Hugh Owen

Hugh Owen (18081897) was one of the first generation of amateur photographers in the United Kingdom. Early life Owen was born in September 1808 in Market Drayton, Shropshire, England and baptised in July 1809 as "Hugh Owen Jones son of Lydia Jones", indicating that he was illegitimate. His father, also Hugh Owen, was a British soldier who fought and eventually settled in Portugal. Moving to Bristol, Owen worked as chief cashier for the Great Western Railway of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His first wife, Mary Anne, died in 1846 when Owen spilt alcohol on her dress and it caught fire from a candle. His interest in photography began shortly thereafter, said by some observers as being a coping mechanism after her death. Learning photography It is likely that he was introduced to paper negative techniques by Henry Fox Talbot. He perfected the silver calotype process in experiments conducted at his Bristol home. This complex process involved sensitizing the paper with a silver nitrate solution to produce images upon wet plates. Owen's efforts rapidly received attention and he went on to be an early member of the Edinburgh Calotype Club in 1847. He was a founding member of the Photographic Society of London, attending its Inaugural Meeting on 20 January 1853. He was a vocal opponent of Frederick Scott Archer's collodion process, particularly after he badly stained his fingers in 1855, when using the chemicals required by that process, although the use of chemicals such as collodion would soon supersede the calotype process. The Great Exhibition Owen's calotypes were exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. His images so impressed the Commissioners that, along with his French contemporary Claude-Marie Ferrier, he was asked to make 155 photographs of the exhibits. More than 140 bound sets of reports and accompanying photographs known as the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided were presented to, among others, Queen Victoria, Heads of Foreign Governments, the Exhibition commissioners, and the British Museum. These remain Owen's most famous photographs, and provide a good insight into how he approached his work. He tended to concentrate on individual objects in sharp focus, contrasted with shadowed backgrounds.