Tate Britain is presenting a major exhibition looking at the conversation between early photography and British art.

Spanning a 70-year period, the exhibition “Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age” opens with the experimental beginnings of photography set in a dialogue with works by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and J.M.W. Turner.

Co-curator Carol Jacobi points out there was a conscious curatorial decision to mix photographs, drawings, and painting throughout to exhibition in order to present how artists and photographers look at each other’s works. Some of these artistic links were born from friendship, such as that between photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and painters George Frederic Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti — Cameron’s “Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die,” for example, is a female profile based on Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix.”

On display are works by JAM Whistler and John Singer Sargent, amongst others, that are being shown for the first time alongside the photographs that they inspired or from which they were inspired.

The exhibition also presents the 12-foot-long “Disruption Portrait” by painter David Octavius Hill, which depicts all 457 members of the rebel assembly that founded the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 that according to Carol Jacobi, curator of British art 1850‑1915 at Tate Britain, was the first painting done with the help of photography and which brought together the famous partnership between Hill and the young chemist and photographer Robert Adamson.

Listen to Jacobi talking in more detail about the exhibition, including her thoughts on a group of photographs that were made as 3-D renderings of scenes from famous paintings.