Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Morphing Past & Present
This selection of images 'morph' between Turner's original photographs and the same scenes photographed today. Click on the thumbnails below to view animated images.
Many of Turner's finest photographs were made in Worcestershire in the early 1850s and must rank as some of the very first photographs made here. His connections with the county came through his marriage in 1847 to Agnes Chamberlain, the daughter of Henry Chamberlain, a Worcester porcelain manufacturer.
In 1837, Turner's father-in-law gave up his part in the porcelain business and purchased Bredicot Court in Bredicot village, a cluster of cottages, a church and a few farm buildings four miles from the city. Turner stayed there for holidays. A family history, based on Turner's wife's memoirs, notes:
Benjamin Turner, when staying there, spent a good deal of time taking photographs, his camera being a huge square box …There was also a little folding tent, with apparatus for changing plates. Developing was apparently done on the spot. Of course the untidy farm furnished endless subjects for photography.
As the first person to photograph and, in a sense, 'capture' Bredicot, Turner must have felt great affection for and ownership of his surroundings. By making pictures in summer and winter, and by effective repositioning of the camera, he coaxed the location to yield a surprising number of visual aspects. However, he chose not to aim his camera at the railway that had recently cut through the village. The country was a place to relax with the family and photograph the signs of a reassuring older order. Bredicot provided a base for other photographic excursions in the area: the city of Worcester, Clerkenleap, Kempsey, Spetchley, Crowle, Earl's Croome and Pershore.
Today Bredicot remains a small rural hamlet surrounded by farmland and open countryside. It is a remarkable survival considering its location close to the M5 and barely four miles from the centre of Worcester. The size and layout of Bredicot is largely unaltered from the time of Turner's photographs, yet the actual locations of some of the scenes in and around the farmyard of Bredicot Court have changed almost beyond recognition reflecting the contrast in rural life between the 19th and 21st centuries.
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