Midley History of early Photography:

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Author's Comment

This is a personal site in that it provides the publications on the history of photography of only one person. However it is appropriate here to at least add the personal reason why this site is named as Midley. The author’s paternal ancestors through much of the nineteenth century, in particular at the period the subject of these articles are set — in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s — lived at Midley in the middle of the Romney Marsh (at the south west corner of Kent on the English Channel). They were agricultural labourers and shepherds — or, to use the local word, ‘Lookers’. It must have been a hard life on the Romney Marsh at that period. Yet Thomas Wood and wife Elizabeth were obviously healthy having fifteen children, all who lived to become adults. In the Midley area resided only about six families in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet at some earlier period there must surely have been a larger number of residents of the area, for there had been a small chapel in existence which has very long since survived only as a ruin, prominent in the surrounding flatness of the Marsh. Photography in the mid-19th century certainly did not touch their lives — they were typical of a neglected rural working class, ignored at the time and unknown now.

In my research on the history of the 1830s and 1840s (appropriate to dedicate it to those ‘Lookers’ at Midley of that period), I have been struck by the existence of many significant contributors to the beginnings of photography who have been greatly neglected or are entirely absent from what might be called the standard histories of the subject. The parameters of the early history of photography have become set, for example, by the self-promoting character of W. H. F. Talbot. The ‘standard’ texts need to be read and known, of course, but spend only a little time looking at primary sources, then the inevitable conclusion can be that the historiography of the subject remains contained within very narrow boundaries. Instead the history of photography requires some of the fresh air and wide open sky characteristic of Midley of the Romney Marsh.
What has been published from research by the author on primary sources (and what other research needs publication!) reconstructs forgotten episodes of the early history of photography no more than the surviving stones of the Midley Chapel can represent the original church. Maybe, dear reader, you can add a brick sometime to provide a fuller view of a Midley emblem history of photography.

Archived from 2010 by UK Webarchive selected for preservation by the British Library. www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/36700193/   Also archived at Internet Archive WaybackMachine web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.midley.co.uk

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 Pages were last modified on this site July 2015

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