Victorian Scotland was the site of an astonishing florescence of photography, and Thomas Annan was one of an impressive cohort of Scottish masters of the young medium. Born in 1829 into a farming and flax-spinning family in Dairsie, Fife, in the East of Scotland, he left home at the age of fifteen to join the staff of the local Fife Herald newspaper, based in the nearby county capital of Cupar, as an apprentice lithographic engraver. Having completed his projected seven-year apprenticeship in four years, he moved to the then rapidly expanding and industrializing city of Glasgow in the West of Scotland, where, on the strength of a glowing reference from the Herald, he obtained a position in the large lithographic establishment of Joseph Swan, who had set up in the city in 1818 and developed a thriving business in illustrations for mechanical inventions, maps for street directories, book-plates, and, not least, books on Scottish scenes illustrated by engravings of landscape paintings. Over the next six years Annan honed his engraving skills at Swan’s.3
In 1855, still in his mid-twenties, Thomas Annan decided to set up in business on his own. By this time, however, the rapid rise of photography on a commercial scale had led to a drop-off in the lithographic trade. In addition, Annan may well have doubted that he could compete in lithography with his former employer’s well-established company. It was probably for both reasons that he decided to switch fields and explore the possibilities of photography.
Despite its huge initial success, especially in Continental Europe and the United States (Britain was the only country where its use was restricted by a patent), Louis Daguerre’s “daguerreotype,” which had been invented around 1835-1837 and publicized in 1839, had begun to give way to a completely different photographic process discovered in 1835 and much improved in 1841 by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot. Unlike the daguerreotype, which had no negative and produced only a single image, albeit an extremely precise and detailed one, Talbot’s “calotype” allowed for the production of multiple images from a single negative.4 In addition, some photographers and critics preferred it because they believed it gave more scope to the photographer than the daguerreotype, which in their view was in fact too precise and detailed and thus “could not record the sentiments of the mind”5 (i.e. the daguerreotype left no room for the insights and imagination of the photographer).
Among the earliest practitioners of the calotype, besides Talbot himself (Figs. 1:1-3), was the Scottish team of the respected landscape painter David Octavius Hill (Figs. 1:4-7) and his associate Robert Adamson, a young chemist and engineer from St. Andrews, who together set up a photographic studio in 1843 at Rock House at the southwestern entrance to Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Their international renown was soon such that a succession of notables stopped by the studio to have photographic portraits taken—among them, in 1844, the King of Saxony, Friedrich August II, on a tour of Great Britain with his personal physician, Carl Gustav Carus, a friend of Goethe and a gifted Romantic painter in his own right. “We found a large number of artworks hanging on the walls—landscapes, photographs of buildings, portraits,” Carus reported. “Much of this was entrancing. Ever since, such unmediated imprintings [Abformungen] of nature have given me much to think about.”6 The photographs of Hill and Adamson, mostly taken in the 1840s (Adamson died in 1848 at the young age of 27), are now considered classics of early photography—“the earliest and most brilliant works bearing witness to the young medium,” in the words of a recent German scholar (Figs. 1:8-15).
The two men worked as a team and Hill’s photographic production flagged after Adamson’s premature death, so much so that on his own death many years later, in 1870, as the eminent photographic collector and historian Helmut Gernsheim noted, “neither newspapers nor art journals referred to his photographic work. More surprisingly still, no photographic journal even mentioned his death.” It took James Craig Annan, Thomas Annan’s son and partner, to rescue the man his father admired deeply from oblivion. “Today,” as a result, “David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson are universally accorded first place in the annals of photography,” on account of “the artistic spirit with which their photographs are imbued. [. . .] It is indeed astonishing that in its very first years the new art should have reached its highest peak in the magnificent achievements of these two Scottish photographers.”7
Inspired in part by Hill and Adamson, and aided by the fact that, thanks to the intervention of the Principal of St. Andrews University, Sir David Brewster, a physicist, close friend and collaborator of Talbot, the latter’s patents did not apply in Scotland, other Scots took up photography professionally. In 1849, Thomas Rodger, a nineteen-year-old former chemistry assistant to the St. Andrews surgeon John Adamson—himself an accomplished amateur photographer from whom his younger brother Robert, David Octavius Hill’s partner, had received his earliest instruction in the new medium—opened a studio in St. Andrews. A modern plaque outside the building where the studio was located (today the Careers Centre of the University of St. Andrews) reads: “The first professional photographer in St. Andrews, he was taught the calotype process by Dr. John Adamson, who induced him to make it his life’s work. His pictorial record of the town, its people, the fisher folk and eminent visitors, brought him great fame. His favour with visiting royalty gave him journeys to London on Royal Photographic missions. He built this house and in it the first photographic studio in the town. Brewster, the Adamsons, and Rodger made St. Andrews a world centre of photography.” (Figs. 1:16-17)
After a brief career as a painter of portrait miniatures catering to the wealthy families of the northeast of Scotland, George Washington Wilson set up a studio in Aberdeen in 1852 and ventured into portrait photography. From these early beginnings, aided by technical and commercial acumen, as well as by a contract to photograph the Royal Family while documenting the construction of Balmoral Castle in 1854-1855, Wilson soon established himself as one of Scotland’s premier photographers. In 1863 he took a now iconic photograph of Queen Victoria with her faithful servant John Brown at Balmoral (Fig. 1:18), and in the single year 1864-1865, his company produced 553,331 prints of portraits and landscapes.
