Art Institute of Chicago

Whitby

Benjamin Brecknell Turner

Date

c. 1855

Medium

Albumen print

Culture

England

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

The scion of a successful manufacturing family, Benjamin Brecknell Turner took up photography as a hobby in 1849. Like other Victorian amateurs, he found himself attracted to the picturesque ruins of the British countryside, such as the ancient Whitby Abbey, which had become a popular tourist destination. Turner made several images there, publishing six in an album entitled Photographic Views from Nature , which featured sixty photographs made between 1852 and 1854. Turner employed the paper negative process, which had the risk of overexposing very light areas, such as the sky, while underexposing the shadows; here, he solved the problem by presenting the sky as interesting shapes framed by the bones of the church. The paper negative’s slight texture, however, was otherwise well-suited to its subject, allowing Turner to evoke more effectively the roughly textured character of hewn stone.

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