606
eventually emigrating to the United States in 1861,
fi rstly as a photographer, then he became a lecturer and
fi nally an evangelical minister.
James Graham became a travelling companion to
British and American visitors and entered the world
of art in 1854 and 1855 when he chaperoned, accom-
modated and befriended two Pre-Raphaelite painters:
Thomas Seddon (1821–56), the fi rst Pre-Raphaelite
painter to enter a national collection with ‘Jerusalem and
the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel’
(1854, bought by the National Gallery, London 1857),
which much resembled a Graham photograph of the
same view, together with Holman Hunt (1827–1910).
Both Seddon and Hunt used Graham’s photographs,
including Graham photographing the goat for Hunt’s
famous painting ‘The Scapegoat’ (1855). In his diaries
Hunt described Graham as ‘a churchman with a strong
tendency of Presbyterianism’ and that he was ‘prosy and
an incorrigible procrastinator.’ He was a man of rigid
principles but also outspoken against injustice. Hunt was
to join Graham in his growing criticism of the treatment
of the Jewish Christian converts and their appalling
conditions under the bishopric of Bishop Samuel Gobat
(1799–1879); both were to issue protest pamphlets in
Britain. Jewish converts were totally economically de-
pendent on the Christian community for work or charity
as the Turkish rulers had as much contempt for them
as the Jews. Like the Finns, Graham befriended the
Christian Jews and became increasingly criticised by the
church for ‘indulging too much in the society of worldly
people.’ Such complaints to the British establishment
resulted in his dismissal in 1856 and later brought down
the Finns who were recalled. Throughout, Graham had a
peculiar access to those of importance but little is known
of his activities after leaving Jerusalem: he is known to
have travelled to Syria, Rhodes, Egypt, and frequently
to Naples, where he photographed extensively, at least
for seven years between 1857-1864, but probably until
c.1868. He died in Paris in 1869 on his way from Scot-
land to winter in Naples. He made an extensive tour
round the Gulf of Naples using waxed paper negatives
and produced a remarkable set of photographs which in-
cluded probably the earliest calotypes of Capri, Ravello
and Scala, and some of the fi nest of Pompei. In Naples
he assisted the Anglican community with the building of
Christ Church (1865), the fi rst Anglican church allowed
in Southern Italy. This including negotiating with the
Italian government over the site for the church promised
by Garibaldi to the Anglican community in 1860 when
he ‘liberated’ Naples.
Although Graham began to copyright his images from
1862 onwards, his photographs are extremely rare as he
never became a commercial photographer, although, in
later life, some of his prints were used for reproductions,
particularly Biblical texts; rather he appears to have used
them to put into albums for presentation to family and
friends. Throughout he remained with the ‘out of date’
paper negative. Not particularly known in the annals of
photography, he nevertheless exhibited in exhibitions
at Crystal Palace (1855 and 1864) and in 1859 in Paris
(where he had an address) where his ‘Voyage à Jerusa-
lem’ of some 50 images found much favour.
Alistair CrawfordBibliography
W. Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism & Pre-Raphaelite Brother-
hood vol. I and II, Macmillan, London, 1905.
Bertram Lazard, ‘The Photographs of James Graham in the
Middle East’ The PhotoHistorian Supplement Summer, 89,
The Royal Photographic Society, Bath (1990).
Dror Wahrman, Carney Gavin, and Nitza Rosovsky, Capturing
The Holy Land, M. J. Diness and the Beginnings of Photogra-
phy in Jerusalem The Harvard Semitic Museum, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1993.GREAT BRITAIN
Composing a national survey is a diffi cult task; it re-
quires attention to a wide range of practices and can
induce an excessive focus on canonical pictures and
‘inventions.’ More signifi cantly, it is hard to avoid the
ideological assumptions embedded in a ‘national tradi-
tion.’ During the nineteenth century the British nation
was in the making and there were plenty of Brits abroad
whose images count among the highpoints of ‘British
photography,’ while quite a few photographers working
in the British Isles were emigrants or passage migrants
without whom ‘British photography’ would be very dif-
ferent. The story is further complicated, because at the
time Britain was the foremost Imperial power. The pho-
tographs produced in parts of the globe coloured pink,
appear in some accounts as British images, but they also
fi gure in the history of other social formations—‘Indian
photography’ or ‘photography in Burma.’
Accounts of origin are also notoriously problematic
and photography provides no exception. One place to
start is with the fact that some people were looking
for a cheap and reliable copying technique in the later
eighteenth century. In 1802 Thomas Wedgwood and
Humphrey Davy published a paper in the Journal of the
Royal Institution giving details of how to copy existing
images on paper, or pale leather, treated with silver
nitrate. The veracity of these early experiments is open
to dispute, but Wedgwood and Davy probably produced
images that they were unable to ‘fi x.’ Following Arago’s
announcement of Daguerre’s process in 1839, William
Henry Fox Talbot came forward to contest priority of
invention, having independently discovered ‘light drawn
pictures.’ Talbot, a landed gentleman with interests in
mathematics, ancient languages and other things, wrote
in the introduction to The Pencil of Nature, that in: