Photography

Graystone Bird

Owen Graystone Bird (1862–1943) was a British professional photographer, active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some sources give his first name as William instead of Owen, however, all sources agree on the prominent use of Graystone. The cause of confusion about the correct form of Bird's full name is unclear, but it does not seem to be a case of multiple photographers using the names "Graystone" and "Bird" in combination, contemporaneously. Born in Frome, Somerset, he was a member of the second-generation of a prominent family of pioneering photographers who relocated to the town of Bath, in England during the mid 1860s. His father, Frederic Charles Bird, a photographer and portrait painter active from the middle to late nineteenth century, had received a Royal Warrant of Appointment from the contemporary Prince of Wales, the future king Edward VII. The younger Bird would also receive this honour, although the limited records available are unclear about whether his patron, as Prince of Wales, was Edward VII or George V, or both. Bird was a skilled and respected artist, the winner of numerous photography prizes, whose talent was internationally recognised during his professional lifetime. Posthumously however, he slipped into relative obscurity, when compared to other notable photographers of the period. Aside from the simple passage of time, and the role of random-chance selection in the recognition of artistic talent, there appear to be two key reasons why Bird's work remains relatively unknown: much of Bird's most notable work, created during a peak period of his career in the 1890s and very early 1900s, involved creating pictorialist-style photographic images for publication-and-use as magic lantern slides. This was, at the time, a popular form of entertainment in private homes and public shows. However, the development of moving pictures as a form of art and entertainment, beginning in the 1890s, would eclipse the popularity of magic-lantern shows in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸George Miller (filmmaker)
• ▸Greg Weight
• ▸Ana Mendieta

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.