Valentine Blanchard

Photographing Movement in Wet-Plate London

Valentine Blanchard was born in 1831in Cambridgeshire, England,and began working as a photographer in London in the 1850s. He produced portraits and stereographs, and by the early 1860s had gained recognition for urban views made with short exposures.^*1 The wet-collodion process required a glass plate to be sensitized immediately before exposure and exposed and developed while it was still wet. Street photography therefore meant bringing darkroom facilities to the location itself.^*14

In early urban photographs, architecture may appear sharp while pedestrians vanish or dissolve into faint streaks because people and vehicles did not remain in one place during a long exposure. Conservation material from the Metropolitan Museum of Art likewise explains how nineteenth-century photosensitive materials and exposure conditions directly registered the movement of subjects in the image.^*15

In his later essay “Afield with the Wet Plate,” Blanchard recalled that the equipment required for wet-plate photography nearly filled a wagon and that every stage of the work had to be completed on location. Preparation was important enough that each instrument had to be checked before departure, while the fatigue of waiting for weather and light formed part of the photographic process.^*24 Seen in light of this account, Blanchard’s pursuit of shorter exposures was part of the effort to make the heavy and time-sensitive wet-plate process workable outdoors.

In 1862, The Photographic News identified soot-darkened buildings, overcast weather, and crowded streets as particular difficulties of photographing London.^*23 That same year, the British Journal of Photography observed that instantaneous photography was moving from an exceptional achievement toward something several photographers were publishing in series, and discussed Blanchard’s work as part of this development.^*22

Blanchard responded to these constraints by adjusting sensitizing chemistry, development, lenses, and shutter mechanisms in order to hold traffic and crowds with shorter exposures. The National Science and Media Museum identifies him as an important early practitioner of “instantaneous photography” in Britain and notes his use of a horse-drawn carriage as a mobile darkroom.^*2

Inventor, Portrait Photographer, and Urban Photographer

Blanchard’s work extended beyond instantaneous street views. Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery confirm that he also photographed sitters as a commercial studio photographer.^*1

His stereographs of Scottish churches arrange naves and rows of columns as deep spatial structures particularly suited to stereoscopic viewing.^*4 Other views of ecclesiastical ruins likewise show architectural record and the commercial appeal of the stereograph operating within the same body of work.^*5

He also made figure studies far removed from urban traffic, including a portrait of a Roman peasant.^*6 Within the varied work of a Victorian commercial photographer—portraits, architecture, travel views, and stereographs—Blanchard used shorter exposures as a means of expanding the situations photography could record, not as a technique confined to one genre.

How Short Exposures Changed the Content of Urban Photography

The central issue in Blanchard’s work is what shorter exposure times allowed a photograph to contain. In The Haymarket, building facades share the frame with carriages, pedestrians, and traffic moving in several directions.^*3

In Regent Street, vehicles moving along the roadway are similarly fixed as part of the urban scene.^*10 Architectural perspective gives the image its structure while moving bodies pass through it, allowing the photograph to record both the city’s physical form and how it was moving at that moment.

Blanchard’s technical attention extended from instantaneous street photography to portraiture. A 1880 visit to his Regent Street studio published in The Photographic News records his explanation that south-facing daylight was carefully controlled with screens to produce a soft illumination comparable to light passing through a white cloud.^*25 Outdoors he used available light as fully as possible to shorten exposure; in portraiture he reduced and shaped light to model the face. This control of both the quantity and quality of light across different photographic situations makes the label “pioneer of the high-speed shutter” too narrow for his work.

In January 1863, Blanchard published “Instantaneous Photography” under his own name in the British Journal of Photography.^*27 Short exposure was therefore both a visual feature of his finished street photographs and a technical subject he continued to examine in the professional press.

This method should not be equated with the shooting experience of later snapshot photography made with small cameras. Large equipment, wet-plate preparation, and the selection of a fixed camera position were all required; the “instant” was anticipated through extensive technical preparation.^*13 That preparation allowed carriages, people, waves, and clouds that would have faded during longer exposures to remain legible, making the speed of urban life a concrete part of the photograph.

Stereography and Instantaneous Photography in the Same Visual Culture

Nineteenth-century stereographs generated depth by presenting paired left and right images through a viewer and circulated widely as a domestic medium for simulated encounters with distant places and cities. The output of the London Stereoscopic Company indicates the scale of this market and the breadth of its subjects.^*18

William England, a contemporary of Blanchard, was likewise known for stereography and travel photography, translating large exhibitions and urban spaces into stereoscopic views.^*19 Blanchard combined this spatial presentation with temporal change—people, horses, waves, and clouds made visible by shorter exposures.

