A photographic tour, by Godfrey Kittow
An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this journal, kept in 1866, an amateur photographer records a summer tour of the Scottish Highlands, travelling with his camera, his chemicals and a portable dark tent in which each glass plate had to be prepared and developed on the spot.
August 3rd. Glen Corran. I have now been eleven days in the Highlands with my camera, and I have made precisely two negatives worth the keeping. My equipment fills two great boxes, a tripod, and the dark tent, which folds, so the maker assured me, ‘into a compass no larger than a portmanteau’. It does not. It must be strapped across the back of a hired pony named Jessie, who has taken a strong dislike both to the tent and to me.
The method, for those who have not suffered it, is this. Each glass plate must be coated, dipped in the silver bath, carried still wet to the camera, exposed, and hurried back into the tent to be developed before it dries. In a London studio this is the work of a few minutes. On a Highland hillside it is a battle. Today the wind caught the tent as I was pouring the developer and laid the whole thing flat upon me, so that I knelt in the heather, blind and choking, with a bottle of ether in one hand and a ruined plate in the other.
My fingers are stained black to the second knuckle with silver, and will not come clean for any soap. The landlady at the inn at Corran Bridge believes I am a chimney sweep of unusual pretensions. The midges, meanwhile, have discovered that the inside of a dark tent is a pleasant place to pass an afternoon, and two of my plates this week are spotted with their small bodies, fixed for ever in the varnish.
I will not pretend that I have not thought of throwing the whole apparatus into Loch Corran. Yet there are hours that make amends. Yesterday an old shepherd stood behind me for the best part of an hour without a word, and when at last I showed him a plate of his own cottage, its every stone sharp and silver in the glass, he took off his bonnet to it, as if it were the minister.
And this evening I had my reward. The wind dropped about seven, the light turned soft and level along the glen, and I made a plate of the falls below the bridge with an exposure of forty seconds. I developed it with my heart in my mouth. It is perfect. The water has become a white veil, the birches stand out leaf by leaf, and there is a little rainbow caught in the spray which I did not see with my own eyes until the glass showed it to me. I sat in the tent and laughed aloud, black fingers and all. Tomorrow I shall carry everything up the Ben.
“For the writer, photography brings far more frustration than pleasure.”
To what extent do you agree with this statement?
You should comment on:
You must refer to the text to support your comments.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.