Judge, Fred, Days Toil Over

In the 1920's, another well-known pictorialist, Fred Judge, perhaps better known for the picture postcard company he founded, designed a special camera to take photographs of London at night, producing apparently unposed pictures of pedestrians and horse-traffic on the streets. It is perhaps unfortunate that we only know these through the at times unfortunate stipple of the bromoil transfer print (of which Judge was the inventor), which in this instance appears unsympathetic to the subject matter. Much of Judge's work (and the Blake picture mentioned above) is in the Royal Photographic Society Collection, but is unfortunately not available on line Fred Judge was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1872, where he started life as an engineer. Photography had always been his real interest and it was whilst visiting Sussex in 1902 that he made the decision to give up engineering for a career as a photographer. He and his brother Thomas purchased an existing business at 21a Wellington Place, Hastings and here they set up as photographers and photographic dealers under the name of Judge’s Photo Stores. Success was also to come with larger format and landscape photography using the Bromoil process. This gave Fred Judge’s pictures their strongly impressionistic nature, rich in depth and tone: he won over 100 medals, and one-man exhibitions of his work were held in London, Washington, New York and Tokyo. +1950

Photo ID: 893