2012/01/01 by Roger Rosewell · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Photography and Visual Culture
paper · doi:10.1179/1752016913z.00000000017
openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In 1952 the National Monuments Record, the forerunner of the English Heritage Archive, acquired just under 5,000 glass plates belonging to Sydney Alfred Pitcher (1884–1950), an architectural photographer whose achievements rank alongside, and sometimes exceed, some of the most important photographers on the first half of the twentieth century. His work deserves to be better known and his significance in the history of photography properly acknowledged.Unlike any of his contemporaries Sydney Pitcher was more than just an outstanding photographer: he wrote and published books; he was a pioneering scholar of medieval stained glass; he was a unique participant in the world which he saw and recorded. His images appeared in every important book about medieval art and architecture published in the interwar years, and his survey of Ancient Stained Glass in Gloucestershire Churches, published in 1925, remains an unsurpassed single-volume guide to the county's treasures. In 1927 his images formed the first exhibition of stained glass photography in Britain, and modern scholars continue to rely heavily upon on his work. Pitcher was also an innovative figure, experimenting with colour photography, and producing some of the earliest images of stained glass in colour.Although collections of his photographs are held by a range of public institutions other than the English Heritage Archive, including Gloucestershire Archives (part of Gloucestershire County Council); the National Archives, Kew; the Victoria & Albert Museum; and the Bill Douglas Centre at Exeter University, the corpus of Sydney Pitcher's images have never been the subject of serious study, and no significant obituary appeared at the time of his death in 1950 ().