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This is the second article sent in by Mike Russell MSP...
Printed in the Herald 7th May 2005
By Michael Russell MSP
“William Carrick”
If there is one art form in which Scotland can rightly claim to have been – and still to be - up with the best it is photography. Although discovered in 1839 by Daguerre in France and Fox Talbot in England, Scotland quickly became one of photography’s power houses thanks to Sir David Brewster, the Principal of St Andrew’s University, who conducted painstaking experiments in order to perfect the chemical process.
In May 1842 Dr John Adamson took the first successful calotype in Scotland and when Talbot generously waived his patent, Adamson’s younger brother Robert set up a photographic business on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, a stone’s throw from the proposed new Scottish Photographic Museum. His subsequent partnership with the painter David Octavius Hill produced photography’s first great flowering in the world .
But there is also further proof of Scots influence. A number of countries view Scottish photographers as the founders of their tradition, including Russia. Indeed the Russian Deputy Minister for Culture, Pavel Khoroshilov, is presently finishing a book on the Scotsman William Carrick whom the Russian historian and collector Alexei Loginov has called “the pioneer of Russian photography“.
Mr Khorloshilov is, however, guarded about being quoted in foreign newspapers. Perhaps worried that admitting to a cultural hinterland may not be productive for a politician (Russia being therefore, much like Scotland) he declines to talk in public about his photographic hero until the book itself appears.
His reticence, however, should not be allowed to cloud either his skill in choosing such a good story to tell, or the claim to fame of his remarkable subject whose work is well represented in Scotland’s National Photographic Collection as well as in other significant collections throughout the world. Indeed Dr Sara Stevenson, the deeply knowledgeable NPC curator, has been asked to assist with the book and hopes to arrange an exhibition of Carrick’s work in Moscow and Edinburgh.
Carrick was born here in 1827 but before he was a year old his parents had moved to Krondstadt, the port city of St Petersburg, where his father prospered as a timber merchant. Educated there before studying architecture in the St Petersburg Academy he went to Italy in 1853 to pursue his interest in painting and drawing. Returning to Russia in 1857 he discovered that the family business had been virtually ruined by the Crimean War.
Later the same year he accompanied his sister and brother to Edinburgh where he studied under the photographic pioneer James Good Tunny and befriended a young photographer, John MacGregor. Carrick needed to find a way to earn money and he enlisted MacGregor in his plan to establish a photographic studio in St Petersburg .
That was a risky venture. Despite the high price of photographic raw materials, when the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth visited Russia in the summer of 1859 he was surprised to notice that, in every principal street of the capital “there was scarcely a more frequent sign to be met with than Photographer”.
A month after Smyth had made this observation, Carrick opened his atelier. Competition was so intense that six months after they started Carrick’s mother was still writing to her family advising them not to be shocked about how little was being earned. Yet it was that very lack of paying customers that led Carrick to bring into his studio the peddlers who filled the Nevsky Prospect, selling every conceivable type of merchandise or service. Icemen, woodmen, knife-grinders and many others sat or stood for these photographs which he produced as “cartes de visite” – small postcards – under the title “Russian Types” or sometimes “Rasnoshchiki”, which means “Hawkers”.
One of Carrick’s main problems was the absence in Russia of any sizable middle class – the key customer base for mid-nineteenth century photographers. Whilst that gave him time to pursue his studies of ordinary people, financial success required an aristocratic clientele. The breakthrough came in December 1862 when the heir apparent, the Grand Duke Nicholas, gave him a diamond ring as a token of his admiration for the “Rasnoschiki” series. This led to the court painter, the Hungarian Zichy, seeking out Carrick for photography as a means of accurately reproducing and disseminating art works was much in vogue.
Financial security allowed Carrick to develop his passion for photographing ordinary people as they were. He moved out into the streets and then into the countryside, visiting Simbirsk province in 1871 and again four years later, this time without McGregor who died in 1872. Their host on the first trip, the liberal landowner NM Sokovnin has left an appealing account of the pair “working tirelessly, from sunrise to sunset, building up a marvellous collection of great Russian types and views.”
Carrick’s huge presence – he was over six foot four, heavily bearded and handsome – was allied to a complete mastery of the Russian language, which he spoke better than English. His natural charm endeared him to everyone he met and especially the vast Russian underclass.
His empathy for the downtrodden was no doubt deepened by his sympathy for the aims of the Russian reformers, who were very much on the side of the poor. Not only had he been questioned by the secret police on his return in 1857 (he had smuggled into the country the first three issues of a political magazine, produced by the revolutionary Alexander Herzen in London) but in 1867 he contracted a secret marriage with the Nihilist writer Alexandra Markelova, by whom he had two children. His mother was horrified when she eventually found out for she regarded the revolutionary movement as “the most ungodly set of people who ever existed , for they neither fear God nor the laws of the times we live in”. None the less she was eventually reconciled to her daughter-in-law.
