Historic photographs of far north point to a long line of family creativity
Jenny Bruce, who recently published a booklet on Life in the Village Post Office about Berriedale, delves into some old photos from the north
Whenever I have embarked on historical research, synchronicity has always arisen, so it was no surprise when working on the story of Berriedale Post Office that something new would materialise.
Having an old sepia photograph in my possession of Berriedale House, I decided to use this for illustrating the story as it had also connections to Alexander Johnston, the well-known 19th-century Wick photographer.
He had taken this photograph while on his journey to the Kildonan Goldfields in 1868 to photograph the miners, and had probably stayed at the Berriedale Inn before continuing his journey south. A rest overnight for the horse would have been essential, as a cart was necessary to carry the heavy equipment for developing the collodion photos on site.
When I contacted Fergus Mather and Ian Leith of the Wick Society for permission to use the photograph of Berriedale, I was amazed that they had never seen an actual sepia print, as the one they held in the collection was the original glass negative.
Apparently, they did have an unusual photomontage which is quite remarkable. In this, Alexander Johnston had taken a self-portrait of himself seated alongside plants in his studio, but also superimposed a second photographic image of Berriedale House into the background. This photomontage has never been printed before, so permission was given for me to use this rare image in my booklet.
Photomontage is a process where two separate images are combined into a new composition with this then appearing as a single photograph. The first evidence of this appears to be around the 1850s when photographers experimented and tried to emulate images that could be accepted as fine art.
The French photographer Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1879) is considered the first to have achieved success in this field, but this approach to creativity aroused much controversy with many photographic societies at this time, due to the images not being a truthful record.
“Combination printing" as it came to be known was further developed in the late 19th century by Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. In Scotland, George Washington Wilson (1823-1893) whose collection of 37,000 glass negatives is part of Aberdeen University was also an exponent of this new process of imagery.
In 1857, he produced a group portrait which involved the first recorded use of photomontage in Scotland, achieving this by cutting and pasting small portraits together into a small oval, and then photographing the compositional collage. However, we have another Caithness connection to photography of this period in that of James Sinclair, 14th Earl of Caithness, who had experimented with collodion photography from 1859 and was part of the London Photographic Society since its inception in 1853.
In 1862, the Earl was elected as an honorary member of the Edinburgh Photographic Society and was presented with medals for his photographic views of winter scenes at the Dublin International Exhibition of Art and Industry in 1865. It is interesting to note that these same photographs were displayed at the Caithness Art and Industrial Exhibition in Wick in 1874.
One wonders then whether Alexander Johnston had been greatly influenced by the Earl of Caithness, as he was known for his remarkable inventiveness and creativity in design solutions, and Johnston may have visited his home in Caithness on plumbing business and so engaged in conversation on photography and its newest processes, and there is a photograph of the Earl and Countess taken in the grounds of the Castle of Mey. Alexander’s brother Charles, who helped run the plumbing business, had also been one of the members of the committee responsible for organising this unusual art exhibition in Wick and the industrial one in 1868.
From these early images, artists such as George Grosz and others elevated this photographic technique to a new role and perception where photomontage was visual construction work where artists assembled images with engineering skill and precision. Later, the "Constructivists" would combine dynamic graphic design and photography into a revolutionary approach to art with propaganda posters, whereas Surrealist artists would adopt the experimental photomontage as part of their unique vision with Salvador Dali, Magritte and Man Ray being their chief exponents at this time.
The developing visual awareness of photography by 1909 led to filmmakers for cinema adopting the photomontage process in a new, sophisticated way and this provided us with the beginnings of modern film. Now images could be cut and spliced and therefore joined to combine fantasy with realism. Today’s digital technology portrays the same photomontage of imaginative creativity but using a more advanced technology of visual effect using electronic and mechanical ingenuity.
The Johnstons, as Wick photographers, documented the most remarkable social history of the county of Caithness through three generations from 1863 to 1975. Alex Johnston on his retiral in the late 1970s donated the remarkable archive now known as the Johnston Collection which included his own, his father and grandfathers’ photographs – including 100,000 glass negatives – to the Wick Society, which is held in trust by them with about 50,000 negatives having been digitised.
But one forgets that these three generations of photographers were originally artists primarily and their oil paintings, pastel drawings and watercolours are also part of the Wick Society’s assets. One of Alexander’s oil paintings is of Provost James Reiach in Wick Town Hall showing Johnstone’s distinctive talent in portraiture.
However, creativity from this family is not over and Hugh Alexander Johnston, a grandson of Alex’s brother James and a great, great, grandson of the original photographer Alexander, is continuing the family tradition.
Throughout his childhood, Hugh was interested in art and photography and as a first-class graduate he is now developing new methods of visual communication which is synonymous with his great, great grandfather, where they both wanted to push the boundaries in creativity.