Life through a lens

It's hard work adjusting from the pounding urban traffic of SW7 to contemplate Benjamin Brecknell Turner's rural documentary of the 1850s.

BBT was one of the Victorian era's most accomplished amateur photographers, and his honey-hued albumen prints of uninhabited rustic landscapes and silently crumbling buildings leak into the present day like phantoms from another world.

Today, photography's garish presence assaults us from every billboard, shop window and magazine stand. It can be salutary, therefore, to return to photography's youth (it was born in 1839), the days when every snapshot was a protracted labour of love: a good 30-60 minutes to expose, and as long again to develop.

The long exposures explain why Turner's photographs are deprived of specific weather conditions - even of shadow. They seem to hover in a vacuum of timeless pale light, with flat skies and stilled trees unperturbed by wind. Silence reigns.

Where Turner comes into his own in this soundless idyll is in his treatment of texture. Every leaf of ivy smothering the walls of Ludlow Castle, every straw of the thatched roofs at Bredicot in Worcestershire, the eerily smooth rapids of Lyndale (the river looks like aerosol cream caressing the rocks): his camera records everything with the meticulous, focused detail of an engraver.

You only have to compare Turner's images to the clichéd

postcard vistas of Francis Frith (on display next door) to understand how elegantly fresh the former's photographs are. While picturesque medieval buildings held fascination for any number of Victorian photographers, you can't imagine many of them being drawn to the scaffolding on Canterbury Cathedral or doing justice to the high-tech tensile architecture of Crystal Palace. The industrial grandeur of the latter's nave is captured by Turner in exquisitely chill terms: a grid of perspective leading out of the past and into the future.

The same temporal connections are made in Chris Meigh-Andrews's specially commissioned video work, based on Turner's photograph of Hawkhurst Church in Kent. But this facile high-tech supplement has everything of the attention-grabbing, distraction-inducing simplicity that Turner's own work so carefully eschews.

Rural England Through a Victorian Lensat the Victoria and Albert Museum until 27 August. Tel 020 7942 2000.