'For purposes of approximate truth, it might be said that photographic tradition died in England sometime around 1905.'

When John Szarkowski made that damning observation in the late 1960s about the state of British photography, he was not wholly right but not entirely wrong. We had a few first-class commercial photographers, some world-class photojournalists (most of them in Magnum), but little sense of a photographic culture.

Museums had no interest in photography, college photographic courses were almost entirely technical, and the medium was still largely wrapped up in the old British class system, with 'the Players' (the professionals) left to get on and make money, while 'the Gentlemen' (the amateurs) still harboured a notion of photographic art that had changed little since 1905, when Pictorialism was considered avant-garde.

The magazine editor and critic, Peter Turner - who died 01 August after suffering years of living hell with multiple sclerosis - was instrumental in dragging British photography out of its hidebound closet and not only rediscovering, but creating a new photographic tradition in the country that was, after all, one of the inventors of the medium.

I first met Peter in his cluttered 'cubby hole' in 19 Doughty Street, the offices of Coo Press, publishers of Creative Camera magazine.

Founded in the early 1960s by Colin Osman, an aficionado of photography and racing pigeons (hence Coo Press), Creative Camera, under its first, remarkable editor, Bill Jay, was bringing a radical notion of what the medium might achieve to a small but growing audience.

This notion, emanating primarily from the US, where photography was entering the art museum, postulated that photography was an important art medium in its own right, and that both intellectually and aesthetically, many photographers had more to say about the world than those who hired them gave them credit for. Figures we now take for granted as fundamental to the medium's development in the 20th century - Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Edward Weston (the list goes on and on) - were largely unknown and disregarded until Jay and Osman published them in the magazine in the late 1960s.

When Jay left Creative Camera in 1970 to found the magazine Album with his friend David Hurn, Osman took over the editorship, but taking a young graduate from Guildford School of Art as his assistant. The April 1970 issue introduces Peter Turner in his new job, inaugurating an association with the publication that would last until 1991, firstly as assistant editor, then editor, and finally publisher.

Peter carried on where Jay had left off, tirelessly promoting what we know as modernist photography, making sure that the medium's primary figures were known about, and encouraging a new generation of photographers, frequently British but not exclusively so, by publishing their work alongside the 'greats' and giving them an important yardstick by which they could measure themselves.

His mission was twofold: to establish a proper sense of the medium's tradition, and in doing so, to foster its renewal and future development, particularly with regard to British photography. He aimed to foster a tradition of 'independent' photography, whereby photographers made photographs 'for themselves', just as artists made paintings 'for themselves', free from the dictates of others. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Creative Camera was essential and stimulating reading for those interested in new ideas about the medium and the growth of the new photographic culture.

In the 1977 issue of US Camera Annual, the American critic Bill Messer, in an important article about British photography, wrote that Peter was one of the 'three key people in photography's developmental hierarchy in England'. But Peter and Creative Camera were not alone. Others had picked up the baton for modern British photography and were running with it - Sue Davies at the Photographers' Gallery, Barry Lane at the Arts Council, others too numerous to mention in college programmes and photographic galleries. Nevertheless, Messer's judgement was sound. Peter remained a key player.

In 1980, he founded his own photographic publishing business Travelling Light, with his partner Heather Forbes. In 1985, together with his friend John Benton Harris, he curated an important survey exhibition of postwar American photography at the Barbican Art Gallery, and he wrote an excellent, and underrated, history of photography for Hamlyn Publishing in 1987.

Plagued by financial and production problems, Travelling Light eventually foundered, and in 1986, Peter responded to Colin Osman's invitation to edit Creative Camera once more, eventually taking over the magazine as publisher as well as editor. By this time, however, the largely modernist approach to the medium espoused by Peter was under fire from postmodernist theory. Always interested in the primacy of the image, he was a fierce critic of too much academic theory, although as a former 1960s radical, his editorship of the magazine during this time was open-minded, and he allowed many viewpoints other than his own to grace its pages.

In 1991, he emigrated to New Zealand with his partner, Heather, who was a native New Zealander, and apart from one brief visit a couple of years later, never returned. His health was failing and he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, although he continued to write, especially for the New Zealand Journal of Photography, and (as long as his health permitted it) teach, encouraging young New Zealand photographers as once he had encouraged young British, American, and European photographers.