The Victorian Era

When Was the First Photograph Taken

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The first permanent photographic image, fixed on a metal plate and surviving to the present, was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 at his estate at Le Gras in Burgundy, France. The first photograph of a human being was made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, showing the Boulevard du Temple in Paris with a man having his boots polished and a customer waiting. The first practical negative-positive photographic process was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, and the calotype, the talbotype, the wet collodion process, the dry plate, the gelatin silver process, and the roll-film Kodak of 1888 together made photography into a mass medium by the end of the century. The story of Victorian photography is part of the wider history of Victorian Science, Invention, and Technology, and it transformed portraiture, journalism, death and mourning in the Victorian era, and the way ordinary Victorians saw themselves.

Niépce and the Heliograph

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a retired French inventor, had been working on a process to fix the images of the camera obscura since the early 1810s. The camera obscura had been known for centuries as a drawing aid: light passing through a small hole into a darkened room projected an image of the outside scene onto a wall, and an artist could trace the image. Niépce’s idea was to replace the artist with a chemical coating that would harden where the light struck it. He experimented for nearly a decade with bitumen of Judea, an asphalt derivative that hardens on exposure to light. In 1826 or 1827, he exposed a pewter plate coated in bitumen for at least eight hours, perhaps several days, in a camera obscura fixed to a window of his house at Le Gras. The plate, after being washed in a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, showed a faint but recognisable view of the courtyard and the rooftops beyond. Niépce called his process heliography, meaning sun-writing, and he took the world’s oldest surviving camera photograph. The plate is now in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Niépce partnered with Daguerre in 1829, but he died in 1833 before the partnership could yield a commercial process. Daguerre continued alone, and in January 1839 he announced the daguerreotype, a process in which a copper plate coated in silver and exposed to iodine vapour formed a light-sensitive surface of silver iodide. After exposure in a camera, the latent image was developed in mercury vapour and fixed in a solution of common salt or, later, sodium thiosulphate. The daguerreotype produced a sharp, mirror-like image on a polished metal plate, and it was the first practical photographic process to be sold to the public.

Talbot and the Calotype

William Henry Fox Talbot, an English polymath, had been working on a different process at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Talbot was an established member of the British scientific establishment, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a friend of many of the leading figures of Victorian Science, Invention, and Technology. His process, the calotype, produced a paper negative from which multiple positive prints could be made, the photographic principle that still underlies modern photography. Talbot’s first successful paper negative was made in August 1835, the image of a latticed window in his home at Lacock, which is sometimes called the oldest surviving negative. In February 1839, just weeks after Daguerre’s announcement in Paris, Talbot presented his own process to the Royal Society, and in the autumn of 1840 he patented the calotype under the name Talbotype.

The calotype had a softer, less sharp image than the daguerreotype, but it had a crucial commercial advantage: a single negative could be used to make many prints, whereas the daguerreotype was a unique object. The calotype therefore lent itself to book illustration, to portrait studios, and to the rapid distribution of images. Talbot’s invention was the foundation of the modern photographic press, and it spread quickly to Scotland, where the calotype tradition of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson — whose portraits of the Scottish Free Church leaders in the 1840s are among the great early photographs — produced the first major body of photographic portraiture.

The Collodion Process and the Studio

The 1850s and 1860s saw the development of new processes that improved on both the daguerreotype and the calotype. The wet collodion process, patented by the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, produced a glass negative from which many paper prints could be made, combining the sharpness of the daguerreotype with the reproducibility of the calotype. The dry plate, developed in the 1870s by the British photographer Richard Leach Maddox, freed the photographer from the need to coat and develop the plate immediately, and the gelatin silver process of the 1880s made photography fast enough for handheld cameras. The Kodak camera of 1888, marketed by George Eastman with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest,” brought photography to the mass market for the first time, and the Kodak Brownie of 1900 made it a child’s toy. The development of the Victorian Entertainment and Leisure industry was intimately connected with the spread of the new medium.

The daguerreotype and the calotype were both quickly commercialised. Daguerre’s studio in Paris became a place of pilgrimage for visitors to the city, and the London firm of Beard & Robinson established the first English daguerreotype studio in 1841. By the mid-1840s, there were daguerreotype studios in every major British town, and the new medium began to appear in the illustrated newspapers. The early Victorian studios included the Boston firm of Southworth & Hawes, the New York studio of Mathew Brady, the Edinburgh firm of Hill & Adamson, and the London firm of Maull & Polyblank, all of which produced the daguerreotype and, later, the collodion portrait. The Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word of the period was transformed by the new image, and the illustrated weekly press, which had been limited to wood engravings, began to use photographic sources for its illustrations.

Photography and Society

The Victorian photograph did many kinds of work. The portrait studio, with its iron stands to keep the sitter still and its painted backdrops of country houses, was the dominant form of Victorian photographic practice, and the carte de visite, patented by the Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1854, became the calling card of the Who were the Victorian upper class?. The album of cartes de visite became a fixture of the What was a Victorian parlor like?, and the appearance of a new portrait album in a household was a major social event. The Victorian Mourning Brooches of the late Victorian period often contained the photograph of the deceased, transforming the practice of death and mourning in the Victorian era.

Photography also transformed journalism, science, and travel. The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, began to use photographs as sources for its engravings in the 1850s. The Crimean War of 1854 to 1856 was the first war to be photographed, and the wet-plate photographers Roger Fenton and James Robertson produced a body of work that shaped British attitudes to the war. The railways, themselves products of the Victorian Engineering Marvels of the period, opened up the British landscape to the photographer, and the survey photographs of the 1860s and 1870s created a visual record of the rural past that was being destroyed by the spread of the new industry. The photomechanical reproduction processes, the Woodburytype of 1864, the photogravure of the 1870s, and the halftone process developed by Georg Meisenbach, Frederick Ives, and Charles-Guillaume Petit in the 1880s, made it possible to print photographs in newspapers and books. Colour photography was demonstrated by James Clerk Maxwell at the Royal Institution in 1861, when he projected three black-and-white exposures through red, green, and blue filters to produce a colour image of a tartan ribbon. The story of the photograph is part of the wider story of Victorian Daily Life and Society, and it is one of the defining technologies of the era.

The Victorian Photographers

The Victorian period produced a remarkable body of photographic work. Julia Margaret Cameron, the daughter of an East India Company official and the wife of the reformer Charles Hay Cameron, took up photography in 1863 at the age of forty-eight and produced, in the next twelve years, a body of portraits and allegorical subjects that remain among the most famous of Victorian photographs. Cameron used a wet collodion process and a lens that was, by modern standards, very soft-focus, and her photographs of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, of the astronomer Sir John Herschel, of Charles Darwin, of the actress Ellen Terry, and of the little girl who posed as the infant Christ have become icons of the Victorian imagination. The Scottish firm of Hill & Adamson, working in Edinburgh in the 1840s, produced the first great body of calotype portraits. The London firm of Maull & Polyblank, working in the 1850s and 1860s, produced the portraits of Victorian scientists, engineers, and men of letters. Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War, taken in 1855, are the first systematic war photographs. The survey work of Francis Frith, the alpine photographs of the Ellisson brothers, and the colonial photographs of John Thomson together made the photograph the central medium of the late Victorian visual world. The story of the photograph is therefore part of the wider story of Victorian Daily Life and Society, and it is one of the central chapters in the history of the Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.