More on Preston’s early photographers

Following on from the recent post about Silas Eastham and the oldest surviving Preston photographs, here’s some information on a couple more photographers active in Victorian Preston.

Thomas Ogle and Thomas Edge developed the technique of stereographic photography that enabled the creation of a 3D image from a pair of photographs.

They were the subject of a lengthy article Ogle and Edge: Lakeland Stereographers by Bruce Graver in the journal Stereo World in 2020.

https://stereoworld.org/wp…/uploads/2021/07/SW-V46-1.pdf

The following extracts are taken from that article:

‘… for a period of about a five years, roughly between 1856 and 1860, the team of Ogle and Edge established themselves as the world’s pre-eminent photographers of the picturesque scenery of the English Lake District …’

‘Thomas Ogle was born in 1813, the youngest son of a successful corn and flour merchant in the Lancashire city of Preston. In his teens he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, and by the age of 20 was a partner in his own bindery, which specialized in “account books of all sorts, ruled to any pattern, and firmly bound in the most durable Materials, with Spring backs….”

‘Ogle continued in this Gradgrindian line of work for much of his early life, escaping occasionally to the Lake District, where he met Hannah Burton of Kendal, a tobacco merchant’s daughter, whom he married at Kendal parish church in 1842. Shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to Ireland, and there their eldest child was born. But by 1850 they had returned to Preston, and Ogle was ready for a change of careers.’

When the Avenham Institute opened:

‘Ogle began moonlighting there, giving lectures twice a week on his real love: landscape and figure drawing. We can assume that he also attended lectures at the Institute on photography, optics, and the chemistry necessary for understanding photographic processing, because by 15 November, 1855, he had reinvented himself as a “Portrait Painter and Photographic Artist,” according to a notice in the local newspaper, The Preston Guardian.

‘His studio, with “photo graphic apparatus on the newest and most improved principles,” opened a short walk from the Institute, at 28 Great Avenham Street, Preston, and for the next year, advertisements for his business appeared in the Guardian on almost a weekly basis, all of them emphasizing portraiture.

‘But it was not long before Ogle drifted away from studio portraits and began exploring the brave new world of simulated three-dimensionality, made possible by the lenticular stereoscope. As he did so, Ogle moved outside his comfortable studio into plein air, and began photo graphing landscapes.’

At about this time, he went into partnership with Thomas Edge, who was also born in Preston:

‘Ogle needed a partner, and sometime between 1856 and 1857, he found one in Thomas Edge. Like Ogle, Edge was a fledgling portrait photographer who probably learned his craft at the Preston Institute alongside Ogle himself, and together they expanded the Great Avenham Street portrait studio into a facility for mass-producing photo graphic prints and stereoscopic slides.

‘The division of labor seems to have been this: Ogle seems to have been mainly responsible for taking landscape photographs, and Edge seems to have been mainly responsible for the mass-production of prints and stereoscopic slides.’

‘Their earliest stereo graphs were primarily of local scenery, often with personal associations: a view of the Preston dock yards, for instance, where Ogle’s cousins were partners in a shipping firm, or rustic views along the rivers Ribble and Brock where they grew up, clearly indebted to the tradition of picturesque drawings and prints.’

Below are two of those early views of Preston and district survive:

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