Collection Selection Boxes – The History of Photography

David Octavius Hill (1802 – 70) and Robert Adamson (1821 – 48)

Newhaven Fishermen

The two Scotsmen David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson were the first important users of the calotype process in Edinburgh. Adamson, a chemist, was introduced to the process by his brother and by David Brewster of St. Andrew’s University. Encouraged by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 77), who invented the calotype process in 1840, Adamson opened a photography studio in 1843.

Hill, a painter, is said to have contacted Adamson after being commissioned to paint a great commemorative painting of the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. Hill commissioned Adamson to take photographic portraits of the members of the Church, which Hill used as studies for his painting. The Hill and Adamson partnership lasted from 1843 until Adamson’s untimely death in 1848. During those few years, they produced at least 3,000 photographs and took portraits of many leading figures in Scottish society. They worked together to blur the lines between art and science in photography. Hill and Adamson used watercolour paper for both negatives and prints, as its fibres enhanced the painterly effect. Hill’s artistic training is evident in the carefully contrived lighting and sitters’ poses.

Hill and Adamson created a distinctive photographic style and produced portraits, among many other things. They made up compositions and photographed local landscapes and urban scenes, including images of the Scott Monument under construction in Edinburgh. In the summer of 1845, the photographers went to the fishing village of Newhaven, near Edinburgh, to photograph the residents. Their objective was to publish six volumes of pictures on particular subjects. First on the list was The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth. This project was never completed but Hill and Adamson took around 120 pictures of men, women, children, and groups. They thereby produced one of the first large-scale visual explorations of a community in the 19th-century. The three fishermen in this photograph were posed in the open air, since interiors were not light enough for a negative to be quickly produced. They would have remained completely still for one or two minutes.

Paul Strand (1890 – 1976)

Rocks, Porte Lorne, Nova Scotia

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who explored the themes of city life and abstraction. Influenced by artists such as Picasso, Braque and Brancusi, Strand began to consider how photography could respond to modern art. Between 1915 and 1917, Strand made work that was highly experimental and marked a radical shift in the vision of photography. From softly focused scenes of modern New York that reflected the movement of the city, Strand began making sharply focused images of machinery, natural forms and candid portraits. Strand used a large-format camera with an 8 x 10 inch negative to capture greater detail in his photographs. Strand intended his work to be seen as art rather than reportage photography, and along with fellow modernist photographers, like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, he helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century.

Before 1915, Strand had focussed on the Pictorialism, an approach to photography that placed beauty, tonality and composition above creating an accurate visual record. The phrase ‘Pictorialist’ referred to the artistic aesthetics of painting at the time. Pictorialists aimed to situate photography within the context of other art forms through recreating a softer, more traditional, painterly effect. Strand broke away from this aesthetic to embrace a more abstract, objective style. This closely framed photograph of rocks is an example of Strand’s belief in the objective nature of reality. Using a very sharp lens, Strand creates a tightly structured composition that relies on the richness of texture and different grey tones to give the image its strength. Strand did not approve of cropping or manipulating the negative, preferring to compose an image fully in the camera’s viewfinder before exposure. Influenced by the British art critic Clive Bell, Strand believed in the idea of ‘significant form’ which was when ‘lines and colour combined in a particular way, certain form and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.’