Landscapes in particular were his forte; by the 1880s, the company claimed to offer 10,000 views of Scottish scenes (Figs. 1:19-20).8
Around the same time that Wilson was setting up in Aberdeen (1851), James Valentine opened a photographic portrait studio in his family’s engraving and stationary business in Dundee. By 1855 he claimed to be building one of the largest photographic glasshouses in the kingdom. Though on rare occasions his work came strikingly close to Annan’s images of the slums of Glasgow (Fig. 1:21), Valentine’s reputation rested on his photographs of landscapes and ancient (often ruined) buildings. In 1868 he received an appointment as Royal Photographer and a commission from the Queen to photograph a set of forty views of Highland scenery. The Valentine business ultimately developed into a considerable international operation, occupying a five-story factory building and producing picture postcards of town, countryside, and celebrated buildings not only for the crowds of tourists visiting Scotland in the nineteenth century—the heyday of “Ossian” (James Macpherson), Walter Scott and other Scottish writers, such as James Hogg (the “Ettrick Shepherd”) and Robert Burns—but for travellers in many other parts of the world, such as Norway, Jamaica, Tangiers, Morocco, Madeira and New Zealand, well into the twentieth century. As early as the mid-1870s an elaborate works had already been built in the gardens of two adjoining villas in Dundee. It soon covered the whole site and employed over 100 people. In the British Journal of Photography for 12 March 1886, the Valentine Dundee establishment was described as one of the largest and most comprehensively equipped in the kingdom (Figs. 1:22-23).9
Other Scots who made a name for themselves internationally, often for work executed abroad, include Edinburgh-born John Thomson, known for his photographs of the Far East and for his popular Street Life in London (1876-1877), to which we shall have occasion to refer later; Alexander Gardner, who emigrated to the United States in 1856 at the age of 35 and was responsible for many of the great Civil War photographs (some wrongly attributed to his employer, Matthew Brady) as well as for a number of celebrated and widely reproduced portraits of Lincoln; William Carrick and John MacGregor, classic photographers of mid- to late-nineteenth-century Russia; Robert Macpherson, known for his photographs of ancient and Renaissance Rome and the first photographer permitted to take pictures in the Vatican; William Notman of Paisley, who in the same year that Gardner, also from Paisley, left for the United States, emigrated to Canada and established flourishing professional photographic studios first in Montreal, then in Toronto and Halifax, where he produced well-regarded individual and group portraits for customers of all classes. In 1858 he was commissioned by the Grand Trunk Railway to photograph the construction of Montreal’s Victoria Bridge, and in the 1870s and 80s he sent photographers across Canada to record the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the rise of the western cities, and the life of the Plains and Coastal Indians. On the occasion of the official inauguration of the Victoria Bridge by the Prince of Wales, in 1860, he presented the future Edward VII, then still a student at Christ Church, Oxford, with a handsome album of his photographs, the so-called Maple Box Portfolio. Its acceptance by the Royal Family permitted Notman to describe himself on an advertising pamphlet of 1867 as “Photographer to the Queen.” He subsequently opened studios in a dozen other Canadian cities as well as in Boston and Albany, N.Y. In 1873 alone, his firm created 14,000 images (Figs. 1:24-32).10
Less well remembered today, but highly successful in their time, were Horatio Ross, from an old landowning family in the North of Scotland, who made a name for himself as a photographer of country sports; John Moffat of Aberdeen, who opened a photographic studio on Princes Street in Edinburgh in 1857 that continued in operation until the 1960s; and Archibald Burns, a landscape photographer who worked from David Octavius Hill’s Rock House on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, which he shared briefly with the Annan family in 1871. The author of a collection of photographs of old Edinburgh, published in 1868 as Picturesque “Bits” of old Edinburgh, Burns was commissioned in 1871 by the Edinburgh Improvement Trust to take photographs of the old closes between the University and Cowgate that were about to be demolished (Figs. 1:33-35). We shall have occasion to refer to Burns’s work when discussing the photographs of The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, which the Glasgow City Improvement Trust had commissioned Annan to take three years earlier. Even in the then relatively inaccessible small town of Largs, described in The Photographic Studios of Europe (1888) as “a fishing village” and “modest little watering place” on the Firth of Clyde, one John Fergus had set up as a self-described “photo artist” and, despite the remoteness of the location (clients from England had first to travel north to Glasgow, take a train to Wemyss Bay, and then board a steamer for the trip down the Firth of Clyde to Largs), succeeded in attracting a sophisticated clientele from all over Britain for his widely admired portraits (Figs. 1:36-37).11
