In Our Time - The Invention of Photography

Episode Date: July 7, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the development of photography in the 1830s, when techniques for 'drawing with light' evolved to the stage where, in 1839, both Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot made claims for its invention. These followed the development of the camera obscura, and experiments by such as Thomas Wedgwood and Nicéphore Niépce, and led to rapid changes in the 1840s as more people captured images with the daguerreotype and calotype. These new techniques changed the aesthetics of the age and, before long, inspired claims that painting was now dead.WithSimon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of CambridgeElizabeth Edwards Emeritus Professor of Photographic History at De Montfort UniversityAndAlison Morrison-Low, Research Associate at National Museums ScotlandProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the time. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For news about In Our Time and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in Paris in 1839, the digotype was announced to the world.

Louis de Garre had found a way to capture images that went through a lens onto a screen in a sealed box and to preserve those images for others to see in another place and at another time. This was the dawn of photography. DeGar's was a great feat of chemistry, technology and showmanship and drew on years of experiment with camera obscura going back to Da Vinci and medieval China

and on the work of scientists who knew some chemicals directed to light but didn't know how to preserve those changes. It was said Daggerer Types had, quote, realized a dream that had been dreamt for a long time, a way of making nature make images of itself, I'd quote. There were more of a nightmare for Henry Fox Talbot in England who'd been working on a very different way of capturing images and rushed to make his discoveries known too.

With me to discuss the invention of photography are Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge, Elizabeth Edwards, Emeritus Professor of Photographic History at De Montford University, and Alison Morrison Lowe Research Associate at the National Museums Scotland. Simon Schaffer much was known before to go about light and lenses. So let's start with the idea of a camera.

What's meant by that word? A camera, we think of a pinhole camera here, is literally a room, say a box with a tiny hole in it, point the tiny hole at an external object, and on the back wall of the box, a remarkably clear, lucid, precise image of the exterior can be formed. If one puts a lens by the hole, you can bring the image to a focus,

and with an arrangement of mirrors, the image can be turned right side up. That's an ancient technology. It had been known for centuries. What was important, I think, about the very idea of the camera was that it was very widespread. It was used by people in drawing and artistry

to capture an image that could then be drawn. In the early 1800s, a complementary technique was developed, the so-called camera lucida, patented by the great British chemist William Hyde Walliston in 1807, in which one could use an arrangement of mirrors and lenses to achieve more or less the same effect. It seems to me that this was going on but not steaming ahead. It didn't have a role with it.

I mentioned Leonardo da Vinci. I touched on medieval China. David Houghton has written about Candeletto and so forth, but it didn't seem to gather any force in those early days. I think that's right. I think one of the morals of the story of the invention of photography, and it's a very apt moral right now, is how appropriate and important it is

to have the movement of technique of ideas and of people around Europe. That's crucial for the invention of photography because it was the convergence of a large number of different kinds of experimental tradition, stretching from Sweden to Switzerland and from France to Britain that brought about photography. And Germany came in.

Can you talk about Thomas Wedgwood in the late 18th century? Wedgwood is fascinating. Could we say that that's when it sort of got going in this country? Well, there were precedents. As you've said, it was well known to many chemists that silver salts in particular respond in a very interesting way to light, though the mechanism was not very clearly understood. Thomas Wedgwood was the son of the Great Potter, Josiah Wedgwood. He was clearly a brilliant young man. He was constantly ill.

He was in Bristol therapy centre taking drugs prescribed by Humphrey Davy and Thomas Bechard. Beddows, he worked extremely hard to see if it was possible to use the strange, optically sensitive behaviour of silver salts by soaking leather initially with those salts and then exposing them to light. The clever trick was to put on the leather or some other surface an object. So this would be what we would call a contact image. And then the parts of the silver salt-soaked leather not exposed to light would make the shadow image of the object lying on the leather. The puzzle was... So in fact you made a negative. In effect. Yeah. The puzzle, the crucial puzzle, was how could one preserve this image? Now there's a, there's a quandary about what Wedgwood did,

