Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach Robinson (c. 1870)
Robinson's When the Day's Work is Done (1877). Combination print made from six different negatives.

Henry Peach Robinson (9 July 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire – 21 February 1901, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent) was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing[1] - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image;[2] an early example of photomontage.[3] He engaged in contemporary debates in the photographic press and associations about the legitimacy of 'art photography' and in particular the combining of separate images into one. [4][5]

  1. ^ Robinson, H. P. (1860). On Printing Photographic Pictures from Several Negatives. British Journal of Photography, 7(115), 94.
  2. ^ Vertrees, A. (1982). The picture making of Henry Peach Robinson'. Perspectives on Photography, Austin, Texas, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 79, 101.
  3. ^ Oscar Gustave Rejlander preceded Robinson in developing combination printing techniques in the mid-1850s, exhibiting his The Two Ways of Life by 1857, while in the 1855 Journal of Photography Scottish colleagues Berwick and Annan proposed such a technique. Earlier again, in 1852 De Montfort published Procede de grouper plusiers portraits obtenue isolement afin d'en former un seul tableau heliographique (Procedure for grouping several separately obtained portraits in order to make a single heliographic plate). See Prodger, Phillip (22 October 2009), Darwin's camera : art and photography in the theory of evolution, Oxford University Press (published 2009), p. 166, ISBN 978-0-19-515031-5. Gustave Le Gray, also in 1957, achieved simultaneous detail in both sky and sea through combination printing in his 'The Great Wave', 1857, Albumen print from collodion-on-glass negative. Museum no. 68:004, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. French architectural photographer Edouard Baldus, commissioned in 1851 to document the state of French architectural heritage, employed combination printing techniques from paper negatives to produce not only panoramas, but also to deal with technical limitations of exposure range and depth of focus, particularly for his Cloister of St.. Trephine, Arles, 1851
  4. ^ Robinson, H. P. (1860). Composition NOT Patchwork. British Journal of Photography, 7(121), 190.
  5. ^ Harker, M. (1989). Henry Peach Robinson:“The Grammar of Art.”. British Photography in the Nineteenth Century.