Yesterday, in a bit of a re-play, I went along to the Tate Britain art gallery on London's Millbank, on the side of the Thames, which has an exhibition - Salt and Silver - of early salt prints that continues until 7th June.
Salt prints are the first photographs on paper that still exist today. The process was discovered about 12 years after the very first photographic image was created. It was the scientist William Henry Fox Talbot in the late 1830s who experimented with exposing paper coated with silver salts to light through a lens. He found that the chemicals turned black in the light areas and stayed light in the shadows, creating what we now call a 'negative'. (It's the same process that causes silver cutlery to tarnish and turn black; the salt stops the process, enabling a moment in time to be frozen). By shining sunlight through this negative onto another paper, also coated with silver salts, he created the first paper-based black and white 'positive' photographs.
Interestingly, at the very same time he announced this discovery - 1839 - a Frenchman Louis Daguerre was busy inventing the 'daguerreotype' a similar image recording system using a highly polished silver-plated copper sheet. Initially popular, both salt prints and the daguerreotype had largely died out by the mid-1860s. Daguerreotypes were technically superior, being sharper and more detailed, but, using silver-coated copper as the base, they were also more expensive. Both processes would be superseded by the albumen method of making prints.
There are 90 rare salt prints on display at the Tate. They are rare because they are fragile, few have survived and those that have need to be curated carefully to ensure preservation; the display at the Tate is the first ever devoted to salt prints in Britain. It is carefully lit, simply displayed and the accompanying textual description is kept to a minimum to avoid distracting from the photos.
All the usual suspects are on display including Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, Matthew Brady, J-B Frenet etc., but also quite a few less well-known photographers. As in early Victorian times, professional photographers are few, these are mostly gentlemen-amateurs, scientists, painters, lawyers politicians and so on. The subjects are equally varied; nature, landscapes, architecture, ruins, portraits, war reportage, technological progress, natural disasters and so on.
I'd love to discuss individual exhibits in some detail but - in an unaccustomed display of frugality - I refused to pay £35 for the catalogue with its bare-bones display of prints and its inclusion of some learned experts' roundtable padding. I see that new and used copies are still priced at £35 upwards on Amazon...sigh.
Some striking examples that I recall are:
Roger Fenton's portraits of the Crimean War, especially Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards, 1855, taken in civilian dress, once a hero, now his face haggard and haunted by the fearful misery of war...the same thousand-yard stare seen in Don McCullin's photos of soldiers in the Vietnam War, 113 years later.
Compare that photograph to one he took of a French cantiniere (mess servant) from the same war, her uniform pristine and shiny, looking for all the world like she has been plucked from a dinner party and dropped into the carnage.
Then there are all the early pictures of ancient ruins, like Eugene Piot's photo of the Parthenon from the Acropolis or Linnaeus Tripe's views of Sri Meenakshi Temple in India, or numerous studies of Egyptian relics; bereft of tourists, half buried in sand or incompletely excavated, they look like they have just been discovered - and can be as easily forgotten.
Initially, Paul Mares' Ox Cart, Brittany seems a scene of rural charm, an ancient wooden cart parked outside an equally ancient cottage - but then the eye is drawn to two roughly painted white crosses on the wall - a sign common since medieval times that is used to warn of the presence of a deadly disease inside, perhaps plague.
The portraits are a study in themselves. In early Victorian times, portraits of eminent men were carefully posed to convey a weighty, solemn impression of worthiness and probity. Happily, some of the photos in this exhibition also capture a more natural joie de vivre, especially of families and children - not forgetting David Hill and Robert Adamson's wonderful naturalistic studies of Newhaven Fishermen.
...the exhibition closes on 7th June - hurry along!
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