The career of the celebrated British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) overlapped with the invention of photography in 1839.
His encounter with the new medium featured in a scene from Mike Leigh’s biographical film ‘Mr. Turner’ (2014).
It was one that reimagined Turner’s awareness of photography and its likely long-term impact on painting, which he had done so much to revolutionise.
This cinematic encounter came to mind during a visit last week to the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and confirmed that this pioneering artist was well ahead of early photography’s technical limitations.
One of the 38 watercolours bequeathed by collector Henry Vaughan that form ‘Turner in January,’ and are displayed annually under the terms of his will in a free exhibition, is titled ‘The Piazzetta, Venice.’
This vivid scene was painted during a short visit made by the artist in the summer of 1840 and captures the moment when a violent storm hit.
To recreate the brilliant crack of lightning he witnessed, Turner scratched the surface of the watercolour to reveal the white paper beneath.
Photographically, it was another four decades before professional photographer William Nicholson Jennings of Philadelphia (1860-1946) was credited with successfully capturing a fork of lightning using his plate camera.
It was a ‘first’ that has since been challenged by other early practitioners, but Jennings used it as a springboard and spent the rest of his career experimenting with what photography could record.
His 1882 breakthrough clearly inspired others around the world.
One was the Tynemouth landscape and portrait photographer Matthew Auty (1850-1895) whose successful career is traced in other Pressphotoman blogposts.
Auty & Ruddock blogpost – 23rd September 2024
Gateshead Glories blogpost – 22nd September 2025
A copyright form he completed on 15th October 1884 and now part of the National Archives at Kew records that he was the author of ‘Photograph of flash of lightning.’
All these years later, the image still has the desired effect despite the neat crease across the middle of Auty’s print.
Of course, it would be fascinating to learn more about when, where and how he created his version of the lightning shot.
In the absence of a written account, imagination suggests that Auty placed his tripod and camera on the sea front cliffs within a stone’s throw of his Tynemouth studio and waited for a storm to roll in from the North Sea.
Pressphotoman 
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