His personal feelings and his basic kindness illuminate the best of Carrick’s work. Whether it be in a portrait of a fishmonger, standing weary but erect with the most enormous basket on his head, or a picture of a young serf sowing seed, caught sharply against the rising sun and the ploughed steppe, Carrick celebrates the dignity of human labour without hiding either its harsh reality or the suffering caused by widespread poverty. He is a photographer of universal humanity, as well as of his adopted country.
Shortly before his death in 1878 he achieved critical acclaim for work exhibited in London, much of which featured the exotic landscapes that a British audience craved. Two years earlier he had been given the title of Photographer to the Russian Academy of Arts, a gesture which formally acknowledged the arrival of the art form in that country. After his death Russia warmed even more to his vision with celebrated Russian photographers like Dmitiriev openly acknowledging their debt to him. That admiration continued throughout the Soviet period and is growing even stronger today.
Now it is time that we at home realised how important he was in his chosen field, just as it is time that Scotland recognised how central our country still is to this most democratic of all art forms.
A number of other early Scottish émigré photographers made a strong impact in their new countries.
Robert Macpherson was an Edinburgh painter, journalist and art dealer who took up photography in 1851. Resident in Rome, where he had gone for his health in 1840, he established a commercial photographic business where he sold photographic prints. He later described himself as an “artist photographer” and wealthy tourists were amongst the customers for his architectural studies and romantic landscapes. He died in 1872.
Alexander Gardner from Paisley emigrated to America at the age of 35. He worked first as a portrait photographer and on the outbreak of the Civil War made a number of studies of soldiers in uniform. In 1863 he travelled widely through the war torn countryside. A number of his photographs from that time, including the famous President Lincoln on the Battlefield of Antietam have achieved almost iconic status. He later became the official photographer to the Union Pacific Railroad.
William Notman established himself in Montreal in 1856 and soon became the most important figure in Canadian photography, opening studios in Toronto, Ottawa, St John and Halifax as well as in Boston. In addition to portraiture he recorded landscapes, street scenes and city views and specialised in highly original composite pictures. On his death in 1891 his flourishing business was continued by his two sons.
George Valentine was the second son of James Valentine, who founded the family photographic and printing business in Dundee. Serious ill health forced him to emigrate to New Zeland in 1884 and the following year his pictures of Otukapuarangi and Te Tarata - the celebrated Pink and White Terraces - won immediate acclaim. Following the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886 - and the loss of the Terraces - Valentine returned to the devastated region to complete a series that was unmatched for its quality and drama. He died in New Zealand in 1890.
This is the second article sent in by Mike Russell MSP...
Printed in the Herald 7th May 2005
By Michael Russell MSP
“William Carrick”
If there is one art form in which Scotland can rightly claim to have been – and still to be - up with the best it is photography. Although discovered in 1839 by Daguerre in France and Fox Talbot in England, Scotland quickly became one of photography’s power houses thanks to Sir David Brewster, the Principal of St Andrew’s University, who conducted painstaking experiments in order to perfect the chemical process.
In May 1842 Dr John Adamson took the first successful calotype in Scotland and when Talbot generously waived his patent, Adamson’s younger brother Robert set up a photographic business on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, a stone’s throw from the proposed new Scottish Photographic Museum. His subsequent partnership with the painter David Octavius Hill produced photography’s first great flowering in the world .
But there is also further proof of Scots influence. A number of countries view Scottish photographers as the founders of their tradition, including Russia. Indeed the Russian Deputy Minister for Culture, Pavel Khoroshilov, is presently finishing a book on the Scotsman William Carrick whom the Russian historian and collector Alexei Loginov has called “the pioneer of Russian photography“.
Mr Khorloshilov is, however, guarded about being quoted in foreign newspapers. Perhaps worried that admitting to a cultural hinterland may not be productive for a politician (Russia being therefore, much like Scotland) he declines to talk in public about his photographic hero until the book itself appears.
His reticence, however, should not be allowed to cloud either his skill in choosing such a good story to tell, or the claim to fame of his remarkable subject whose work is well represented in Scotland’s National Photographic Collection as well as in other significant collections throughout the world. Indeed Dr Sara Stevenson, the deeply knowledgeable NPC curator, has been asked to assist with the book and hopes to arrange an exhibition of Carrick’s work in Moscow and Edinburgh.
Carrick was born here in 1827 but before he was a year old his parents had moved to Krondstadt, the port city of St Petersburg, where his father prospered as a timber merchant. Educated there before studying architecture in the St Petersburg Academy he went to Italy in 1853 to pursue his interest in painting and drawing. Returning to Russia in 1857 he discovered that the family business had been virtually ruined by the Crimean War.
Later the same year he accompanied his sister and brother to Edinburgh where he studied under the photographic pioneer James Good Tunny and befriended a young photographer, John MacGregor. Carrick needed to find a way to earn money and he enlisted MacGregor in his plan to establish a photographic studio in St Petersburg .
