3-016-972 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Photographer", by W. Bromley, in the Exhibition of the Society of British Artists, 1864. Engraving of a painting. 'Look...at the little boys...How laughably they copy the mysterious proceedings and apparatus of a photographer! They have placed the music-stool on a chair, and...have constructed something which bears a general resemblance, in form, to a camera and stand...they have evidently posed the group to be photographed; and one boy, in mimicry of the "photographic artist," puts his head under a shawl and looks through the music tube in order to adjust the focus...The group to be photographed meanwhile enact their part very creditably. The girl, as befits her years, enters into the spirit of the performance...The little boy in her lap, however, discovers that apprehensiveness of something terrible and extraordinary going to happen which may be detected in the expressions of older folk when that formidable instrument of torture, the camera...is aimed at them for the first time...As regards the composition of this group, it is arranged more agreeably than we see similar subjects treated in the ordinary run of photographs; for it is in the "posing" of his unfortunate "patients" that the full-grown photographer generally fails'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.