Pepperharrow Park, Surrey 1852 - 1854

Curator: Standing before us is Benjamin Brecknell Turner's "Pepperharrow Park, Surrey," a gelatin-silver print dating from around 1852 to 1854. Editor: My first impression? It’s like a hushed symphony. All these gnarled branches reaching, almost clawing at the sky... there's something beautifully melancholic about it. Like a memory of a park. Curator: That melancholy seems very apt. Turner was quite captivated by these sprawling, ancient trees. They were a potent symbol, weren't they, of rootedness, of time itself etching its passage onto the land? The way he captures the texture of the bark... almost palpable. Editor: Absolutely, and the bare branches. They're skeletal. They give it that end-of-days, almost primordial feel. Are they Oak trees? To me they almost appear like family trees—but uprooted. A disruption of inherited culture—or more bluntly, ancestry trauma? Curator: Indeed, those trees have a character almost looming out from this plane. But it’s not all doom and gloom; there's an amazing ethereal glow and clarity in certain sections. Early photography held an idea that landscape embodied morality. But those gnarly trees carry cultural weight! Druids to folktales of otherworldly entities. Editor: Yes, this interplay… there's a real drama happening in the greyscale. That subtle contrast. It is as though our world and something lurking beyond the visible are fighting for space. The silver gelatin printing, it contributes, lending that old feeling to the space, too. As much as one can say a print carries emotion, the printing of photography brings me into a somber reflection. Curator: Precisely. Turner has harnessed a new medium to look backward. Perhaps even holding on to something we collectively understood. Turner has somehow found a way of placing magic in a "photograph". Editor: Ultimately, it's that haunting beauty. Makes you want to go out into nature and wrap yourself up in a big hug with a tree, really consider it a symbolic gesture towards mending lost connection to ancestors. Or question why that relationship has fractured in the first place.