which is there were clearly Wedgwood images that survived for decades, provided they were kept in the dark. and the publicity for Wedgwood's technique was very widespread in England and in Scotland and overseas. So perhaps not the beginning of photography, but clearly an absolutely crucial prompt for it. Alison and Morrison Lowe, who solved this? The problem is a fixing now, isn't it? That's correct. Who solved that problem of fixing, these transient images? There was a Frenchman called Nisphor Neps, who spent most of his... life after he had retired to his estates. He was a lawyer earlier on. He experimented with his brother

on trying to fix images. And he really didn't start, well, he did. He started off with the wedgwood process and he does appear to have fixed a couple of images which survive in France to this day. But then he took a different route. And like many other early pioneer photographers, he was interested in producing a method of printing photographs, or at least that's how we'd understand it today. The great dream, I think, was to produce images on pages with the text, and all sorts of people from Talbot onwards were striving for this. But Nisvonep's similarly was striving for this.

So his first successful photograph, the photograph we know done by a process called heliography, is on a pewter plate and it uses something called bitumen of Judea and it was washed with lavender oil. This is not a really very successful technique for mass

production, I have to say here. And he managed to capture a picture in a camera obscura of the roofs of the houses outside his house at his workshop at grass. How did he move on

from there. Let's cut to the chase. He met up with Deguhr. He met up with Deguhr. And then got on with it. And Deguhr, Deguhr was a very different sort of person. He wasn't a scholarly retired scientist dabbling around with stuff. Although he was doing a lot of scientific experiments himself, he was an entrepreneur and a showman.

And he ran a device called the diorama, which is rather similar to the panorama. The diorama, though, is translucent canvases where you project or project through paintings of foggy scenes, Gothic ruins, you know, everything that was very romantic. And he was

very keen to capture images in the camera obscure. Again, it is this business of using the camera obscure to capture images. And so he teamed up with Nieps and then Neeps died. It has to be said because it's important here really that the diagram

was fantastically popular. Absolutely. And he built one here in Regents by Constable went and declared himself to be amazed by So something big is going on. He's attracting crowds. And that is part of the story. It is. It is indeed because D'Ager manages to do this in a very flamboyant way. He makes the breakthrough secretly.

He practices, again, with silver plates. He moves away from pewter and he moves on to silver plates. And he produces, by 1838, this single one-off reversed positive image, which is metallic and very, very fragile, has to be protected by glass. And he finds he can't get the backing for it. That's the crucial thing. So he goes to the Institute of Paris, the scientists. And he speaks to Arago, who is the director there.

And Arago sees what he's doing and is thrilled to bits and then negotiates with the government to get them to buy it and pay him off for the pension. It's a brilliant, seriously, that a brilliant notion of state sponsorship. This one man in the French Assembly made a magnificent speech said, this is the future, this is France's glory,

give him a great big pension, which is what he really wanted. Let us patent it and get on with it. It was terrific combination of the state and an individual. Dengar brought a lot together and away he went. So we're on our way. What was the reaction of people, Elizabeth Edwards, who saw these Daggerotypes, came in in 1839. We have one or two littered around the studio table.

So if you close your eyes, I'll see them better. Anyway, here we are. What was the reaction? Complete astonishment. They're beautiful photographs to say to the distance. I haven't seen a daguerre type recently. Obviously, they look at their oval. They're in, they're beautifully fig.

They look as if they've been exposed for a long time. They're black and white, of course. But a few touches of colour here and they look like the person they're meant to look like. I'm holding one up of Edward Allen Poe. It's fantastic. You really see into his character. It must have been astonishing. for people to see that. Right, that's me and you.

It was astonishment and wonderment. People talked about the unimaginable precision. You could see every eyelash, every crease, every whisker, every hair. There was some resistance to this in some quarters. You know, only God should really have that control of precision over mankind. And this could be the work of the devil. But that was a minority view. the view was absolute astonishment and enthusiasm.

