635
HARRISON, WILLIAM JEROME
daguerreotypes include The Infant Saviour Bearing the
Cross, Young America, and an 1847 plate of his friend,
Poe. Romer suggests he won more awards than any
photographer of the period.
The defi nitive analysis of Harrison is in IMAGE:
Gabriel Harrison: The Poetic Daguerreian, by Grant
B. Romer. The George Eastman House has the Harrison
family records and images. A self portrait of him as an
actor is in the West Archives.
Larry West
HARRISON, WILLIAM JEROME
(1845–1908)
English amateur photographer
Founder of the Photographic Record and Survey Move-
ment, William Jerome Harrison was a remarkable ex-
ample of the archetypal Victorian polymath. He was an
original thinker, a geologist of national repute, an inno-
vative educationalist and a leading fi gure in the amateur
photographic world of the late-nineteenth century.
Harrison did not begin practical ‘work in the art-sci-
ence’ until 1881 at the age of 44 years. He had gained
an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject from me-
ticulous studies of the history, chemistry and various
applications of photography. Harrison undertook these
investigations in his early career as a writer, museum
curator and science teacher, as his awareness of the
role that photography could play in the illustration of
educational material developed. The publication of
Harrison’s account A Sketch of the Geology of Leicester
and Rutland in 1877, ‘the fi rst geological book... illus-
trated by photographs’ was an early demonstration of the
reciprocal relationship that Harrison perceived between
science, photography and education. ‘Let nature be thy
teacher’ was refl ected on his personal bookplate and
became a personal credo throughout his life.
Harrison’s photographic self-education was
prompted by his belief that ‘it is the man who takes
as his starting point a knowledge of what others have
done and are doing, who will best be able to advance
photography in the future.’ In 1885 he made another
contribution to the advancement of photography with
the fi rst of a large number of essays on all aspects of
the subject. From the prolifi c manner in which Harrison
contributed to the literature of photography in British
and American photographic journals, it might be rea-
sonable to conclude that he had decided to undertake
this task single-handedly. By 1887 he had compiled the
fi rst complete bibliography of photography, the results
of which were published in The Photographic News.
On completion he had listed and often annotated 328
titles of books of photography. His accounts of the
‘bibliography’ of the subject were unmatched in his
own day and remain important reference works for all
modern photographic historians.
Another important project for Harrison was A His-
tory of Photography, written as a practical guide and
an introduction to its latest developments... with a
biographical sketch of the author, and an appendix by
Dr. Maddox on the discovery of the gelatino-bromide
process. This was published in New York by the Scovill
Manufacturing Company in 1887 and by various pub-
lishers in Britain the following year. Harrison also wrote
instructional articles and textbooks with Photography
for All: an elementary textbook and introduction to the
art of taking photographs published in 1888.
In the two decades on either side of the turn of the
century, a documentary photographic movement evolved
amongst amateur photographic societies that shared the
notion of the photograph as evidence. The initiation of
this Record and Survey Movement has been ascribed to
Sir Benjamin Stone, through his work with the Warwick-
shire Photographic Survey (WPS), the National Photo-
graphic Record Association (NPRA) and the Federation
of Photographic Record Societies (FPRS). Although
Stone may be credited with aiding the establishment
and promotion of Record and Survey photography, it
was Harrison who was the visionary and guiding force
and truly responsible for the creation, momentum and
dissemination of interest in this work.
Shortly after the re-formation of the Birmingham
Photographic Society (BPS) in 1885, Harrison as the
society’s new Vice-President replied to enquiries made
to him concerning the goals of an amateur photographic
society. As part of the work that Harrison proposed
members undertake, he suggested that:
... by securing accurate representations of old buildings
we can furnish a record for posterity whose accuracy can-
not be disputed, and whose interest in the future would
be great. But I would not only photograph the old build-
ings, I would secure, on rapid plates, impressions of our
streets, of the principal lines of thoroughfare, and of the
busy crowds by which they are traversed.At a ‘Special Meeting’ called on 11th December
1889, Harrison presented his paper ‘Some Notes on a
Proposed Photographic Survey of Warwickshire.’ In this
he points out that only now had such a scheme become
possible with the publication of the government map
on a six-inch to a mile scale showing the outline of
every fi eld and the position of every tree. Warwickshire
comprised two hundred sheets of this map. Harrison
proposed to allot one sheet of this map to every pair of
photographers who were willing to share the enterprise
and obtain good negatives of every point of interest
within the area allotted to them. He suggested illustrat-
ing the state of things ‘as they exist today’ to be printed
on sensitive dry plates and printed in platinum. The size