David Octavius Hill

When photography was first being developed in the late 1830s and early 1840s, its applications were strictly limited to the kinds of objects you see on the left side of this case. Daguerreotypes and salted-paper prints were celebrated as technical marvels for their ability to stabilize images made with a camera. But they were also extremely fragile, subject to fading, and difficult to replicate and share widely. 

In response to these limitations, artists, printmakers, and scientists looked for ways to combine photography with printmaking. A major breakthrough was the addition of light-sensitive materials (including bitumen and dichromated gelatin) to printmaking processes. Discoveries were shared through publications such as Alphonse Poitevin’s 1862 Manual on Photographic Printing without Silver Salts, displayed here.

Just a few years after the calotype (paper negative) was introduced, Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill made these sophisticated examples. They used the characteristically soft texture created by the calotype process to capture the fleeting nature of human life, a recurring theme in their work.

The portrait of Elizabeth Rigby emphasizes the tension between a dark interior doorway and the natural outdoor light, with the sitter at the threshold. Rigby’s downcast eyes and crucifix stand in contrast to the carousing putti at her right. Her averted eyes may have resulted from technical rather than artistic concerns, given the exposure time of up to 30 seconds.

The salt print was a common method of creating a positive image from such a negative: here is seen Lady Eastlake, an artist and writer on photography. A salted piece of paper was exposed while in contact with the paper negative, fixing a positive image on the surface of the salted paper. This procedure enabled the making of unlimited prints from a single negative, although the quality of the prints gradually degraded as the print number increased.