Portrait of the artist

FRANK Meadow Sutcliffe's photographic portraits of the fisherfolk of Whitby are now much loved, but they weren't always. A critic in the Amateur Photographer in 1890 was just one of many who aired his distaste for them.

"We have his everlasting Whitby fishermen and women, taken in front and behind, standing, sitting, kneeling, crouching, and so on ad infinitum. We have seen these men and women at every exhibition for years, and we are tired of them.''

The general public wasn't too enraptured either. When a national firm of photographic publishers added a selection of Sutcliffe's Whitby pictures to its range, none sold. In 1897 Sutcliffe lamented: "Absolute failure, yes that is what photographers, who try to make a living by making pictures, see staring them in the face.'' He even suggested that his epitaph should be: "Here lies a failure".

That bleak scenario would never be guessed today from the cluster of visitors almost always to be seen peering through the window of the Sutcliffe Gallery in Whitby. And they don't just admire his pictures. Prints cross the counter almost as fast as they can be framed. And if no Yorkshire home is complete without one, not a few find their way far beyond.

In truth Sutcliffe's business was busy enough. Sometimes too busy, for Sutcliffe often worked a 12-hour day. As Michael Hiley points out in his perceptive study, a revealing gap in his Whitby record is of tourists. When the sun brought them out Sutcliffe was "working hard in the heat of his studio and the gloom of his darkroom".

Portraits largely earned Sutcliffe his bread, and the pictures he took for his own pleasure had to be fitted in around this tiring, tedious work. Sutcliffe feelingly described how he felt shackled to his studio, "taking portraits of babies and twins, and groups of young children, and old maids... Sometimes I get out with my camera before breakfast."

And yet this semi-imprisonment contributed to his status as what a contemporary photographer called "Whitby's pictorial Boswell" - the man who, above all others, captured the spirit of the place and its people. For even in his free time, he was more circumscribed than he would have liked. As he put it, he was "tethered for the greater part of each year by a chain, at most only a mile or two long". But arguably no other mile or two in England has yielded more appealingly evocative photographs.

Born in Leeds in 1853, Sutcliffe was introduced to photography by friends of his father, an accomplished artist. The catalyst for him wishing to pursue this still novel craft is believed to have come when he opened a book whose spine read Photography - Lake Price, believing it to be a picture book of the Lake District, rather than a manual by a man named Lake Price.

Still in his teens, Sutcliffe launched himself as a professional photographer, chiefly in landscapes, when the family moved to a mansion near Whitby. A picture that he took entitled Sunset After Rain, a cottage near Rievaulx Abbey, with wind-tossed trees and a turbulent sky, came to the notice of the writer John Ruskin, who engaged him to take pictures at his home, Brantwood, at Coniston in the Lake District.

But after his marriage in 1874 to local girl Eliza Duck, Sutcliffe decided to try his hand as a society photographer down in fashionable Tunbridge Wells. The complete failure of this venture within months brought him back to Whitby, where he opened his first studio in the disused half of a jet workshop. Its lathes shook the building so violently that he had to do all his delicate work in the jet workers' lunch hour.

The fierce heat through the glass roof was another hazard. Sutcliffe recalled: "I lost many sitters from that cause. Stout aldermen would come blowing up my lead-covered stairs, sink into the sitter's chair for a few seconds and then go out again, saying: 'You must be a salamander to stand this'."

Hiley's book is full of such engaging insights, culled largely from a newspaper column that Sutcliffe wrote for 22 years. Happily, in it he confided many of the secrets of his art.

"A photograph, to be of real value, must express some little thought on the part of the photographer," he wrote. Mini stories, Sutcliffe's cameos of Whitby and its rural hinterland - the old sea salt holding an infant, a group of cottagers listening as a letter is read, the ploughboy looking at his watch - brim with such thoughts.

How did Sucliffe persuade his subjects, no-nonsense working folk, to pose? Well, sometimes he couldn't. "It is a great pity that when people are at work they do not like anyone to photograph them, for the poses they take are classical to a degree," he observed. "Laundrymaids hanging out sheets and carrying heavy baskets of clothes would make grand subjects, if laundrymaids had not such objections to be photographed in anything but their Sunday garments."

That he often succeeded testifies to the respect he had earned. Fishermen addressed him as 'sir'. Children followed him around the town and would often run to his studio to tell him of a large ship arriving. Doubtless some remembered sitting for portraits. To please his young subjects Sutcliffe had a camera rigged up to look like a pig - the lens its snout.

If not big sellers, Sutcliffe's Whitby studies won scores of top awards and medals - from Calcutta to Chicago. In 1888 his work was selected by the Camera Club for the very first 'one-man' photographic exhibition. "Reputations do not bring in any more customers," Sutcliffe reflected ruefully a year or two later.

But Hiley makes the case that Sutcliffe was a major pioneer. Not only of "naturalistic" photography but even of photo journalism. For the advent of the "instant" camera brought a second flowering of Sutcliffe's art. Hiley illustrates this by highlighting a picture-essay that Sutcliffe produced on Yarm Fair. Revelling in the new technique, he noted that the photographer was now able to "steal impressions rather than beg them".

But it is Whitby that Sutcliffe will forever be associated with. As Hiley says, his pictures are "an extraordinary blend of record and personal interpretation". He adds that for anyone familiar with his work "it is often difficult to see Whitby without being influenced by his view of the town".

Many, perhaps, would say it is impossible. In fact, throughout the larger part of the 20th century, Whitby, at least in winter, was still pervaded by the atmosphere of the Sutcliffe photographs: the atmosphere of a quiet watering place going about its business. It's gone now. However, with his well-illustrated text, amplified by an extra 63 full-page annotated plates, Hiley has given us an authoritative and affectionate portrait of the man who has created what seem certain to remain the best-loved images of one of Britain's best-loved towns.

* Frank Sutcliffe: Photographer of Whitby by Michael Hiley (Phillimore £25).