Photography and Fine Art - Henry Bailey Turner

Below is a gallery of illustrations from Photography and Fine Art, a manual of photography published by Henry Bailey Turner in 1922. Turner founded School Arts magazine, originally known as The Applied Arts Book. Turner's illustrations offer a glimpse into the strange confidence intoned by photographic instructors of the era. The captions prescribing lighting styles for the sexes are comic today, but reveal the typical gendering of photography in this kind of literature. Turner's rules of composition and balance are interesting too. In the text he develops complex systems for readers to follow in composing their pictures, much of them derived from painting instruction.