1270
square glass plates. The camera was called the Pistol-
graph. Skaife’s camera was sold with several types of
lenses including a wide aperture Dallmeyer f/1.1 portrait
lens. The plates could be enlarged successfully 10 to 15
times by projection, by enlarged negative or by use of
a solar camera.
Skaife’s camera attracted much interest in the photo-
graphic press and Skaife licensed the use of the camera
to other photographers to produce ‘pistolgrams’ or
‘pistolgraphs.’ It was deemed particularly applicable for
taking portraits of children, old people, and animals.
Skaife died on 18 November 1876 at Preston, near
Steyning, Sussex, aged 68.
Michael Pritchard
SKEEN, WILLIAM LOUIS HENRY
(d. 1903)
English, photographer, publisher
William Louis Henry (W.L.H.) Skeen was the proprietor
of a large commercial photographic company active in
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) from the late 1860s through
1903, with studios in Colombo and Kandy. His father
William Skeen, the fi rst offi cial government printer for
Ceylon, purchased a studio for his son after he his return
from photographic training in London. During its exis-
tence, W.L.H. Skeen & Co was the premier photographic
fi rm in Ceylon. The company offered an extensive cata-
logue of views of landscapes, studies of tribal peoples
and ethnic groups, and documented the tea plantations
and spice works. Skeen & Co. held commissions to re-
cord many of the major construction projects—railway
projects and the construction of the Colombo Breakwa-
ter in the 1880s. The company published J.W.W. Birch’s
photographs of Polonnaruwa around 1876. Skeen & Co.
received the coveted “photographers by appointment
to the Duke of Edinburgh” during his tour of 1870. In
addition to views of Ceylon, in the 1890s the fi rm of-
fered a series of views of India—Bombay, Jaipur, Delhi,
Agra, Darjeeling—probably acquired through purchase
or trade with another commercial studio. Skeen & Co.
photographs were exhibited at major international
exhibitions from 1870 to the end of the century and
its operations. It appears the Platé & Co. acquired its
negatives when it closed in 1920.
Kathleen Howe
SKY AND CLOUD PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography was invented as the meanings and uses of
sky and cloud in art were in fl ux. In paintings, skies were
once typically conveyed as the realm of gods; cloudless,
infi nite and timeless, often blocked out with celestial
gold. If a cloud was present, it was a symbol of divine
wrath. From the early Renaissance artists began to fi ll
images of skies with clouds and birds, seeking to evoke
a specifi c space and time. By the nineteenth century, sky
and cloud in art could be romantic, evoking emotional
states or spirituality, but could also be scientifi c or real-
ist, used to image atmospheric effects, highlight the time
of day or document nature.
At a time when the West was surveying unknown
lands, it was also exploring the infi nite, daunting sky.
Photography played a role in the demystifi cation of sky
and cloud, providing what was considered objective
evidence of natural processes. In 1896, the International
Atlas of Clouds was published, incorporating photochro-
matypes of different types of cloud, by the international
meteorological committee—a concern thus spanning
the entire century. However, it was actually in the early
1900s Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Luke Howard worked
on classifi cations for clouds.
The night sky was also documented. Lunar da-
guerreotypes of George Philips Bond and John Adams
Whipple were shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition at
Crystal Palace, London, and were so popular that they
went on tour in Europe. The subsequent wet-plate col-
lodion prints by Warren De La Rue, along with Lewis
Morris Rutherford’s albumen print ‘The Moon, New
Yo r k ’ (1865) continued to spark the interest in lunar
photography. As well as looking to the skies from
Earth, Gaspard Félix Tournachon, or Nadar, famously
took his camera up in the hot-air balloon, attempting
‘aerostatic photography’ from 1858 to record the earth
from the sky.
Cloud and sky were aesthetic as well as scientifi c
subjects. In nineteenth-century art the empiricist doc-
trine of depicting a specifi c place at a specifi c time,
and aiming to show atmosphere, was pursued by art-
ists such as Claude Monet, John Constable, Joseph
Mallord William Turner and James McNeil Whistler.
Images recording ‘effect’ gained scientifi c value and
appeared more ‘truthful’ and desirable. Summing up
mid-nineteenth-century art, Ruskin stated in 1856, that
‘if a general and characteristic name were needed for
modern landscape art, none better could be invented
than “the service of clouds”.’ Photographs were used
as an aid to drawing and painting natural landscapes.
Many people considered them equivalent to a sketch,
although less subjective and less artistic. In the 1870s
for example, the French artist Gustave Courbet was
concentrating on skies and seas, making photographs
on which to base his paintings.
Skies could be cloudless for both technical and
aesthetic reasons. From the 1840s skies in photographs
were often blank due to the fact that the material’s sen-
sitivity was selective and restricted, which prevented
the photographer to acquire detail in a dark foreground
(for example ‘At Compton, Surrey, 1852–54’ by Ben-