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John Pattison Gibson (Photographer)
John Pattison Gibson: An Appreciation of his Photography by Isabella Jedrzejczyk, 1982 (text of Amber publication):
John Pattison Gibson fits within the tradition of photographers such as Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, Whitby photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, George Washington Wilson and John Thomson; all of whom were his contemporaries in Britain.
The practical problems of photographing were significant: wet collodion negative plates, boiling developers in the desert, and large heavy equipment. Yet they voyaged far and wide, to Egypt, India, the Crimea, China, and all around England. In a similar fashion, in America, the boundaries both of photography and geography were being pushed by men like Matthew Brady, who photographed the American Civil War, Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan, pioneers and documenters of the New World. They all shared a dedication to their medium, and a commitment to the reality of their environments.
Photography lends itself to the documentary tradition more than any other medium (even if the printing is ultimately manipulated). This tradition can be traced to the present day in the work of people like Frederick Evans, Lewis Hine, Eugene Atget, Russell Lee, Walker Evans and Bill Brandt.
Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, who was photographing life on the Norfolk Broads at the same time that J.P. Gibson was working, published a thesis in 1889 entitled Naturalistic Photography, supporting Art Photography’s claim; whether or not photography was art! It must be remembered that painters were very threatened by the advent of photography because of its ability to represent reality. This meant that painters had to define a new function for themselves if they were not to compete with the camera. The debate hinged on the idea that indeed anyone could take a photograph. It only required technical skill, and one need not be an artist to operate a camera. Therefore, how could a photographer be an artist? Photographers responded to this by making their photographs look like paintings, to look ‘artistic’. Thus we have the birth of the pictorialist tradition in the history of photography. Photographers learned to print in atmospheric clouds, dramatic skies. They included quaint figures in their pictures for compositional effect, and also, at times, to emulate allegorical painting. One photographer, H.P. Robinson, would make several negatives and use bits from all of them to re-construct a previsualised image. The argument here was that in order to achieve such a picture, one required ‘artistic’ sensibility, and it was not just a record of ‘what the camera saw’
One can see these various influences in J.P. Gibson’ photographs. He undoubtedly was aware of the debates. He entered his photographs into competitions around the world, and he was a member of the Royal Photographic Society and the local Hexham Photographic Society. This is pure conjecture on my part but I believe Gibson distinguished between his artistic photographs (the most pictorial of his oeuvre) and the documentary work that he did as an extension of his interest in the history of his county of Northumberland, and his passion for archaeology. At times the two strands, pictorial and documentary became intertwined. One can see examples where this happens, and he has made a factual record of a ruin, or a river scene, introducing with the same picture a little figure (or group of figures) and an intensely dramatic sky. As did most photographers in his day J.P. Gibson made separate cloud negatives and added them to the other pictures because the negative emulsions at that time were not capable of rendering such extremes of lighting conditions. Even today, photographers that use black and white film need to use filters in order to bring out sky details in their prints.
It is evident, however, that even without these aids, J.P. Gibson had an unerring eye for composition and detail, and a great sensitivity to mood, expressed in his photographs through the awareness and use of light. We can only be grateful that he took up photography with such dedication and has left us such rich evidence of his times, fragments from a passing era.
Note: This A3 booklet of John Pattison Gibson’s photographs, published in 1982, is available from the Amber website.