140 years of Amateur Photographer

As AP celebrates its 140th birthday next month, Nigel Atherton looks back at its glorious past

- Nigel Atherton

On 10 October 1884, J Harris Stone launched the first issue of a new weekly magazine ‘devoted to the interests of Photography and kindred arts and sciences’. It was called The Amateur Photographer, and in his first editorial he explained why. ‘Photography has, within the last few years, become so popular with amateurs, that at the present time their number vastly exceeds that of professional photographers. Recruits of either sex – for here let us say that ladies make excellent manipulators – are daily being added to the rank of those practising this pleasing and truly fascinating art, which is not to be wondered at when one remembers that some of the most successful photographs that have ever been taken are the work of amateurs.’

Based a stone’s thrown from London’s Charing Cross Station, AP, as it quickly became known, was not the first weekly photo magazine to grace the newsstands. Photographic News had been around since 1858 and The British Journal of Photography had launched in 1854 as Liverpool Photographic Journal, changed its name in 1860 and turned weekly in 1864. But AP was the only one specifically aimed at amateurs and it quickly gained a following.