Scarborough’s Photographers
Scarborough on England’s Yorkshire coast is one of the country’s earliest seaside resorts. Visitors were coming before photography was invented. The Early photographers soon realised that there was money to be made in seaside resorts and they began to congregate in the town during the summer season.
There is only one book about the history of Photography in Scarborough (Bayliss, 1998) and many people don’t know how important photography was to the resort, which boasted the largest photographic studio in Europe and photographers from all over the world.
This website seeks to add to the published knowledge and share the importance of Scarborough as a photographers seaside town.
Image Sources
The images on this website are either taken from photographs in the collection of Martha and Jonathan or are taken from other online sources. The images that are taken from our collections are free to use, but please credit the source. If they are taken from elsewhere please follow the link to that website and follow the guidelines on the original post. Photo Scarborough can not take responsibility for those who use images without permission. Photo Scarborough have tried to credit those who have images rights. If you feel that we have impinged on your intellectual property rights please inform us and we will remove the images with immediate effect.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the support of many people, but there are two people who deserve particular mention. Anne and Paul Bayliss for paving the way for this work with their book published in 1998. They have been kind enough to send us all of their research including work that they did after 1998, this has proved invaluable and we could not have done this without their generosity and kindness.
Dr Michael Pritchard for encouragement. John Oxley from the Big Ideas By The Sea Festival for helping us to get started. Jim Middleton from Scarborough Museums and Galleries for allowing us to view the collections in store. Angela Kale at Scarborough Local Studies Library for letting us see some of the original Sarony material in the collection at Scarborough Library.
About Us
Martha Cattell and Jonathan Wallis are two friends who both live in Scarborough and have an interest in photography and its history.
Martha is a curator, researcher and artist who’s work typically explores tensions between nature/culture, through memory and material. Her work typically revolves around artist moving image and photography; either curating or making, and often incorporates or questions notion of the archive. They are particularly interesting making culture more accessible and work a lot with community groups and in developing engagement activities.
Jonathan works as a curator for the National Trust working across North Yorkshire, Teesside and County Durham and is particularly interested in photography in the country house. He is currently researching the photographers who lived at Ormesby Hall on the edge of Middlesbrough. He is also chair of the trust who is exploring how best to preserve the historic studio and associated collections of the UKs oldest purpose built photographic studio still in use at W. W. Winter Ltd in Derby.