But to no avail. Although he himself found these images to be imperfect, the academy, the king, and all the others who have seen them admired them as you now admire this one. This brought him much honor but not so much as a farthing. The state, which gave M. Daguerre far too much, said it could do nothing at all for M. Bayard—and the unfortunate drowned himself.
In the Studio of Bayard , about , Hippolyte Bayard. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Photography on paper would not become popular, either in public opinion or in use, until the early s; the daguerreotype predominated for more than a decade.
The hesitations of the artistic community with regard to photography should be seen in the context of this mass production. Nonetheless, a number of artists showed some interest in the new technology. Paper photography came to France with a number of handicaps: It arrived after the daguerreotype; the images seemed less than perfect; and there were at least two, if not three, inventors. This was as much a political problem as a scientific argument, summarized by Talbot in his introduction to The Pencil of Nature :.
This great and sudden celebrity [of the daguerreotype] was due to two causes: first, to the beauty of the discovery itself; secondly, to the zeal and enthusiasm of Arago, whose eloquence, animated by private friendship, delighted in extolling the inventor of this new art, sometimes to the assembled science of the French Academy, at other times to the less scientific judgment, but not less eager patriotism, of the Chamber of Deputies.
The representations made by the two inventors of paper photography, and the extensive reports made to the two French academies in the early s, stimulated a discussion of the nature of photography and its possible applications that would have never been elicited by the daguerreotype alone.
Whether photography was indeed a branch of art was hotly debated in Paris—at that time the global center of artistic life. The controversies that surrounded photography were not unrelated to the arguments around competing schools of contemporary painting. Since the s, the academic tradition had been under attack both by the partisans of plein-air painting, on the one hand, and by the Realist painters, on the other. The challengers found evidence to support their arguments in current progress in science, in modern trends in literature, and in the general upheavals that were then affecting French society.
The daguerreotype image was created on a silvered metal plate exposed to iodine fumes, forming a light-sensitive surface of silver iodide.
Development was achieved by exposing the plate to fumes of heated mercury and the image fixed in a salt solution. The daguerreotype produced an image of remarkable sharpness, but unlike competing processes, each daguerreotype was unique.
This proved to be the major factor in its demise, compared to the negative-positive processes, from which unlimited copies could be made. Newland, the photographer of this portrait, had practised as a daguerreotypist in North and South America, the Pacific and Australia, before establishing a studio in Calcutta in about Although his studio remained successful throughout the s, Newland himself died in , one of the early victims of the Indian Mutiny.
Enlarged image C. One of the oldest and longest surviving photographic processes, the cyanotype or blue-print was invented by Sir John Herschel in , using a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to produce a light sensitive paper.
As a relatively simple process to prepare and manipulate - it required no development or fixing other than washing - it was popular among amateurs throughout the nineteenth century and has also been widely used by engineers and architects for reproducing technical drawings 'blueprints'. This image is one of a large collection produced by Anna Atkins between and entitled Photographs of British algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
These photographic impressions were made without the use of the camera, by placing specimens directly onto the sensitised paper and exposing them to sunlight.
William Henry Fox Talbot's calotype process, the first practical negative-positive photographic process, was patented by him in A sheet of good quality paper was first treated with light-sensitive silver compounds before exposure in the camera.
The 'latent' image thus produced was then developed in gallo-nitrate of silver and fixed. This concept of negative-positive photography, allowing the production of an unlimited number of prints from a single negative, has formed the basis of photographic practice up to the present day, and is only now being challenged by digital imagery. The calotype negative was the subject of many refinements in the s and 50s and it was common practice for photographers to apply heated wax to the developed negative in order to increase printing transparency and lessen the visibility of the paper fibres the French photographer Gustave Le Gray also introduced a waxed-paper process in which the wax was applied before the sensitising and exposing of the photograph.
In India, Dr John Murray of the Bengal Medical Service was one of the most skilful practitioners of the calotype process in the s and early s. Concentrating on the Mughal architecture of northern India, he produced an extensive series of large format views, using paper negatives of up to 20 x 16 inches in size. Once a paper negative had been secured, any number of positive prints could be created by contact printing.
Preparation involved soaking good quality paper in a sodium chloride solution table salt and then brushing it with a solution of silver nitrate to produce light-sensitive silver chloride. Exposure of the sensitised paper to sunlight, in contact with a negative held in a frame, resulted in the emergence of a visible image without subsequent development.
This 'printed-out' image was then fixed and toned. Salt prints, unless subsequently coated, have a characteristically matt appearance, with the image embedded in the paper. Although lacking the sharpness of detail associated with the daguerreotype, salt prints from calotype negatives exhibit an expressive softness of tone much prized by early photographers. This portrait of the Rev. Julius Wood is one of a large series taken by Hill and Adamson to serve as references for a group portrait of the founders of the Free Church of Scotland that Hill had been commissioned to paint.
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