Early photography.(Current and coming)

No one really knows the exact date when photography was invented. But once the Frenchman Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre announced his discovery of the daguerreotype in 1839, it compelled others who had been experimenting in the same areas to come forward, if even a bit prematurely, in order to make their discoveries known. One of these was the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, who had devised a product he named the "photogenic drawing" as early as 1834. His process, which could be carried out with or without a camera, called for chemically sensitized paper that when exposed to light became a negative from which positive prints could be made in multiples. Initially it involved salting a fine piece of writing paper photosensitized with silver nitrate. In essence, and despite the fact that numerous other processes were invented along the way, Talbot's discovery became the basis of all photography until our own digital age; and it was quite different from Daguerre's invention, which made a single image only on a prepared copper support. Photography was greeted with great enthusiasm and spread rapidly. Talbot wrote to his mother on July 28, 1845, from York, where he was taking pictures with the Reverend Calvert Richard Jones, "We took 12 views of York today, most of them good--crowds of admiring spectators surrounded the Camera wherever we planted it."

An exhibition about the birth and development of the paper negative has been co-organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (where it is on view until December 30) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. (where it may be seen from February 3 to May 4, 2008). Next summer it will travel to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Entitled Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860, the show includes 118 examples by forty photographers, some well known (Talbot, David Octavius Hill, Roger Fenton), and others who were adept and gifted amateurs whose names will be familiar to almost no one (Jane Martha St. John, for example).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Talbot refined the types of chemicals needed to treat the papers used in his process, calling his improved invention the calotype, which he announced in 1841. Many studies of early photography relate that paper negatives were superseded by glass negatives in 1851. However, given the fragility and weight of glass plates, the clearer pictures they produced were often not worth the inconvenience of traveling with such cumbersome materials. Certainly, in tropical locations calotypes were much easier to use, chiefly because they could be prepared well in advance of their intended use and developed long after the image was taken.

English painters of the period espoused the picturesque and created romantic landscapes, and so did artistically inclined photographers. Some focused on majestic ancient trees, many of which had local myths and legends attached to them, and the ruins of ancient buildings scattered around the country. Exhibitions held by newly established photographic societies and clubs did a great deal to promote the medium among amateurs and professionals alike. Landscape photographs were often exhibited with poems, which reinforced the romantic ideal that so appealed to Victorian sensibilities. As more and more amateurs learned how to take pictures, a camera became a necessary accouterment on a grand ...