In 1839, when Louis Daguerre announced his great invention of the daguerreotype, and William Henry Fox Talbot followed it up with his announcement of a competing photographic technique called calotypy, there were no photographers, only experimenters.

By 1857, when Edward Elgar was born, every town of even modest pretensions had at least one daguerreotype gallery, and the army of practising photographers in the country, both amateur and professional, came from the ranks of hundreds of different trades and crafts, most of them not even remotely related to the science or the art of photography.

Photography’s subject matter had also expanded rapidly from the early days, taking in an array of work, from individual portraits and landscapes to scientific images and the first efforts at photo-journalism. For example, during the 1850s Gustave Le Gray, a French photographer who was a painter as well as a skilled photographic technician and chemist, developed a special aesthetic appreciation for photography, drawing on the principles of painting. For his photograph Mediterranean Sea at Sète (1856-59) he enlivened his composition with a richly clouded sky using two negatives and printing the sky and the sea separately. He was not interested in imitating painting, but his work on the effects of light on form is similar to what the French Impressionist painters were to achieve a decade later.

Oscar Rejlander, a Swede working in Wolverhampton, also made multiple prints from several negatives when creating his allegorical picture of 1857, The Two Ways of Life. It depicts a sage introducing two young men into life; one turns towards industry, charity, religion and other virtues, while the other rushes madly into the pleasures of gambling, wine, licentiousness and eventually suicide. Enlisting the services of a troupe of strolling players, Rejlander photographed them in groups, and then photographed models of the stage. He made 30 negatives in all, which he masked so that they would fit together perfectly like a puzzle, and then painstakingly printed them one after another in the appropriate positions. The final print, which measured 31 by 16in (79 x 41cm), displayed at the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition held in Manchester and was hailed as “a magnificent picture, decidedly the finest photograph of its class ever produced”. It was so magnificent that Queen Victoria bought it.

In France at about this time Nadar was creating bold portraits of the highly individualistic personalities turning Paris into a centre of the literary and artistic world. In 1857 he made a portrait of the poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier posed against a plain background beneath a high skylight.

Nadar declared that “photography is a marvellous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds – and one that can be practised by any imbecile . . . Photographic theory can be taught in an hour, the basic technique in a day. But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light. Nor can one be taught how to grasp the personality of the sitter. To produce an intimate likeness rather than a banal portrait . . . you must put yourself at once in communion with the sitter, size up his thoughts and his very character.”

Back in England, the 1857 annual exhibition of the Photographic Society was dominated by landscapes and architectural studies taken throughout Britain and Europe. Photographing distant prospects, leafy glades and crumbling ruins was the preferred option of most amateurs. The most successful of them, such as Roger Fenton, achieved their results with subtle artistry, taking the themes of Britain’s tradition of watercolour painting and giving them a new twist.

Fenton also made the first extensive photographic documentary of war, working in the Crimea in 1855. By 1857 he was in Lucknow, covering the Indian Mutiny, along with two other early photojournalists, James Robertson and the Italian-born Felice Beato.

In 1857 Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician and aesthete better known as Lewis Carroll, was a 25-year-old amateur photographer who had owned a camera for just a year. He preferred portraiture to landscape photography, and that summer he took his famous picture of Agnes Weld as Little Red Riding-Hood posed against densely textured ivy. A month later he made the portrait of his hero Alfred Tennyson with his son Hallam, together with James Marshall, a Leeds industrialist, and his wife and daughter.

Photographs of the engineering accomplishments of the industrial age were frequent in this period, probably the most famous being Robert Howlett’s 1857 portrait of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the steamship Great Eastern, seen standing against the ship’s colossal launching chains.

By this time commercial portrait photography was growing into a flourishing trade that continually sought to widen its audience with new forms of presentation and lower prices. The hugely popular carte de visitewas one of the most successful formats that began around this time with portraits of members of the Royal Family and other eminent Victorian figures and later broadened to allow large numbers of middle-class sitters to be photographed for the first time.

But one of the events of 1857 that was hugely significant for photography was the opening that year by Queen Victoria of the South Kensington Museum, a museum for the masses with free days, evening opening hours and an educational mission. It had the first “museum photographic service” and the beginnings of a collection of photography as an independent art medium, begun by Henry Cole, himself an enthusiastic amateur photographer.

The museum was later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photography has been championed by the museum ever since.

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