That was a risky venture. Despite the high price of photographic raw materials, when the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth visited Russia in the summer of 1859 he was surprised to notice that, in every principal street of the capital “there was scarcely a more frequent sign to be met with than Photographer”.
A month after Smyth had made this observation, Carrick opened his atelier. Competition was so intense that six months after they started Carrick’s mother was still writing to her family advising them not to be shocked about how little was being earned. Yet it was that very lack of paying customers that led Carrick to bring into his studio the peddlers who filled the Nevsky Prospect, selling every conceivable type of merchandise or service. Icemen, woodmen, knife-grinders and many others sat or stood for these photographs which he produced as “cartes de visite” – small postcards – under the title “Russian Types” or sometimes “Rasnoshchiki”, which means “Hawkers”.
One of Carrick’s main problems was the absence in Russia of any sizable middle class – the key customer base for mid-nineteenth century photographers. Whilst that gave him time to pursue his studies of ordinary people, financial success required an aristocratic clientele. The breakthrough came in December 1862 when the heir apparent, the Grand Duke Nicholas, gave him a diamond ring as a token of his admiration for the “Rasnoschiki” series. This led to the court painter, the Hungarian Zichy, seeking out Carrick for photography as a means of accurately reproducing and disseminating art works was much in vogue.
Financial security allowed Carrick to develop his passion for photographing ordinary people as they were. He moved out into the streets and then into the countryside, visiting Simbirsk province in 1871 and again four years later, this time without McGregor who died in 1872. Their host on the first trip, the liberal landowner NM Sokovnin has left an appealing account of the pair “working tirelessly, from sunrise to sunset, building up a marvellous collection of great Russian types and views.”
Carrick’s huge presence – he was over six foot four, heavily bearded and handsome – was allied to a complete mastery of the Russian language, which he spoke better than English. His natural charm endeared him to everyone he met and especially the vast Russian underclass.
His empathy for the downtrodden was no doubt deepened by his sympathy for the aims of the Russian reformers, who were very much on the side of the poor. Not only had he been questioned by the secret police on his return in 1857 (he had smuggled into the country the first three issues of a political magazine, produced by the revolutionary Alexander Herzen in London) but in 1867 he contracted a secret marriage with the Nihilist writer Alexandra Markelova, by whom he had two children. His mother was horrified when she eventually found out for she regarded the revolutionary movement as “the most ungodly set of people who ever existed , for they neither fear God nor the laws of the times we live in”. None the less she was eventually reconciled to her daughter-in-law.
His personal feelings and his basic kindness illuminate the best of Carrick’s work. Whether it be in a portrait of a fishmonger, standing weary but erect with the most enormous basket on his head, or a picture of a young serf sowing seed, caught sharply against the rising sun and the ploughed steppe, Carrick celebrates the dignity of human labour without hiding either its harsh reality or the suffering caused by widespread poverty. He is a photographer of universal humanity, as well as of his adopted country.
Shortly before his death in 1878 he achieved critical acclaim for work exhibited in London, much of which featured the exotic landscapes that a British audience craved. Two years earlier he had been given the title of Photographer to the Russian Academy of Arts, a gesture which formally acknowledged the arrival of the art form in that country. After his death Russia warmed even more to his vision with celebrated Russian photographers like Dmitiriev openly acknowledging their debt to him. That admiration continued throughout the Soviet period and is growing even stronger today.
Now it is time that we at home realised how important he was in his chosen field, just as it is time that Scotland recognised how central our country still is to this most democratic of all art forms.
A number of other early Scottish émigré photographers made a strong impact in their new countries.
Robert Macpherson was an Edinburgh painter, journalist and art dealer who took up photography in 1851. Resident in Rome, where he had gone for his health in 1840, he established a commercial photographic business where he sold photographic prints. He later described himself as an “artist photographer” and wealthy tourists were amongst the customers for his architectural studies and romantic landscapes. He died in 1872.
Alexander Gardner from Paisley emigrated to America at the age of 35. He worked first as a portrait photographer and on the outbreak of the Civil War made a number of studies of soldiers in uniform. In 1863 he travelled widely through the war torn countryside. A number of his photographs from that time, including the famous President Lincoln on the Battlefield of Antietam have achieved almost iconic status. He later became the official photographer to the Union Pacific Railroad.
William Notman established himself in Montreal in 1856 and soon became the most important figure in Canadian photography, opening studios in Toronto, Ottawa, St John and Halifax as well as in Boston. In addition to portraiture he recorded landscapes, street scenes and city views and specialised in highly original composite pictures. On his death in 1891 his flourishing business was continued by his two sons.
George Valentine was the second son of James Valentine, who founded the family photographic and printing business in Dundee. Serious ill health forced him to emigrate to New Zeland in 1884 and the following year his pictures of Otukapuarangi and Te Tarata - the celebrated Pink and White Terraces - won immediate acclaim. Following the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886 - and the loss of the Terraces - Valentine returned to the devastated region to complete a series that was unmatched for its quality and drama. He died in New Zealand in 1890.