Architecture, Religion, and Architects

Although his fame rested on his landscape photographs, Bedford pursued architectural subjects throughout his career. Perhaps because of his early training as an architectural draughtsman or the influence of his architect father, Bedford found and photographed architecture in the towns and regions he visited primarily for their landscape and touristic appeal. While he photographed castles, stately homes, timber frame buildings, schools, and the occasional resort hotel, his primary interest was religious architecture. He photographed both cathedrals and small parish churches, illustrating stylistic continuities, stylistic innovations, and changes in society reflected in the church fabric. The period in which he photographed was one of major transformation for the Anglican church in terms of internal structure, liturgy, ritual, and the role of the church in society. These debates affected English society from the local to the national level, represented by renewed activity in the building or restoration of religious structures from parish church to cathedral. Bedford’s most extensive period of church photography corresponded with the peak of church construction in the 1860s-70s. Emerging from this context of energetic religious discussions, his photographs were grounded in and expressed the theory propounded most adamantly by A.W. Pugin (d. 1852) and John Ruskin—that churches reveal the character of the society that made them. While Bedford’s photographs of churches were available to his usual market, they also held particular relevance for architects who saw several possible uses for architectural photography. Although the two disciplines of architecture and photography shared several characteristics, differences masked common goals and methods shared by members of both communities, particularly evident in architects writing about photography in the 1860s and 1870s.