In 2014, the ROSPHOTO museum collection was enriched with the acquisition of Early British Photography, comprising 253 prints and one full album. It stands as the largest collection of mid-19th-century British photography in Russia.


The photographs in the collection were created primarily using two techniques characteristic of this period: calotype (late 1830s–early 1850s) and the wet collodion process (mid–late 1850s).

After many years of meticulous work with the collection, carried out by the staff of the restoration department, the collections department, and the museum’s digitization laboratory, ROSРHOTO presented the exhibition project Early British Photography in October 2017, showcasing 61 original photographic prints. The curators of the exhibition aimed not only to explain how the first photographic techniques emerged, but also to highlight that early British photography was a new form of visual art created by artist-photographers.

The exhibition featured works by masters of the “golden age” of British photography: William Henry Fox Talbot and those in his immediate circle — Nicholas Henneman, co-author of The Pencil of Nature; Talbot’s cousins John Dillwyn Llewelyn and Calvert Richard Jones; as well as works by the Scottish calotypists David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson; Frederick Scott Archer, the inventor of the wet collodion process; and Roger Fenton, the first official war photographer. Special attention was given to the works of Welsh photographic artist Thereza Mary Dillwyn Llewelyn, one of the earliest women in the history of photography.

The exhibition project incorporated the Artefact digital platform, which made augmented reality features available for the objects on display. For example, by pointing a smartphone at the QR code next to an exhibit, visitors could explore the smallest details of the image. For those without smartphones, an interactive table was installed as part of the exhibition.

 

 

On William Henry Fox Talbot’s Role in the Development of Photography

A major role in the invention of photography, played camera obscura, which had become widespread in the eighteenth century as a technical aid for automating drawing.

Camera obscura gathers, through a lens, the rays of light emitted by distant objects and produces, on the opposite side at the lens’s focal point, an inverted image. One crucial step remained — to find a way to fix this ephemeral image onto a physical surface. 

In 1819, the renowned English scientist John Herschel discovered sodium hyposulfite and its ability to dissolve silver chloride. Yet only twenty years later did he suggest to William Henry Fox Talbot how to “fix” silver darkened by light by eliminating residual salts, in other words, how to produce a true photograph.

The official date of the invention of photography is 1839, and priority is traditionally given to Louis Daguerre and his silver plates, the daguerreotypes. However, it was William Henry Fox Talbot who first introduced into photographic practice the two-step process (negative –  positive) and the optical enlargement of images — innovations that determined the future course of photography.

Talbot began his experiments as early as January 1834 with so-called “photogenic drawings”,  contact prints made on paper coated with silver nitrate. He later replaced silver nitrate with the more light-sensitive silver chloride, fixing his images with a common salt solution. After that, he moved on to exposures made inside the camera obscura itself. Talbot commissioned several small camera obscuras from local craftsmen, each producing an image only one square inch in size (approximately 2.5 cm²). After placing these cameras around his house and exposing them for an hour, he obtained tiny negatives.

Talbot didn’t publish the results of his early experiments. Only in January 1839 did he attempt to assert his priority by presenting a paper before the Royal Society in London. Unlike the daguerreotype, whose possibilities for manipulation were essentially limited to the choice of viewpoint and lighting, Talbot’s calotype offered additional means of altering the final print made from the negative: adjusting its tonality and color, choosing various types of paper or even other printing materials (such as porcelain, fabric, or metal), as well as retouching both the negative and the print.

And although calotypes were inferior to daguerreotypes in rendering fine detail for portrait photography, they allowed for the production of multiple prints from a single negative. Unfortunately, Talbot lost the race for priority in inventing photography as a physical process.

to Daguerre, but he created an analog photographic technology whose core principles remained essentially unchanged until their digital update at the end of the twentieth century.

Calotype (from the Ancient Greek καλός — “beautiful” and τύπος — “impression”)

 is an early photographic process based on the use of paper sensitized with silver iodide. The technique became the first negative–positive process in history, making it possible to produce an unlimited number of positive prints from a single paper negative. The process was patented by William Henry Fox Talbot on 8 February 1841. For this reason, calotype is also known as Talbotype.

With the invention of the calotype, it became possible to reproduce positive images by means of contact printing from a semi-transparent negative, which was created by impregnating the sensitized paper with melted beeswax. The resulting positive image was direct, rather than mirror-reversed as in daguerreotypes.

The two-stage negative–positive method gradually became widespread, but it only began to replace other photographic processes after the invention of the wet collodion technique, in which the light-sensitive layer was applied as a transparent emulsion.