Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles
Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles (born March 13, 1871 in Rotterdam , † February 27, 1956 in Hastings ) was a British publisher and photojournalist who published his photos in the newly founded illustrated magazines at the end of the 19th and early 19th centuries.
Life
Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles was born in Rotterdam to a Scottish wool merchant from Aberdeen and a Polish mother; his older brother was the painter James Pitcairn-Knowles . He spent part of his youth in an English colony in Wiesbaden . At the turn of the century, Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles traveled professionally through Europe as a photographer and lived in Berlin , Brussels , Paris and Jersey . At that time, magazines illustrated with photos were booming due to improved printing techniques. Pitcairn-Knowles sold his photos to various themed magazines, including the UK travel magazine World Wide Magazine , Die Woche , a German family magazine , and Lectures Pour Tous , a French literary magazine.
As an enthusiastic athlete, Pitcairn-Knowles founded his own magazine, Sport im Bild , in Berlin in 1895 , which appeared for the first time on May 10, 1895 with 30,000 starting copies. In the foreword to the first edition, Pitcairn-Knowles and the publisher, Horace F. Simon, wrote that with this magazine they wanted to show that Germany “stands by our role models - England and America - on an equal footing in the execution of all sports”. In 1899 Pitcairn-Knowles had an athletic sports field built in the Kurfürstendamm sports park , which - still unusual for the time - had a lawn, a covered grandstand for several hundred spectators and fixed goals with goal nets. On November 23, 1899, the athletic sports field was inaugurated with the first game of an English football team on mainland Europe. The English defeated a German selection 13-2 in front of about 1500 spectators.
During this time, sports photography established itself as a genre of its own , also because the technology in photography was constantly improving, such as shutter speeds . At the same time, as well as in mutual interaction, spectator sport became increasingly popular. Pitcairn-Knowles was also interested in subjects outside of sport; So he traveled several times to Ostend in Belgium to photographically document the entire atmosphere around car races , dog races , shrimp fishermen and children on sand yachts . "His photographs reveal his delighted and tactful view of leisure activities in the age of Edward VII. "
Pitcairn-Knowles also used the latest technology: He made gelatin silver prints from the glass negatives, which had been taken as gelatin drying plates , using a process invented in 1871 by the English physicist Richard Leach Maddox . The negatives were easier to handle and more sensitive to light than the earlier wet collodion plates . Pitcairn-Knowles usually worked with the smallest negatives used by professionals, the half-plate (4½ ″ × 5½ ″), and made contact prints from them. The dry plate negatives were relatively easy to handle, but the half plate camera was very heavy.
In 1904 Sport im Bild was sold to the publisher August Scherl ; In 1911 Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles moved to England and together with his wife Margaret opened the Riposo health center in Sussex , which existed until 1962. Photography continued to play an important role in his life; he photographed the treatments, created teaching materials and researched and documented the Schroth cure with photographs . In 1930 he and his wife published a book of vegetarian recipes, Sixty Favorite Riposo Recipes , which was reprinted in 1980 by his grandson Richard.
Much of the work, as well as documents from the Pitcairn-Knowles estate, are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Christine Walther: Winner types: On the photographic mediation of a social self-image around 1900 . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3510-4 , p. 31 f . ( Preview in Google Book Search).
- ↑ Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles on vam.ac.uk ( Memento of the original from July 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Riposo Health Hydro on bohemiavillage.com
literature
- Richard Pitcairn-Knowles: The Edwardian Eye of Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles 1871-1956 . Book Guild 2000. ISBN 978-1-85776-427-7
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pitcairn-Knowles, Andrew |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British press photographer and publisher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 13, 1871 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rotterdam |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 27, 1956 |
| Place of death | Hastings |