In Search of the Picturesque: The English Photographs of John Wheeley Gough Gutch 1856 - 59 - Tapa blanda

Bristol-born John Wheeley Gough Gutch originally trained as a surgeon before eventually becoming a photographer. A contemporary of Fox Talbot, he was experimenting with photography as early as 1841, making him one of the earliest known photographers working in the West of England. His work, influenced by the poets and painters of the period, has remained virtually undiscovered for more than 150 years.

Like many educated men of the period Gutch was interested in all things scientific, literary and artistic and wrote a series of articles for Thomas Sutton's Photographic Notes. His personal albums dating from 1856-1860 are a fascinating collection of work featuring the people and places of Cornwall and Devon, Malvern in Worcestershire, Somerset, Bristol and the Lake District.

Partially paralyzed and using a cumbersome wet-plate camera that doubled as a darkroom, Gutch had to traverse miles of muddy rural tracks by horse and carriage.

This selection of more than 100 images from his five albums, now published for the first time, provides a remarkable historic record of the places and people working in what are now often rare or extinct industries - pilchard fishermen or tin miners, as well as portraits of family groups or working children, landscapes, villages and geological studies.

Ian Sumner attended photography school in the early 1970s and then worked in Australia for a year in order to buy a clutch, of Nikon F cameras and lenses. Influenced by 'street photography', Sumner worked as a newspaper photographer in west London and in 1982 moved to the West Country, where he now works as a press and architectural photographer. He has always had an interest in early British photographers and, after acquiring an original print by John Gutch, realised that Gutch could be regarded as an early photojournalist. Further research into Gutch's life showed that he was descended from an old West Country family who, in the seventeenth century, lived in the Somerset towns of Glastonbury and Wells. This gave the author a local interest, as he too had lived in the same towns - several hundred years later.