1411
TURNER, BENJAMIN BRECKNELL
(1815–1894)
British photographer
Benjamin Brecknell Turner was born on 12 May 1815
at 31–32 Haymarket, London, the eldest son of Samuel
Turner and Lucy Jane Fownes. He attended Queen
Elizabeth’s Old Palace School, Enfi eld, London, until
- At sixteen he was apprenticed to his father as a
tallow chandler in the family fi rm Brecknell, Turner
Ltd., which made and sold candles and soap from their
premises at Haymarket. In 1836, the family moved to
live in Balham, South London. In 1840, Turner travelled
to Belgium, Switzerland, and Paris. At his father’s death
the following year he took over the family business.
He continued his continental tour in 1845 with visits to
Switzerland, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, Dres-
den, Berlin, and Hamburg. In 1847 he married Agnes
Chamberlain with whom he had eight children. The
family lived above their shop at Haymarket. In 1849, at
the age of thirty-four, Turner took out a licence for one
guinea from Talbot to practice calotype photography
as an amateur.
Turner’s earliest surviving photographs were taken in
and around the location where the family spent holidays
at Bredicot, a farm four miles outside Worcester bought
by Turner’s father-in-law, Henry Chamberlain, in 1840.
These pictures were made with a modestly sized cam-
era, taking negatives of about 7½ × 5½ inches (19 × 14
cm). By 1852 he had acquired a larger camera taking
impressive negatives of about 12 × 15 inches (30 × 40
cm). In this format in March that year he photographed
the interior of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London.
It was probably the display of photographs held there at
the Great Exhibition of 1851 that spurred him to greater
ambition. His photographs, taken after the Exhibition
had closed, capture the scale and elegance of engineer-
ing of the light-fi lled structure.
Two views of the Crystal Palace open his sequence
from a unique album of sixty photographs—his major
extant body of prints—entitled Photographic Views
from Nature. By Benjamin Brecknell Turner. Taken in
1852, 1853 and 1854, on paper, by Mr. Fox Talbot’s
Process, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Unlike nearly all other British photographers, Turner
remained faithful to Talbot’s calotype paper negative
process for most of his career. The collection of some
250 negatives made by Turner between about 1852 and
1860, preserved by the Royal Photographic Society,
demonstrate that he occasionally doctored them by
adding pencilled foliage details or blacking out skies
with Indian ink. However, he chose mostly to use the
newer albumen (rather than salted paper) print process.
This results in an image that successfully combines
the grainy quality of the negative with the depth and
clarity characteristic of the print.
Apart from its opening images, Photographic Views
from Nature contains examples of the kind of subjects
which Turner would favour and excel at throughout the
1850s: English churches, abbeys, castles, cottages and
farms—rural scenes and ancient architecture—espe-
cially in the counties of Worcestershire, Surrey, Sussex,
Kent and Yorkshire. His choice of canonical Picturesque
subjects—rustic scenes, ivy-clad ruins and trees—was
drawn from the English water colourist tradition of the
pre-photographic generation. Updating his subjects
for the photographic art, Turner understood the power
of the medium to capture both broad handling of light
and shade and to render minute, textural detail. Typi-
cal examples include, At Compton, Surrey (c.1852–4
showing an ancient barn and farmyard with thatched
hayricks, Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire, from the North
East, (c.1852–54) capturing the brooding ruins and
Hawkhurst Church, Kent (1852) remarkable for its
almost perfectly symmetrical refl ection in the village
pond. Scotch Firs, Hawkhurst (1852) was his most
frequently exhibited photograph. The 1850s was one
of the last decades before mechanised farming and the
expansion of the rail network changed the landscape
irrevocably. Turner’s works contain a reverence for the
disappearing older order. Because of their long exposure
times (documented as up to half an hour) his photo-
graphs are largely unpopulated. This lends his work a
timeless, meditative quality.
Turner’s work was highly regarded in its day and
constantly praised by reviewers. He exhibited regularly,
beginning at the world’s fi rst ever purely photographic
exhibition at the Society of Arts in London, 1852 and
participated in photographic society shows through-
out the 1850s in London, Norwich, Manchester and
Glasgow. He exhibited at the Exposition Universelle
held in Paris in 1855—the French follow up to the
Great Exhibition—and was awarded a bronze medal.
In 1862 he contributed nine photographs at the London
International Exhibition.
Turner was a founder member and later a Vice Presi-
dent of the Photographic Society of London (founded
1853). He was also an honorary secretary and treasurer
of the Photographic Club, within the society, which
produced albums of photographs in 1855 and 1857.
Members used the albums as a means of exchanging
their works. Turner contributed a print of his own
for both volumes and organised the 1857 album. At
a glass-house studio, which he constructed above his
London business, he took portraits in collodion of fel-
low photographers, friends and family. He also experi-
mented with collodion negatives for landscape subjects
in 1856 but the results lacked the charm of his works