Hedgerow Trees

BRITISH photography in the middle of the 19th century was headed by gentleman amateurs, inspired by the patenting in 1841 of William Fox Talbot’s calotype processing method to seek suitable subjects for picture-taking.

- Benjamin Brecknell Turner, Jack Watkins

When it came to landscapes, the photographs reflected the picturesque tastes of the age in fine art and the growing antiquarian interest in documenting and appreciating the past, including ancient buildings and monuments and a countryside untainted by the intrusion of modernity. Benjamin Brecknell Turner’s carefully framed large-format images embodied the approach, with Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap, and Worcestershire (1852–54), being an outstanding example.

Turner’s photos are notably English in the intimacy of their settings. Unlike the sublime photographs of untraversed open spaces and enormous geological features produced by the great American landscape photographers such as Carleton E. Watkins and William Henry Jackson a decade or so later, Hedgerow Trees offers no elevated viewpoint and lacks a backdrop. This is the everyday countryside—cosy and familiar.

Tellingly, when Turner contributed another of his images for inclusion in The Photographic Album for the Year 1855, assembled by the Photographic Exchange Club, he chose to support it with a few lines from The Sketch Book by Geoffrey Crayon (pseudonym of the American writer Washington Irving): ‘England does not abound in grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural repose and sheltered quiet. Every antique farmhouse and the moss-grown cottage is a picture.’