222
Some writers, such as the critic A.J. Anderson, did not
approve of current British pictorial photography but they
thought that the American invasion was dangerous. The
British and European Links must act quickly to prevent
the Salon from collapsing or becoming “annexed” by
the Photo-Secession.
The Links acted and, led by Mortimer, they managed
to defeat Davison over arrangements for the Salon of
- Davison had wanted rigorous selection, excluding
all but the best pictorialists, which would have meant
the return of the Photo-Secessionists. But led by Mor-
timer, the Links voted to invite individuals only. The
Photo-Secessionists could no longer exhibit as a group,
and so they all resigned in May. Their mass resignation
took place months before the Photographic Salon of
September 1909, but it led to further in-fi ghting among
the Links and the Brotherhood collapsed in 1910.
Some former Links decided to continue their version
of pictorialism and founded the London Salon in 1910.
Pictorialism fl ourished there though it remained more or
less where it had been in 1909. The Links who believed
that everything British was correct were in the ascen-
dance. Ignoring evidence to the contrary and changes
abroad, they reasserted the Victorian belief in moral and
improving art in gentle, picturesque photographs. Their
victory marked the path of art photography in Britain
for years to come. Signifi cantly, the Brotherhood of
the Linked Ring, in all its vicissitudes, represents the
exclusive and conservative attitudes that help to defi ne
the artistic cultural life of Britain in the late Victorian
and Edwardian epoch.
John Taylor
See Also: Day, Fred Holland; Photo-Club de Paris;
and Stieglitz, Alfred.
Further Reading
Anon, Photograms of ‘95, London: Dawbarn and Ward Ltd,
1895–98.
Anon, Photograms of the Year, London: Dawbarn and Ward Ltd,
1899–1908.
Caffi n, Charles H., Photography as a Fine Art, New York: Morgan
and Morgan, 1971 (facsimile of 1901 publication).
Doty, Robert, Photo-Secession: Photography as a Fine Art,
Rochester: George Eastman House, 1960.
Guest, Antony, Art and the Camera, London: G. Bell and Sons
1907.
Harker, Margaret, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement
in Photography in Britain, 1892-1910, London: Heinemann,
1979.
Holme, Charles (ed.), Art in Photography: With Selected
Examples of European and American Work, London: The
Studio, 1905.
Holme, Charles (editor), Colour Photography and Other Recent
Developments of the Art of the Camera, London: The Studio,
1908.
Mortimer, Francis James (ed.), Photograms of the Year, London:
Hazell, Watson and Viney Ltd, 1912–18.
Mortimer, Francis James (ed.), Photograms of the Year, London:
Iliffe and Sons, 1919–44.
Naef, Weston, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers
of Modern Photography, New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1978.
Taylor, John, “The Salon des Refusés of 1908,” in History of
Photography, 8/4 (October-December 1984), 277–98.
Ward, Henry Snowden (ed.), Photograms of the Year, London:
Dawbarn and Ward Ltd, 1909–11.BROTHERS, ALFRED (1826–1912)
English studio owner and photographerAlfred Brothers operated a studio at No14 St Ann’s
Square in Manchester from 1858 until at least 1894. He
took over premises which had formerly been operated
by Beard & Foard since 1854.
He was born in Sheerness, Kent, England on January
2nd 1826, and later apprenticed to a bookseller. After
a period of employment as an insurance agent, during
which time he took up photography, he opened his
Manchester studio. In 1858 he suggested a method of
silvery recovery from spent chemicals.
He had a lifelong interest in astronomy, and wrote
and lectured on the subject from the mid 1860s.
Brothers became one of the leading fi gures in both
the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society—
where he met Roscoe and others—and the Manchester
Photographic Society. He therefore knew of Roscoe’s
experiments with magnesium wire as an illuminant.
In 1864, using magnesium ribbon made by fl attening
Roscoe’s wire, Brothers took the fi rst portrait lit solely
by magnesium light—of Roscoe—and in the same year
took the fi rst photographs underground, at the Blue John
Mines in Derbyshire also using the ribbon.
His 1892 book Photography, its History, Processes,
Apparatus and Materials, went to several editions, he
published several albums of photographs, and was a
frequent contributor to the photographic press.
John HannavyBROWN JR., ELIPHALET (1816–1886)
An early-American expeditionary photographer
Although Eliphalet Brown, Jr. is best remembered as the
daguerreotypist with Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1852
mission to open Japan to the West, he had an extensive
career prior to that famous role.
He was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1816,
and by his early twenties was working as an artist in New
York, among a growing number of young men producing
the numerous drawings and lithographs required by a
burgeoning publications industry seeking to satisfy the
curiosities of a public eager for a more visual depiction
of the world.