Benjamin Brecknell Turner

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), one of the first, and one of the greatest, of early British 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.