A hundred and fifty people oblige, not wishing to be left out of the record of such an event. They show up at the Bleury Street studio, as requested, in full fancy dress. But Notman is not interested in the individual photographs he takes. He plans a composite photograph in which all the individual images are to be combined into a great panorama of the event.

The Skating Carnival is William Notman’s first large scale production. It is received with enthusiasm around the world.

Notman was a, a wizard at composites. It was a real money-maker for him, so each and every time there would be a large enough group, he would set about to recreate a scene for them and the scene for them would be his choosing, his arrangement. So each and every one of those people would have been shot individually and afterwards would have been cut and pasted into that giant composite image.

Uh, the point of all this would have been making a picture that couldn’t have been made otherwise, and as well it was appropriate to think that each and every one of those people would probably want one of those pictures, and that said, he could make a fortune in the, in the context of producing the work.

This one’s fun. This is a composite photograph. It’s of yachting, all done in the studio, with the background painted in so you could make the sea as rough or as smooth as you liked. This is an initiative in which you’re paying, not only for photography, you’re paying for an artist, you’re paying for a set, you’re paying for costumes. A lot of money goes into this. We’re talking about the moneyed upper-middle class. They’re anxious to show off their new-found wealth. And a little family show on the, on the yacht, what could be more demonstrative for 19th century America in its gilded age?

The work of doing those composites was quite difficult, and in the 19th century people really appreciated what was involved. They loved the look of that. It was almost magic to them, and almost magic in a way that, once again we can’t really appreciate. We look at that work now and say it looks kind of tricky and faked. And yet at the time it was, for their eyes, quite wonderful; an invention that would have been impossible to create in any other way.

When one looks at the composites in relation to the painting that was going on at the time, it’s very apparent that they were succeeding as cultural objects, as works of art, and I think as long as we’re imagining them in that sense, we’re going to enjoy them to the full. It’s a little hard not to look at them and see them as something pretty kitschy because everybody tends to be exaggerated in their gestures — not always, but in many of the cases they are. And I think they were embraced first as curious Victorian collectibles and people didn’t think about them in terms of how they related to other artistic activity.

But I think once you do, then you see that there’s a, there’s a tenor to them that is quite serious, and, and, and finally, quite profound.