Early Derby Photographers (3) - W.W. Winter

William Walter Winter (1842-1924) was one of Derby's more successful photographers. He was the son of Cornelius Jansen Walter Winter (1819-1891), a Norfolk portrait and animal painter, and started off as an assistant to Frenchman Monsieur E.N. Charles (1827-1864) at 2 Midland Road, Derby. When Charles died in 1863, his widow Sarah ran the studio with Winter, then married him in 1864, after which Winter took over the studio. It continued to operate under his stewardship until his retirement in 1909. He sold the firm the following year, and the business is still operating today, from their premises at the Alexandra Room Studios, built to a design by the Derby architect Henry Isaac Stevens. W.W. Winter died in 1924.


This portrait was probably taken by Winter himself shortly before his retirement in 1907, when he was a Justice of the Peace for Derby.

Early Derby Photographers (2) - J.W. Price

Joseph Wheeldon Price (b. 1830) opened his first studio in Ashby-de-la-Zouch (Leics) in the mid-1860s, and by 1870 was operating another branch at Babington Lane in Derby. Although the Ashby premises closed in the early to mid-1870s, Price took over another studio at 36 Victoria Street, Derby from Clement Rogers for a brief period from 1876 to 1880.


The vignetted head-and-shoulders portrait shown above is a mounted albumen print marked with his signature - very similar to the signature printed on CDV mounts - on the reverse, as well as "Photo'D from copy" in the same hand. It was probably taken in the early 1870s when he was in his early forties.

For a few years in the early 1880s, he was in partnership with a travelling photographer Benjamin Galvin (1828-1900) and quite a few examples of CDVs and cabinet cards with Price & Gavin's stamp exist. Then, in the late 1880s Price retired to Liscard on the Wirral (Cheshire), where he ran a tobacconist's shop. The Babington Lane studio was subsequently operated by Edmund & C. Hopkins (1891) and Charles Carr, Gilbert & Co. (from 1895), who remained there until at least 1903.

Early Derby Photographers (1) - Richard Keene

In the collection of portraits at the Derby Local Studies Library which I looked through recently, I was excited to find several of the photographers themselves.


This one is a portrait of one of Derby's leading photographers, Richard Keene (1825-1894), by James Brennen. It is dated on the reverse, June 1863, about four years after he had established his own portrait studio.

Although primarily a printer, bookseller, stationer and, by 1855, publisher of the Derbyshire Telegraph, he developed an interest in photography, and travelled throughout Derbyshire with friends, taking pictures of architecture, topography and landscapes. He started by selling prints of the high quality photos for which he became reknowned, but also set up and operated a successful portrait studio from at least 1859, produced private commissions for firms, estates and families, and took photos in many other counties. He was an associate of Fox Talbot, and his work reportedly included commissions by the Royal Family. In 1884 he was a founder member of the Derby Photographic Society, he was the recipient of 34 major awards, and he also became President Elect of the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom.

Stereoviews - the first three-dimensional photographs

The other type of photograph which became wildly popular during Victorian times was the stereoscopic photograph, or stereoview. This used two juxtaposed separate images, taken of the same view but from slightly different positions, and a special viewer, to trick the eyes and brain into "seeing" a three-dimensional picture. Although the concept had been around even before the development of photography, the first stereoscopic views were made using daguerreotypes and ambrotypes in the 1850s and early 1860s. The use of albumen paper prints mounted on card in the later 1860s made them much cheaper, therefore available to the the middle classes, and starting photography's first craze.

It should be noted that while stereoviews were arguably more suited to the use of landscapes, buildings, statuary and staged tableaux, rather than portraits, the latter are not completely unknown. Hans Peter Hansen (1868-1943) of Ashbourne was one Derbyshire photographer who experimented with sterescopic portraits, as in this example showing three of his children.


Robert Leggatt provides a brief history of sterescopic photography, as do many others, and I will not bother to to repeat this detail here. The popularity of stereoviews continued to grow in spurts through the 1870s and 1880s, fuelled by the development of steamships and cheap travel.

The stereoview could in many ways be considered the forerunner of the postcard, and of course the latter eventually caused a wane in popularity. During the Great War, however, there was a significant resurgence of interest in the stereoview as a means to portray views of the battlefields to family and friends back home.

This image is one from my own collection, captioned "Entente Cordiale; the Allies fraternizing on a canal boat in Flanders," shows a lighter moment away from the front lines. It was No. 73 in one of many series produced by perhaps the largest of the stereoscopic publishers, Realistic Travels Publishers, of London, Cape Town, Bombay, Melbourne and Toronto.

Post Script - June 2008
David Spahr, who has a very interesting web site Stereoviews.com, offered the following comments on stereoviews and corrections to my article above, for which I'm very grateful:

"Stereoviews on paper actually appeared in the 1850s as both salt and albumen prints. I can't really agree that stereoviews influenced postcards all that much. The creation of the postal service and cameras mass produced in postcard format had more to do with it. Stereoviews actually survived and flourished long after the advent of postcards."

A & G Taylor, Photographers to the World (2)

I received this portrait from Norway, of all places. The sender Bjornar Saternes writes:

Some years ago I scanned some old photographs in an old album owned by my uncle. The pictures comes from my granddad family photo album. One photo is of a woman. In the footer it says "By Special Royal Warrant" and "A. & G. Taylor - Stockton on Tees & West Hartlepool". We have no clue whatsoever on who this woman is. An other major problem is that we do not have any names for any picture in the entire album. And most Norwegian photographers for our area were bombed during the Second World War. Other pictures in the album seems to be from around 1910, though we can't be quite sure. Do you think it is possible to find some more information regarding this photo? Does the archives of A. & G. Taylor still exist?

I don't have details of when the branch studios of A & G Taylor operated in Stockton-on-Tees and West Hartlepool, both located in the county of Durham, and the only information provided by Roger Vaughan on his list is, "c1896, 106 High Street, Stockton." However, I can answer the question about the possible existence of archives of the studio, recording the names of subjects of portraits, with a fair degree of certainty. The chances of them surviving are almost nil. There are a few negative books from Victorian studios which do exist - Roger Vaughan presents one for the Harrow Branch of Hills & Saunders Photographers on his site - but I'm sorry to report that most have vanished.

I estimate, from the style of the cabinet card, including its square corners and embossed frame, as well as the woman's clothing and hair style, that the photo was taken around the turn of the century, perhaps between 1898 and 1902. She looks to be in her early 20s, and was therefore perhaps born in the late 1870s. Without further information, it would be very difficult to deduce anything further about the subject.