Fig. 1. Interior of the Free Library, Melbourne, Australia by Barnett Johnson (later Johnstone; 1832–1910), 1859. Albumen print from a collodion on glass negative, 6 ½ by 7 3⁄16 inches.
Fig. 2. The Hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens, Regent’s Park, London by Don Juan Carlos, Count of Montizón (1822–1887), 1852. Salted-paper print from a collodion on glass negative, 4 ⅜ by 4 11⁄16 inches.
Figs. 3a, 3b. An Oak Tree in Winter by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), c. 1842–1843. The calotype negative is on the left and the salted-paper print is on the right. Image size of both 7 11⁄16 by 6 9⁄16 inches.
Fig. 4. Elizabeth Johnstone Hall, Newhaven Fishwife by Robert Adamson (1821–1848) and David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), 1843–1847. Salted-paper print from a calotype negative, 7 ¾ by 5 ⅝ inches.
Fig. 5. The Principal Street of Agra by John Murray (1809–1898), c. 1857. Salted-paper print from a calotype negative, 14 ¾ by 18 5⁄16 inches.
Fig. 6. Deification Stele with Figure of Harihara, in the Residency Garden, Kediri, East Java by Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821–1905), 1866–1867. Albumen print from a collodion on glass neg-ative, 10 5⁄16 by 8 ¾ inches.
Fig. 7. Kéliwa, a Woman of the Tá-kéda Tribe, Andaman Islands by Maurice Vidal Portman (1860–1935), c. 1893. Platinum print from a paper negative, 13 11⁄16 by 10 ⅛ inches.
Fig. 8. Breakfast Time at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham by Philip Henry Delamotte (1820–1889), 1852–1854. Albumen print from a collodion on glass negative, 8 ⅞ by 11 ⅛ inches.
Fig. 9. Portrait of Oscar Wilde [1854–1900] by Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896), New York, 1882. Gelatin silver print, 12 ¾ by 9 inches.
Fig. 10. Construction of the Aswan Dam, Masonry Commencing in the Western Channelby D. S. George, 1898–1900. Platinum print, 9 7⁄16 by 11 5⁄16 inches.
Fig. 11. Old Houses, Aldgate, London by Henry Dixon (1820–1892) and Son, 1880. Carbon print, 8 ⅜ by 6 ⅞ inches.
Fig. 12. Bony structure of the Cochlea of a Newborn Baby by Josef Albert (1825–1886), c. 1866. Albumen print from a collodion on glass negative, 6 11⁄16 by 5 ⅛ inches.
Fig. 13. Dandelion Seeds by Talbot, c. 1852–1857. Photographic engraving, 2 by 3 inches.
Fig. 14. Printing Kodak Negatives by Sunlight, Building 1, Harrow, photographer unknown, 1891. Toned silver gelatin print (printed later), 7 7⁄16 by 9 7⁄16 inches.
When photography was first announced to the public in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1781–1851) took the limelight. Daguerre’s process produced a singular photograph on a silvered sheet of copper, breathtaking in its detail and seductive in its beauty. But in the larger mainstream of communication, it was a dead end. Talbot’s productions on paper seemed coarse and cumbersome by comparison. Yet paper has traditionally been the basis of many reproductive arts and is especially the province of books, allowing Talbot’s approach into existing pathways. The Library of the British Museum (as it was then) was not the logical repository of works of art, a function served by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert). Some photographs came in through the British Museum’s prints and drawings collection, others as part of donations of private libraries, but the truly stupendous numbers of photographs were collected contemporaneously as illustrations in books and portfolios. Since photomechanical processes were not perfected for most of the nineteenth century, many of these illustrations were original photographic prints. In many ways, we are fortunate that collections such as that of the British Library exist. They are fundamentally different from museum curated photographic collections though each has its strengths. Without this “accidental” collecting, many splendid images would either have been considered insignificant, or would not have fit the aesthetic of the moment and would have been lost to us.
The British Library is not the first library to declare itself a collector of photographs—the Bibliothèque nationale de France has had a curator of photography for years—but the sheer size and comprehensive nature of its collection makes it one of the most significant. A close model is the New York Public Library. When Julia Van Haaften was appointed that institution’s first curator of photographs in 1980, she drew on traditional librarian’s skills and intuition, seeking out keywords in the catalogues and mining likely sections of classification. The result was her 1982 exhibition and book, From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography, a surprisingly broad assemblage of significant art photographs from an unexpected source.3 In London that same year, the enormous photographic holdings of the India Office Library were transferred to the British Library, at once adding a defined collection of photographs. Momentum built over the years, as John Falconer, once with the India Office, was given a temporary appointment as curator of photographs, a position happily now made permanent. This recognition has allowed connoisseurship to join serendipity in building the collection. In 2006 the descendants of William Henry Fox Talbot generously donated the extensive photographic and manuscript collection that had been preserved at their ancestral home of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire (it was reportedly the largest single donation to the library ever given in any field). This established the British Library as a premier center of research for the earliest days of photography. Then, in 2009, the gift of the archive of the British branch of the Eastman Kodak Company added a commercial record through the end of the nineteenth century, providing a neat bookend to Talbot’s record of invention.
Today, a Talbot calotype negative on paper such as his stately Oak Tree in Winter (Figs. 3a, 3b) encourages a modernistic sense of abstraction and the visceral thrill of seeing the actual sheet of paper that faced the sunlight more than a century and a half ago. In the 1840s, however, the negative was more often regarded as a needless complication, introducing an unintelligible first stage that had to be “corrected” by printing on a second sheet of paper. But in publishing, that negative could serve the same function as type or printing plates to produce multiple identical copies. Talbot had always been interested in book production, particularly in botanical plates, and saw in his invention a more truthful and affordable alternative to lithography. In 1844 he commenced publication of his book, The Pencil of Nature, with each part illustrated with several original photographic prints. The Library of the British Museum received this book, not their earliest photographs nor their first photographic acquisition, but the first time that photographs rode in on the Trojan horse of the book.
The industrialization of photography grew slowly. In Talbot’s day each sheet of sensitized negative paper and each print was made by hand. Negatives are by definition unique, but in early photography there is no such thing as a duplicate print. Each has its own life history, often revealed when one closely examines a print, and, in any case, each carries the DNA of the person who made it.
This very human aspect of the early stages of the art is nowhere more apparent than in Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill’s pioneering work with Talbot’s calotype. Adamson had been encouraged by Talbot to establish a photographic studio in Edinburgh in 1843. Within months he was thrown together with the artist Hill in a project to record the more than four hundred ministers who had given up their livings to form the Free Church of Scotland. Hill had in mind a heroic painting and at first saw the calotype as a means of producing reference studies. However, the unique power of photography to preserve the life of real people almost immediately took over, and in the four years of their collaboration, Adamson and Hill produced more than three thousand calotype negatives, the majority of them portraits. The Newhaven fishwife Elizabeth Johnstone Hall (Fig. 4), taken in the mid-1840s, moved the recipient of a similar print (in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh) to inscribe on it, “It’s no fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” Assembled in grand albums, the veracity of these photographic portraits was indisputable.
The 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace marked a turning point for photography, both in public acceptance and in technology. The invention of collodion on glass by Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857) adapted the versatility of Talbot’s negatives to a more detailed and sensitive medium. Others coated Talbot’s plain surface paper with albumen (egg white), permitting finer detail within a glossy surface. However, some photographers continued to use the traditional materials, usually for valid technical reasons, but often to good aesthetic effect. Dr. John Murray, a physician with the East India Company, found that large paper negatives were more practical in the heat of India, and his Principal Street of Agra (Fig. 5) benefits from the Rembrandtish qualities of that process.
Paper also scattered light less than did glass as a negative base, so detail is present in the deepest of shadows. It was entirely appropriate for Barnett Johnson to use the modern glass negative and finely detailed albumen print for his view of the newly opened Melbourne Free Library (Fig. 1). Although these two pho-tographs were taken only two years apart, one demonstrated the European view of an exotic land, while the other recorded the success of imposing European values in taming a wild country.
That photography had the potential to translate the mysteries of the natural world was obvious, but as Talbot had observed, it automatically took in context at the same time. Don Juan Carlos, Count of Montizón recorded the passive bulk of the hippopotamus in a London zoo, as serene as his re-flec-tion (Fig. 2). A dedicated amateur, the count submitted this to The Photographic Album for the Year 1855. But is it the animal or the human observers who are behind the bars? Sometimes the life histories of photographers seem most improbable. The Dutchman Isidore van Kinsbergen traveled to Jakarta in 1851 with a French opera company. He stayed behind to open a photographic shop and became a master of finely detailed studies of Hindu art (see Fig. 6). While the Montizón photograph of the hippopotamus draws part of its strength from its straightforward composition, Van Kinsbergen characteristically chose an oblique camera angle, bringing out the dimensionality in his subjects. The melding of nature and art in his image adds to the mystery of both.
Oscar Wilde’s caution that “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter,”4 applies as much to photography as to painting. In spite of the apparent (if debated) truthfulness of their art, photographers inevitably left the imprint of their own intentions in their images. Philip Henry Delamotte was given the business-like charge of recording the re-erection of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham between 1852 and 1854. Using a wet collodion negative and albumen paper print, he turned his attention to those actually doing the work and included Breakfast Time in his official report for the directors (Fig. 8). It gives us a rare insight into the lives of common people, less consciously artistic than Adamson and Hill’s, but continuing their documentary tradition. Three decades later, the New York portraitist Napoleon Sarony captured the eccentric artistic spirit of Wilde, in which one is very aware of Sarony’s input (Fig. 9). Both Sarony and Delamotte left us with more than the stated subject of their portraits.
The world was changing rapidly in the nineteenth century, and even by the 1880s there was need for a Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. Henry Dixon’s Old Houses, Aldgate, London accepted photography’s ability to freeze a moment in time, preserving at least the veneer of something about to be only a memory (Fig. 11). Yet, photography is always about the present, not the past, and D. S. George’s view of the construction of the Aswan Dam recorded the complexity and messiness of a contemporaneous effort now lost to us (Fig. 10). By the end of the nineteenth century when this photograph was made, a printing process based on the metal platinum provided a highly stable and permanent way of printing photographs.
Science, with its pursuit of truth, was a natural benefactor of photography. By 1866 Josef Albert could magnify and record in exacting detail the tiny bones of an infant’s ear for Nikolaus Rüdinger’s atlas of the organs of human hearing (Fig. 12). Photography, of course, was both limited by the specificity of whatever example was depicted and equally powerful in presenting that one example well. The British Museum commissioned Maurice Vidal Portman to scientifically document the disappearing races in the Bay of Bengal. His portrait Kéliwa, taken in 1893, shows that he returned to the use of paper negatives in order to facilitate working in remote locations. The thought that one could use a two-inch checkerboard to provide some sort of meaningful information about a people hovers between the quaint and the repugnant now, but it was indicative of the broader attempt to apply photography to scientific measurements in many fields (Fig. 7).
By the time that Kodak and similar cameras encouraged the growth of amateur photography near the end of the nineteenth century, much had changed. The craft of making a photograph had gone from the individually made sheets of paper used by Talbot and by Hill and Adamson, through a variety of technologies that increasingly emphasized standardization and mass production. Yet even at the end of the century, the sun was still the main source of light for printing photographs, and the women at the Kodak factory still did much by hand (Fig. 14). The inventor of photography on paper, William Henry Fox Talbot, came to realize that printing with the salts of silver would always have limitations. Although many books and albums were illustrated throughout the nineteenth century with original photographic prints, these were easily damaged by improper storage or faded by exposure to light.
Starting in 1852 Talbot sought to merge photography and the familiar printer’s ink. His Dandelion Seeds was photographed onto a printing plate with all the truthfulness of nature (Fig. 13). This plate was then used in the time-proven way to put printer’s ink on paper. The example shown, executed using his first “photographic engraving” process, is beautiful in spite of lacking the full tonality in the denser areas of the seeds. In 1858 he introduced a second process, termed “photoglyphic engraving”, which used the concept of the halftone dot to overcome this. Although it was not brought to commercial perfection in his lifetime, Talbot’s work was the basis of photogravure, and thus the inventor of photography was also the inventor of a way to permanently intertwine that art with the art of the book. Until the digital age, it was through printer’s ink that we saw the majority of our photographs.
Talbot could have been speaking about the British Library’s holdings when he delighted in the fact that “sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls… sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen, and upon it—unconsciously recorded—the hour of the day at which the view was taken.”5 An 1845 reviewer of Talbot’s Pencil of Nature observed that “photography has already enabled us to hand down to future ages a picture of the sunshine of yesterday.”6 The sunshine of the first century and a half of photography was broadly, effectively, democratically preserved, largely unseen, hidden in the bookshelves of the British Library. In the digital world, where will we find its successors a century and a half from now? How will we remember the small but critically important elements of today?
1 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, no. 3 (London, May 1845), text for Pl. XIII, Queen’s College, Oxford, Entrance Gateway.
2 The catalogue of the exhibition is by John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs (British Library, London, 2009). All the illustrations here are drawn from the catalogue.
3 Julia Van Haaften, From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography from the New York Public Library (Thames and Hudson, New York, 1982).
4 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1908), p. 12.
5 Talbot, Pencil of Nature, no. 3, text for Pl. XIII.
6 Athenaeum, no. 904 (February 22, 1845), p. 202.
LARRY J. SCHAAF is a photohistorian and consultant, based in Baltimore, and the author of numerous books. He is the editor of the online Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot: www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk.
