RUE PRINCIPALE VUE D'UNE TERRASSE

Numéro d'objet:	21160
Photographe:	Wilson, Georges Washington
Date:	1870
Catégorie:	Photographie
Origine:	Tanger
Thème:	Rues, quartiers et maisons

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Après des études d'art à Édimbourg et Paris, George Washington Wilson retourne dans sa ville natale d'Aberdeen en 1849 et y élabore son premier appareil photographique. Il devient alors le premier portraitiste écossais en photographiant notamment la reine Victoria en 1855.
Outre la création d'un appareil photographique, son titre de « pionnier écossais de la photographie » est dû à son amélioration des techniques de prise de vue en extérieur et la production de masse des plaques photographiques qu'il a vendu à plus d'un demi million d'exemplaire en 1864 selon ses dires.
À sa mort en 1893, son entreprise emploie quarante personnes et constitue l'une des plus importante du monde avec celle de James Valentine, un autre Écossais de Dundee.
George Washington Wilson (7 February 1823 - 9 March 1893) was a pioneering Scottish photographer.
After studying art in Edinburgh and London, Wilson returned to his native city of Aberdeen in 1849 and established a business as a portrait miniaturist catering to the wealthy families of the North East of Scotland. After some years of mediocre success, Wilson ventured into portrait photography in 1852 setting a portrait studio with John Hay in 25 Crown Street in Aberdeen. From there, aided by his well-developed technical and commercial acumen and a contract to photograph the Royal Family while documenting the building of Balmoral Castle in 1854-1855, he established himself as one of Scotland's premier photographers working for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1860.
Pioneering the development of techniques for photography outside of the studio and the mass production of photographic prints, he moved increasingly from portraiture to landscape photography in the 1860s. He also produced stereoscopic pictures whose main characteristic was that exposures were very short. By 1864 he claimed to have sold over half a million prints. At the time of his death in 1893 (he had handed over the business to his sons, Charles, Louis and John Hay Wilson in 1888) the firm employed 40 staff and was one of the largest publishers of photographic prints in the world, competing with James Valentine, who was also a prolific photographer, with a large company in Dundee. The business survived until 1908, when it was wound up at auction.
Collection
Over 40,000 of Wilson's photographic glass plates still exist today, largely due to the meticulous washing and chemical treatments he insisted on. Aberdeen University is in possession of some 38,000 of these, which were donated by an Aberdeen photographer, the late Archie Strachan, in 1958. They date from the late 1850s down to the early years of the twentieth century and cover not only Aberdeen and the North East but the whole of Scotland and most of England, as well as parts of Wales and Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Morocco including Tangier, the South of Spain, and (especially) colonial South Africa and Australia.

Cf.Washington Wilson p.170