Victorian Giants : The Birth of Art Photography

'a rare opportunity to see the works of all four of these highly innovative and influential artists' - Artnet news

A beautiful coffee table book about the beginnings of Art Photography and the work of the four Victorian photographers, Oscar Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Clementina Hawarden

The idea of ‘art photography’ is nearly as old as photography itself, for in the 1850s photographers began to claim fine-art status for their work. Debates about photography and its role raged internationally, but it was in England, through the work of Oscar Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Clementina Hawarden in particular, that the new art form found its fullest expression.

This handsome companion book to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together works by those four Victorian pioneers of photography and the images that made the case for the photograph as art. The book includes a foreword by the Duchess of Cambridge and some 190 images including striking portraits of sitters including Charles Darwin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle, George Frederic Watts, Ellen Terry and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

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