the old order.

And if you look carefully, right to the left-hand side

of the photograph, you see an old derelict windmill.

Now these mills were used for draining the marshes

to make the land... to reclaim the land,

make it more sort of profitable.

And next to it is the new modern version of the same thing,

which is a steam-driven mill,

and that's with the smoke coming out.

And to Emerson this was a key sort of symbol of how life was changing.

And how it was threatened?

Absolutely. And he knew that this way of life was disappearing and the

steam mill here is just one symbol of the new world,

what he knew was going to sort of take over from now on.

One seemingly idyllic image, Gathering Water-Lilies,

we now know as another portrait of working life,

thanks to the research of writer John Taylor.

There's a story behind this photograph, isn't there?

Absolutely. The lady's not just leaning over to pick a lovely flower

which she happened to see - they would harvest the water lilies

and use them as a bait and a lure for catching tench.

They'd put them in bow nets, big, round bow nets,

and they would then lower the bow nets into the water

and the tench would see the water lilies and be attracted to them

and swim into the nets.

We know that the lady picking up the water lily is his good friend

and collaborator TF Goodall, the artist, his fiancee,

and the man in the boat is her father.

And so they planned this meticulously.

So I think this is one of his more successful works,

where he's managed to make a photograph rather than

take a photograph but do it in such a way that it actually looks

totally genuine and just like somebody's swivelled round,

seen the scene and gone "click", where it's not that at all.

As well as being a skilled practitioner,

Emerson had strong views on photography, how it should be done,

and what it was for.

He had intellectual discussions the whole time.

He wrote a thick book.

And one of his great thoughts was that focus should not be sharp

all the way through. And he called this naturalistic photography.

There were people around at the time who said,

"Look how good my camera is, I can get every leaf perfectly sharp."

Well, for him, that was the antithesis of what you should do.

You should see... The camera,

the photograph should see what the human eye sees.

So as I look at you, the trees over their go slightly fuzzy...

-Your eye is travelling through the photograph?

-Absolutely.

Whatever his theorising, and it was often contradictory,

what remains for me are Emerson's photographs.

Each one a stunning historical record that confirms that,

by the century's end, the camera had become the pre-eminent way

to memorialise the national story.

To end this episode, I've gone from Norfolk back to Wiltshire

and Lacock Abbey where I began.

On reflection, and what impresses me most,

is how far photography had travelled in the 60 years since that first

experiment by Fox Talbot, here by this window.

And I'm left inspired, but also humbled,

because the early pioneers of my trade did so much

during such poignantly short working lives.

From this, in 1835, to this in 1886, it's a remarkable achievement.

Has any other art practice matured so quickly and with such confidence?

Yet this was just the beginning as a new century beckoned.

Next on Britain in Focus...

The photograph makes newspapers and magazines mediums for seeing

as well as reading.

Photographers try to find a way of recording the horror

of 20th-century genocide.

The artistry of Alvin Langdon Coburn...

..and the glittering world of Cecil Beaton.