1041
yellow as black). Little is known of Owen’s early life
except that he was born in 1808. He was an accountant
and the Chief Cashier for the Great Western Railway,
employed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Owen even
lived for a while, in and apartment in the Temple Meads
building, above the railway’s offi ces. He was married
twice—the fi rst time at St. Mary’s Redcliffe Church to
the daughter of Thomas King a Master of the Society
of Merchant Venturers—and it is known that he had at
least one child (a daughter).
It is not clear how or when Owen fi rst became in-
terested in photography, but most accounts have him
making photographs by 1847. In a letter to W.H.F. Talbot
written in March of 1845, Owen requests a sample of
Talbot’s calotype process and says that he as “for some
time practiced the process on Silver.” This statement
implies that he was familiar with the dagurreotype
process before learning the rudiments of photography
on paper. It has also been suggested that Owen once
worked with another Bristolian photographer by the
name of John Bevan Hazard in the 1850s, though further
research needs to be done to determine the exact nature
of their collaboration.
In 1851 Owen, along with the French photographer
C.M. Ferrier, was “elected by his peers” to make 155
photographs for the Executive Committee of the Great
Exhibition. The photographs were intended to illustrate
the Reports by the Juries and the prints were to be made
by Nicholas Henneman using Talbot’s salted paper pro-
cess. Concern over the quality of Henneman’s printing
though led the majority of the prints to be produced
in France under the supervision of Robert Jefferson
Bingham who had also taken several of the pictures. It
was an ambitious project and the fi rst known attempt
to photograph the contents of an exhibition and thus
represents an important watershed in the history of
catalogue publishing. Surviving prints from this body
of work show that in some instances Owen chose to
photograph the object in isolation, as we can see for ex-
ample in Camel Gun, where the gun and its elaborately
decorated saddle are set against a dark background.
There are no clues about how the gun was displayed,
what other objects surrounded it, or how it would
have appeared to the viewers who paraded through the
Crystal Palace in 1851. The photographs seem to have
been meant more as a kind of inventory rather than a
souvenir of the exhibition itself. Approximately one
hundred and forty bound sets of the reports were made
and were distributed to Queen Victoria, the Exhibition
Commissioners, the British Museum and “a few other
institutions.”
The city of Bristol was also commonly featured in
Owen’s photographs. One of his earliest photographs
was of the shops of the Corn Exchange on Narrow
Quay. Dating from the 17th century, the building was
demolished in 1849 and was one of several examples
of historic architecture in Bristol that Owen sought to
record and preserve through photography. A number
of these photographs were exhibited in London at the
Society of Arts exhibition in 1852 and the Photographic
Institution in 1853. These images refl ect the almost
documentary style with which he approached his sub-
jects. Heavily infl uence by the Pictureseque tradition, he
also photographed scenes from the countryside around
Bristol including waterfalls, quarries and “ruins” as we
can see in a work titled The Bishop’s Palace. Probably
photographed in the late 1840s or early 1850s only two
decades after the Bristol riots of 1831 that had been the
cause of the building’s destruction. Given his position as
an employee of the Great Western Railway, it is no sur-
prise to fi nd that Owen also photographed trains—and
in particular one that had gone of the rails—as can be
seen in the photograph titled Bristol and Exeter Railway
No. 20. Several of his photographers were later copied
and made into lantern slides and then were eventually
turned into postcards featuring the city of Bristol and
its environs.
Owen was also one of the founding members of the
Calotype Club in 1847. The majority of his photographs
are salted paper prints made from paper negatives
(except for a few prints he made while trying out the
wet-collodion process). Although he experimented with
the wet- collodion process, his distaste for the medium
(apparently he was irritated by the staining of his fi ngers
by the collodion mixture) led him to abandon photog-
raphy around 1855.
Photography was not Owen’s only hobby. He was
obviously very interested in the historic sites of Bristol
and was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians.
In 1873 he published a book titled Two Centuries of
Ceramic Art in Bristol and was considered an expert
in the fi eld.
Although somewhat a forgotten fi gure within the
history of photography, Owen is considered to be the
master of early photography in Bristol. His contributions
to the history of early photography in England are only
beginning to be re-discovered. His photographs were
often left unsigned but occasionally bear the letters HO.
Owen’s work can be found in public collections around
the world but the largest collection appears to be in the
Bristol Records offi ce. He died in 1897.
Lori PauliExhibitions
1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of
All Nations, Royal Commission, Crystal Palace,
London
1852 An Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photog-
raphy, Society of Arts, London