Many amateurs were also drawn to photography, especially in Scotland, where the patents on common photographic processes that had been taken out in England did not apply for a time and where costs were thus somewhat reduced.12 Of these non-professionals, one who still figures in studies of photography was the remarkable Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming (1822-1865), better known by her married name as Clementina, Lady Hawarden. Born and raised at Cumbernauld House near Glasgow, the daughter of a distinguished Scottish father, the Hon. Charles Elphinstone Fleeming, M.P. for Stirlingshire, and a Spanish mother, she produced hundreds of highly original and imaginative images that won silver medals in 1863 and 1864 when they were exhibited at the Photographic Society in London (Figs. 1:36-37).13 Thomas Keith of Aberdeen was best known as a surgeon who pioneered new procedures in ovarian surgery, worked with Sir James Young Simpson to develop anesthetics, and was one of the first to introduce Lister’s antiseptic techniques in his professional work. He made the results of his surgical practice known in several books on “ovariotomy” in the 1860s. However, he was also a keen amateur photographer for several years, between 1852 and 1857, and he produced a number of urban scenes, using Gustave Le Gray’s waxed paper process, that could be said to anticipate those of Burns and Annan (Figs. 1:38-39).14
The success of pioneers like Hill and Adamson and the growing number of contemporaries taking up photography as a viable profession—about thirty studios appear to have opened in Glasgow alone in the 1850s—may well have encouraged Thomas Annan to abandon the engraving business in 1855 and set up in Glasgow, with a partner, as a “collodion calotypist.” It may even be that Hill himself encouraged Annan to make this move—in which he had been preceded in 1852 by one of the earliest Glasgow commercial photographers, John Urie of Paisley, who also started out as an engraver—for it has been speculated that the Annan family, living not far from St. Andrews, may have known the Adamsons and that Thomas Annan could have been aware, when he was still an apprentice engraver in Cupar, of the Hill-Adamson partnership. “My father [. . .] had an intense admiration and appreciation of Hill as a man and as an artist,” James Craig Annan recalled in a 1945 letter, written toward the end of his life, to Helmut Gernsheim, the celebrated historian of photography.15
Be that as it may, by 1857 Annan had dissolved his partnership and founded his own firm in Woodlands Road in the fast-developing West End of Glasgow. This practice was soon successful enough to warrant the establishment of a studio at 116 Sauchiehall Street in the heart of the modern city, as well as a photographic printing works in nearby Hamilton, where the air was cleaner and whither in 1859 he also moved his family. Appropriately enough, their new home was given the name Talbot Cottage. Annan quickly made a considerable reputation for himself both as a skilful and meticulous printer from negatives supplied by others and as a fine photographer in his own right. In general, he was quick to adopt the latest technical innovations in photography. Thus by making use of Sir Joseph Wilson Swan’s carbon process, the Scottish rights for which he characteristically had the foresight to purchase in 1866, Annan was able to move into the “permanent” photography that made book illustration a practical proposition. Previous, silver-based processes had had a tendency to discolor and fade. The carbon process ensured stability of the image. To maximize benefits from the acquisition of the rights to the carbon process, an extensive new printing establishment was opened in Lenzie, six miles northeast of Glasgow city center. It was there that Annan printed the negatives for the second set of albums of what is now his best-known work, The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, the first set of which had been produced as albumen prints in 1871. In 1883 he travelled to Austria where, on payment of a considerable sum, he arranged for his son James Craig Annan to learn another “permanent” process, the new technique of photogravure, from its inventor, Karl Klič. He also purchased the British rights to Klič’s invention, which James Craig Annan, who was to achieve greater renown than his father, put to good use in later years, not least in an updated and much expanded photogravure version, published in 350 copies in 1891 under the title University of Glasgow Old and New, of his father’s 1871 Memorials of the Old College of Glasgow. James Craig Annan also issued a revised and somewhat expanded photogravure edition in 1900 of his father’s The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, in a similarly limited number of copies.
