Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England Through a Victorian Lens (Victoria and Albert Museum Studies)

Filled with lovely scenes of 19th-century England, this beautiful book is a nostalgic glimpse of a vanished world through the lens of Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894), who was one of the first, and remains one of the greatest, of all British amateur photographers.

A tranquil stillness pervades Turner's evocative images of churches, cottages, old farm buildings, and ancient ruins. In stark contrast are his shots of the radically modern, long-gone Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park. Also here are his subtly toned portrait photographs, and his 1857 pictures of Amsterdam that are among the earliest known photographs of that city. This first monograph on Turner's work accompanies an exhibition in early 2002 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A Victoria and Albert Museum Publication

70 photographs in quadratone, 112 pages, 11 x 9 3/4"

Martin Barnes is assistant curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.