Page 13 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 13/146
I find it completely fascinating that Charles Babbage and William Henry Fox-Talbot not only knew each other (both were members of the wide-ranging early Victorian salon circuit after all), but that they made their major innovations in the same decade! In my opinion, one of the key factors in explaining the rapid growth of innovation in the British culture of the early-middle 19th century was that the sciences and arts were not divided into the kind of ever more specialised sub-discip- lines that increasingly characterise our culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the 1840s in Vic- torian Britain, the tradition of the Salon gathering - open to men and women of diverse interests - writers, poets, musicians, gentlemen-scientists or natural philosophers, engineers, actors, could meet and talk, give demonstrations or presentations of their work, and chat convivially, flirt and gossip. A case in point are the elegant salons run by Julia Margaret Cameron’s sister at Little Hol- land House in Kensington. Sarah Monkton Pattle’s salons are described by Jilly Foster:
“They (the Pattles) returned to England and in the 1850s and 1860s Sara held a glamorous salon at their London home, Little Holland House in Kensington, which was frequented by everybody who was anybody in the worlds of science, politics, literature and art. It was said of these famous Sunday afternoon at-homes: ‘A breezy Bohemianism prevailed. That time of dread, the conven- tional Sunday of the early Victorian era, was exchanged for the wit of cynics, the dreams of the in- spired, the thoughts of the profoundest thinkers of the age... Among the habitues .... were Carlyle, with his rugged genius, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Browning and a score of others whose names now enrich the sun of England’s greatness.’ We can add to these: Garibaldi, Disraeli, Gladstone, Herschel, Ruskin, Millais and Holman-Hunt.” (https://www.kemptown- estatehistories.com/)
Frederick Scott Archer + Gustave le Gray: Wet-Collodion Process.1851.
Wet Collodion, though a step forward from Talbot’s patented Calotype, was still a complicated and demanding photographic process. It required that the fragile glass plate had to be coated, sensit- ised, exposed and developed within 15-20 minutes (while the collodion was still ‘wet’) - making outside photography (and ‘snap-shots’) difficult or impossible, and requiring an extra level of planning and preparation in the studio. But the rewards of using glass as a substrate were that wet collodion negatives had the same sharpness as daguerreotypes; were more sensitive to light (and therefor allowed shorter exposures); could be much bigger; and you could make multiple prints from them. These advantages over Daguerreotypes and the paper-negative of Calotypes meant that Scott Archer’s Wet Collodion became the dominant process, alongside the albumen silver print, for 30 years or more - until the Gelatin dry plate was perfected in the 1880s. The best descriptions of these early photographic processes is Christopher James unrivalled: The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (2009). https://www.christopherjames-studio.com/build/thebook.html