Like most professional photographers, Annan practiced all the genres for which there was a market: photographic reproductions of paintings, which the public increasingly preferred to engravings; portraits, including the popular and relatively inexpensive new carte-de-visite (2⅛ x 3½ inches) and cabinet (4½ x 6½ inches) formats; landscapes, much in demand in Scotland as waves of tourists swept over the country to view the sites made famous by the novels and poems of Walter Scott; photographs of buildings and public works, usually commissioned by well-to-do property owners or local authorities—the field of activity for which Annan is best remembered and by which he is chiefly represented in Princeton’s collections; as well as photographs of machinery and the modern triumphs of industry and engineering. The work he displayed at exhibitions in Edinburgh (1858 and 1864), Glasgow (1859), London (1861, 1863, 1864) and Dublin (1865) included samples from all those fields—numerous photographs of paintings, sculptures and buildings of note, portraits (sometimes photographed from paintings), countless landscapes, several images of machinery and one (displayed, appropriately enough, in the Glasgow show of 1859) of the Clyde-built S.S. “United Kingdom,” launched in 1857 to inaugurate the Anchor Line of Glasgow’s transatlantic service to Montreal.16 On his business card in 1861 Annan listed among the kinds of work his firm was equipped to undertake “photographs of engravings and architectural drawings,” of “ships taken when on the stocks or when launched or from paintings,” of “engines and machinery,” together with “‘Cartes de Visite’ and large portraits,” and photographs of “groups taken out of doors, volunteers, cricket clubs, &c, views of gentlemen’s seats and every variety of landscape subjects.”17 An important point, to which we shall return, is that, for the more than twenty books and albums in which his photographs appear, Annan was always commissioned to provide illustrations—and nothing more. He himself virtually never contextualized his own photographs. There is usually a text—though not in at least one crucial case—but it is always the work of somebody else: the person or persons who had the idea for the book in the first place, or a representative of the agency that commissioned the photographs, or the author whose work the publisher engaged Annan to illustrate. As we shall see, this can have the liberating effect of placing the modern viewer in the position of directly interpreting the images without having to take the photographer’s own expressed understanding of them into account. What Virginia Woolf once wrote of Jane Austen’s novels—“she stimulates us to supply what is not there”18—might well be said of the photographs that were brought together and published as The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.
In the following pages, I aim to provide an overview of Annan’s work, taking account of the holdings in the Graphic Arts Collection of Princeton’s Firestone Library, but not limiting myself to them. For the sake of convenience, I shall survey in turn the four major genres in which he was active: photographs of paintings, portraits, landscapes, and the built environment. My choice of category may at times seem arbitrary: Annan’s Views on the Line of the Loch Katrine Water Works (1859), for instance, could have been discussed under “The Built Environment” instead of under “Landscapes,” since the photographer’s subject was a major engineering work in a celebrated landscape. A category comprising “Art Works” would have accommodated many photographs of ancient buildings and sculptures that do not fit the category of “Paintings” and are included here instead in the chapters on “Landscapes” and “The Built Environment.” In addition, certain categories, notably “Portraits,” are dealt with quite briefly, while others, such as “The Built Environment,” are discussed at considerable length. However, I believe my treatment of the different categories reflects the significance of Annan’s work in and contribution to each. A final section of the book, longer than the others, is devoted to the photographer’s most widely recognized achievement, the album known as The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.
While my primary aim in this short study is to offer a broad presentation of Annan’s activity as a photographer, his involvement in the life of the city where he set up his studio and printing works was so considerable that it has proved impossible to separate his work from the extraordinary history of Glasgow in the nineteenth century. It is my earnest hope that the photographer and the city are as connected in what follows as they were in Thomas Annan’s career.