In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer introduced a wet plate process, sometimes referred to as the collodion process after the carrier material used. The process is simple: a bromide, iodide, or chloride is dissolved in collodion. This mixture is poured on a cleaned glass plate, which is allowed to sit until the coating gels but is still moist. The plate is then placed in a silver nitrate solution, which converts the iodide, bromide, or chloride to silver iodide, bromide or chloride. Once the reaction is complete, the plate is removed from the silver nitrate solution and exposed in a camera while still wet. The plate loses sensitivity as it dries, requiring it to be coated and sensitized immediately before use. It must also be developed while still moist, using a solution of iron sulfate, acetic acid and alcohol in water. By the end of 1850s it had almost entirely replaced the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype.
A portable photography studio in 19th century Ireland. The wet collodion process sometimes gave rise to portable darkrooms, as photographic images needed to be developed while the plate was still wet.
Roger Fenton
After studying law in London, Roger Fenton trained as a painter in London and Paris. He exhibited his paintings and helped found a drawing school that gave evening instruction to working men in London. Active in the arts, Fenton corresponded with French photographers Gustave Le Gray and Henri Le Secq, which may have led him to pursue photography. Fenton's photographic career was brilliant yet brief. Although his subject matter covered a broad range, he was a photographer for just twelve years. He became one of the founders of the Photographic Society in London and photographed the British royal family. In 1852 he made what are believed to be the first photographs of Russia and the Kremlin. In 1853 the British Museum invited him to document some of their collections. His photographs of the Crimea in 1855 were the first large-scale photographic documentation of war. In addition, Fenton made landscapes, architectural studies of historical landmarks, Orientalist genre studies, and still lifes. Although Fenton exhibited and sold his own photographs, he apparently grew disdainful of the increasing commercialization of photography. In October 1862 he suddenly gave it up, selling off his negatives and equipment and returning to the practice of law.
Francis Frith
Francis Frith was born at Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England in 1822 to a Quaker family. A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography.
From 1856 to 1860 Frith made three photographic expeditions to Egypt and Palestine. His work appeared in books published by the London firms of James S. Virtue and William Mackenzie between 1858 and 1865, and as stereographs published by Negretti and Zambra in 1862.
In 1859, Frith established F. Frith and Company at Reigate in Surrey, which produced and distributed photographs and stereographs for albums and book illustrations. The company also made international travel views from Italy, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Japan, China, and India, as well as an extensive body of work in Great Britain in the late nineteenth-century. One of the first mass-producers of photographs in England, F. Frith and Co. closed in 1960.
Frith died in Cannes, France in 1898.
Francis Frith
Julia Margaret Cameron
After receiving a camera as a gift, Julia Margaret Cameron began her career in photography at the age of forty-eight. She produced the majority of her work from her home at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. By the coercive force of her eccentric personality, she enlisted everyone around her as models, from family members to domestic servants and local residents. The wife of a retired jurist, Cameron moved in the highest circles of society in Victorian England. She photographed the intellectuals and leaders within her circle of family and friends, among them the portrait painter George Frederick Watts, the astronomer Sir John Herschel, and the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She derived much of her subject inspiration from literature, and her work in turn influenced writers. In addition to literature, she drew her subject matter from the paintings of Raphael, Giotto, and Michelangelo, whose works she knew through prints that circulated widely in late nineteenth-century England. Summing up her influences, Cameron stated her photographic mission thus: "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty."
An 1864 photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of her husband, Charles Hay Cameron (1795-1881).
No comments:
Post a Comment