1892, 29 December
Photographers in England.

Newspaper article
Internet - Original source ill-defined
(Alan Griffiths, 30 August 2025) With grateful thaks to David Haynes for bringing this article to my attention.
 
Published in [El Paso] Times, 29 December 1892, 5:2.
 
Photographers in England. Owing to the cholera on the continent papa has been taking us for a tour through the west of England, and I want to tell you how we have been annoyed everywhere by the amateur photographers with their horrid cameras. You can’t get away from them anywhere. At all the famous hills and rocks and valleys and waterfalls, just when you are prepared to go into raptures, you find a camera planted, and a pair of photographers—they always seem to go about in pairs—monopolizing the best point of view. We tried in vain to escape from them all through Cornwall, and now that we have come here they seem to be thicker than ever.
 
It is not their photographing scenery, however, that we object to so much as their photographing their female fellow creatures. If you are not very careful you may get taken at any minute as a “figure” in the foreground of a picture. And the people who carry hand cameras think it the greatest fun to get picture of girls in undignified attitudes. Now, if there is one thing more than another that any girl with a well regulated mind is particular about, it is to look nice when she is having her portrait taken, and it’s a horrible thing to think that you may be photographed at any minute without knowing it, with your hair and clothes all awry, and yourself perhaps all thrown down in a heap, after a long walk or a game of tennis, in the belief that no one could see you.
 
You may say, of course, that nobody who knows you sees these pictures. But how are we to be sure of that? We heard the other day of a lady who was sitting at the side of a rock with a gentleman of her acquaintance in a rather disordered attitude when an amateur photographer took the pair of them. He was so pleased with the picture that he handed it round the smoking room at the hotel and showed it, among other persons, to the lady’s husband. That amateur photographer has started trouble in one family.—Cor. London Truth.
 
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