Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
For most of his professional career, Dr. Hogg was a surgeon of ophthalmology, a fellow of the Linnean Society, and an influential microscopist. However, as a young man, as soon as he could escape the drudgery of his apprenticeship to a medical practitioner, Hogg turned to writing, perhaps inspired by his schoolboy association with Charles Dickens. Hogg’s 1845 Practical Manual of Photography went through several editions, promising “photography made easy.” In 1895, by which time photographs in print were becoming commonplace, Men and Women of the Time recalled the late Herbert Ingram, founder of the Illustrated London News, having “had a great idea that Photographic Art could be made available for the purposes of the newspaper, but after many trials, this, for the time being, proved a failure, although it has of late years become a great factor in newspaper as well as in book work.” For these pioneering attempts, Ingram had turned to Hogg, who would also go on to edit The Illustrated London Almanack for fifty years. After he obtained his surgeon’s diploma in 1850, Hogg became increasingly involved in ophthalmology. Although obviously experienced in photography, Hogg exhibited only once that we know of, in the 1854 exhibition of the Royal Infirmary Fund in Dundee, to which he contributed copies of engravings.