When we went to society museum jersey we were introduced to may historical jersey artists. They were the leading forefront in jersey photography thought the occupation. I have chosen to do some background research on them and there photographic techniques to give me a better understanding of photography in this time period. So that my work can have a real feeling of the time period behind it.

Henry Mullins

Henry Mullins was part of the circle of photographic pioneers at the Royal Polytechnic Institute, Regent Street, London where the first photographic studio in Europe was opened in 1841. The first record of his professional practice is in Edinburgh in 1843. Mullins arrived in Guernsey in summer of 1847 and settled in Jersey the following year.Mullins’s productivity was matched by the technical standard of his work; qualities that are exemplified in the richness of the portraits of Victorian islanders preserved on the pages of his photograph albums. There are 9,861 images from Henry Mullins available to view online.Henry Mullins was by far the most prolific of the first generation of Jersey photographers in the mid-nineteenth century. He produced thousands of portraits of islanders between 1848 and 1873. While numerous photographic studios opened across the town of St Helier in the 1850s and 1860s Henry Mullins continued to be the photographer of choice for leading members of Jersey society and successful local and immigrant families.

William Collie

William Collie started his professional life as a portrait painter. He moved south and is recorded as living in St Helier, Jersey, before 1841, where he had a portrait business. He became one of the earliest photographers working in the Channel Islands, operating from Belmont House, St Helier, until 1872.William Collie was probably the first photographer to use Fox Talbot’s calotype process in Jersey and some of his previously unpublished photographs featured alongside those of Fox Talbot in an exhibition at the Musée Dorsay in Paris in 2008 of the first photographs taken on paper in Britain from 1840 to 1860.Collie was not merely a provincial studio portrait photographer. In the late 1840s he made a series of calotype portraits depicting ‘French and Jersey Market Women’ which were well received by the photography critic of the Art Union (1 June 1847). These studies were later exhibited at the London Great Exhibition of 1851.

Thomas Sutton

Thomas Sutton is a very important figure not only in the story of local photography, but also in wider photographic history. Sutton had a workshop and studio in St Brelade’s bay from 1848 until it burnt down in about 1854.A prolific author, Sutton wrote a number of books on the subject of photography, including the Dictionary of Photography in 1858. In 1859, Sutton developed the earliest panoramic camera with a wide-angle lens. In 1861, Sutton created the first single lens reflex camera. Sutton was the photographer for James’s Clark Maxwell pioneering 1861 demonstration of Color Photography. He also produced the first photographic publication of the island – “Souvenir de Jersey“, from which this image is taken.

Emile Guiton

Emile Guiton was born in Jersey in 1879.  He was a very active member of the Société Jersiaise – curator of the Museum, on the Executive Committee, joint honorary secretary and editor of the Annual Bulletin.  Emile Guiton was a keen amateur photographer and practised throughout his long life.  He experimented with colour at the beginning of the twentieth century in “Autochromes”.  His subjects include the recording of archaeological excavations and he was one of the few people in Jersey permitted to take photographs during the German Occupation of 1940 – 1945.  Emile Guiton also recognised very early on the importance of collecting photographs, both as a valuable social historic resource and as interesting artefacts, an archive of one thousand three hundred German Occupation images was compiled by Emile. That archive forms a large part of the images we will be exploring today.