In the 1863 Photographic News Almanac, Blanchard drew attention to William England’s Paris street photographs for recording traffic, crowds, and a military procession. Research at the University of Hamburg examines this text as evidence that Blanchard and England were both attempting to capture urban “street-life” through instantaneous photography at the same time.^*28 The text evaluates shorter exposure through its ability to preserve movements of urban life that had previously been difficult to photograph.

The Instantaneous Views of Margate Beach marketed the seaside resort as a place in motion, incorporating beachgoers and activity at the water’s edge.^*11 Stereoscopic depth supplied the sense of being there, while instantaneous exposure added what was happening at that moment. Cities and tourist sites consequently acquired a density absent from static views of landmarks.

London Bridge and the Density of Traffic

In London Bridge, from the Borough. Instantaneous, the density of vehicles and pedestrians crossing the bridge dominates the image. The print in the Getty Museum shows traffic becoming so much a part of the visual information that the architecture recedes toward the background.^*12

The “instant” in photographs of this kind did not yet dissect droplets of water or bodily motion as later high-speed shutters would. The aim was to hold urban flow clearly enough to distinguish individual vehicles and people without reducing them to blur. As a result, these street views also became records of transport, dress, and urban life.

Picturesque Subjects and Technical Experiment

Blanchard’s landscapes and figure studies were not valued solely for instantaneous exposure. The National Gallery of Victoria’s “Picturesque Sensibility” places painterly composition, ruins, rural figures, and the selection of views within the broader visual culture of nineteenth-century photography.^*7 His A Roman Peasant is one example of this picturesque subject matter.

These tendencies coexisted within the same career. New sensitizing methods and shutters served the depiction of modern speed, while also allowing portraits and landscapes to be made under a wider range of conditions. In Blanchard’s work, technical change expanded the temporal range available to photography across cities, architecture, tourism, and portraiture.

RPS Exhibitions and the Reassessment of Instantaneous Photography

The catalogue of the Royal Photographic Society’s 1898 international exhibition records a group of Blanchard’s wet-collodion instantaneous photographs from the 1850s and 1860s presented as historical achievements of the medium.^*20 This retrospective presentation shows that his short-exposure work remained a recognized milestone in early photographic technique decades after the technical competition of its own moment had passed.

The Victorian Era Exhibition of 1897 likewise organized early technical experiments within a history of photographic development.^*21 Blanchard is not among the best-known Victorian photographers today, but the repeated use of his photographs in later exhibitions of technical history supports a broader understanding of instantaneous exposure than a record of how many seconds an exposure required.

Urban Photography in Relation to Marville and Annan

The differences become clearer in comparison with other forms of contemporary urban record. Charles Marville systematically photographed streets and architecture before and during the transformation of Paris, preserving the city’s physical structure and change.^*16 By contrast,Thomas Annanlinked Glasgow’s poor living conditions to records of buildings and streets. Blanchard pursued a different problem: how to retain the movement that constituted the city itself.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas preserves a substantial group of Blanchard’s 1862 London stereographs. Views of the Bank of England, General Post Office, Temple Bar, the Strand, Parliament Street, and other sites survive in a consistent numbered format.^*26 The group shows that his urban photographs were produced as a coherent commercial series crossing centers of finance, administration, transport, and entertainment.

Instantaneous stereographs made in the United States, such as Broadway in the Rain, similarly used short exposures to record wet streets and traffic.^*17 Blanchard cannot be credited as the sole “inventor” of instantaneous urban photography. His sustained experiments in 1860s London nevertheless made visible at an early stage the degree to which exposure time determined how the city could appear in a photograph.

From Empty Streets to Streets Filled with Time

The Rijksmuseum preserves photographs by Blanchard of markets, major streets, seaside resorts, and architecture, spanning different urban and tourist settings.^*8 In Covent Garden Market, the structure of a commercial space and the activity of the people using it occupy the same frame.^*9

Blanchard’s historical position does not depend on ranking his photographs among the earliest street views to include people. Faced with a medium in which buildings survived long exposures while moving people and vehicles often disappeared, he combined sensitizing materials, lenses, development, and a mobile darkroom to create conditions capable of recording how streets were actually used. Modern cities, often photographed primarily as collections of buildings, could now appear as places where traffic, crowds, tourism, and work unfolded at the same time.

The conditions of making these photographs, and the photographer’s physical relation to the camera, were very different from later street snapshots made with small cameras. Even so, Blanchard’s early demonstration that photography could register urban movement as well as urban form places him at an important intersection of instantaneous and urban photography.