By day a Bristol-based cashier for Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway, Owen first became an amateur daguerreotypist in the early 1840s. In March 1845, about to give a lecture on photography to the Bristol Mechanics Institute & Philosophical Society, he wrote to Talbot. Owen had not yet tried the calotype and asked Talbot for some examples to illustrate his lecture. These must have won him over, for within two years Owen had became a master of the paper negative. In 1847, after seeing an exhibition by the members of the Calotype Society in London, the Athenaeum drew particular attention to Owen, the “gentleman of Bristol well known for his talent in his art . . . whose various views . . . justified the reputation which [he] has earned.” Owen entered a series of calotypes in the 1851 Great Exhibition, so impressing the commissioners that they engaged him to make photographs of some of the displays. In the 1852 Society of Arts exhibition, views from the Crystal Palace were included in Owens’s group of more than forty calotypes. After this exhibition, he joined the founding council of the Photographic Society. In 1853 Joseph Cundall published two volumes of Owens’s Photographic Pictures. The Athenaeum felt they showed the “short--comings of the Sun’s work,” but admired “the delicate touch of the ivy” in his view of the gate of Farleigh Castle. By 1854 Owen felt compelled to defend his favorite negative process in the Journal of the Photographic Society: “Although I dislike controversy on matters of taste, I must be permitted to remonstrate against the tone assumed by some of the Photographists of the New School with regard to the paper process. . . . For the delineation of nature, however, I . . . assert the superiority of paper, both for force and effect, as well as convenience.” His views from Portugal were in the 1855 exhibition, where he continued to be one of the most prolific exhibitors of the period. In 1856 Owen finally succumbed to the dominance of collodion on glass. His exhibitions stopped, and he seems to have had little to do with photography after that. By the time of his death he was forgotten by the photographic fraternity to which he had contributed so bountifully.
Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs will show work by early British masters at Photo London 19-22 May 2016 at Somerset House. Work by William Henry Fox Talbot, Nicolaas Henneman, Hugh Owen, and Benjamin Brecknell Turner, among others, will be on view. Photogenic drawings, salt prints and other photographs ranging in date from 1839, the year that Talbot announced his invention of photography, through the 1860s, when photography was flourishing more widely. The occasion for this selection of Talbot’s work is to coincide with the exhibition Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph currently at the Science Museum in London.
Of all the people critical to the story of the introduction of photography, the one with perhaps the most humble beginnings is Nicolaas Henneman, who was born in the Netherlands in 1813 and was a valet ...
New York – Hugh Owen Rediscovered, an exhibition of rarely seen 19th century British countryside views, will be on display from January 19 – March 18, 2016 at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs. The exhibition marks the first show of photographs by Hugh Owen since the 19th century.
© Hugh Owen, Still life with two wine casks. Albumen print, 1860s-1870s, from a paper negative, before 1855. 22.2 x 17.5 cm
Known for finely composed and exquisitely rendered photographs, Hugh Owen (English, 1808-1879) was a master of the paper negative, having learned from the inventor himself, William Henry Fox Talbot. Owen’s day job, a cashier for the Great Western Railway in Bristol, stood in stark contrast to his photographic accomplishments, which brought him acclaim in the 1840s and 1850s.
The n...