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Walker, J | Field Camera | Other | Whole Plate

1885. This camera, labelled "J. Walker, Photographic Stores, 22, Charles Street, Bradford.", with dovetailed and screwed joints and square cornered bellows, is a larger version of a pattern identical with the Bulmer camera in my collection, Catalogue No. 0041. The label on Bulmer's camera includes the word "Maker", so his camera is hardly likely to have been made by Walker, although both Bulmer and Walker could have been working from the same drawings. Both this Walker camera and the Bulmer camera are Yorkshire cameras; Bulmer was working at Dewsbury, only ten miles away from Bradford, and it seems to me not impossible that Bulmer made them both, since he labels himself a "Maker" and Walker doesn't. I have been unable to find anything about J.Walker, except that he definitely dealt in photographica, and it is possible that he retailed rather than made this camera, but a Hurter & Driffield exposure calculator in the National Media Museum has his address as 27, Charles Street, not 22, so maybe he had a showroom and a separate camera workshop? But, as my camera has Walker's label on it, I am calling it a Walker camera unless and until I know otherwise.

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