After Arago presents, he describes the process, he doesn't demonstrate the process to the combined meetings of the Academy of Fine Art and the Academy of Science in Paris in August 1839. The room is packed overflowing. They even feel the courtyard to hear about this new discovery and new invention. It's astonishing, isn't, that they were so clued up to do that.

You would have thought it would happen in a back alley somewhere, wouldn't you, Three people around a Bunsen burner, but not like that at all. Not at all. And apparently, after this meeting, optical instrument makers and chemists in Paris were besieged by people who wanted to try out this new technology. I suspect they didn't get very far because it was incredibly complicated. And very soon, the whole of Paris, if not the world, was overtaken by this mania for the daguerreotype.

It offered so many possibilities. It wasn't necessarily seen as an art form of any sort at that period. It was seen as a form of record. It was seen as the potential in portraiture, as we've just talked about. It was also seen as having potential in things like archaeology. In his speech, Arago actually talks about what if we had this in 1798 when the Napoleon's expedition to Egypt looked at the hieroglyphs? and also you get all the information out to lots of people

in precisely the same way at the same time that was new as well exactly and this was crucial this was absolutely crucial in the further dissemination of photography more generally and so by December 1839 Paris is gripped by a mania for the daguerreotype and there's a wonderful cartoon which is actually prescient

it shows how photography takes over the world It shows great throngs of people in the Paris streets, fighting each other to have their photograph taken, to take photographs. There are cameras pointing in all directions. There's somebody in a balloon pointing a camera down. There are anxious mothers and Harris nursemaids trying to get children to sit still in front of the camera because, of course, it's a very long exposure.

And then in the background, we have a railway train stuffed with photographic equipment, people barrowing photographic equipment onto steamships. And so in a microcosm, he's understood the integration of this incredible medium into industrial modernity. And that's very good, description. And he's a showman. He started off being shown, and that's part of it. And it is, also, the French were onto it, you know, when they're good, they're really good, aren't they?

From the very beginning, he said, they said, okay, we're going to photograph all the monuments in France. Yes. We didn't do that, did we? But anyway, they did. And they recorded them, this is so big. They went for it. It's wonderful the way they went for it. Yeah, you're going to say something else. Where you go? Well, I was just going to pick up on your point about how this connection between the state and the individual development in France was very, very clear. And, yes, there is state sponsorship of photography, and its recording of ancient monuments, which starts in 1851, where people are commissioned. five photographers are sent to five regions of France to liaise with

local antiquarian societies and so forth and record the cultural patrimony of France and this is actually a photographic manifestation of something that happens much, much earlier. In 1830s, France has a ministry of ancient monuments effectively. It took us to the 1880s. Still, we're not going to be put down by that.

It's just the way they went about photographing that I was talking about. Okay, Simon Schaffer. Henry Fox Talbot hears of this. Here's of Daguer. He's in England. He's a gentleman. Irish a great, very clever man

and his estate doing all these experiments. He's been doing it a different way. He's shocked into activity. That's right. Talbot was a Cambridge graduate, a landed gentleman of some wealth, though very often cash-strapped, fantastically well-connected.

An MP with a very well-developed, backstory, we might say. His closest associate, whom I want to mention here, was the preeminent astronomer John Herschel. And it was working with Herschel in the early 1830s that began to draw Talbot's attention to photochemistry in general and the specific possibilities of capturing images on silver salts in particular. There's a story Talbot tells later on that while holidaying in Lake Como, one would, if one was an English holiday party, indulge in drawing. Talbot was rubbish at drawing and dreamt of the possibility of making the process automatic

so that he wouldn't be shown up by the other people in his party. How is he different from Degger? He's enormously different. He's not initially an entrepreneur, certainly not a showman. The way he added to the invention of photography, so I'm talking. His chemical technology is completely different. Two things matter most in the contrast between what Talbot did and what Daguerre did. The first was that the Talbot processes that he developed with Herschel

involved making a negative and then printing positives from that negative using the same process as one had used to expose the photograph in the first place. Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, the substrate that, Talbot used was paper, very fine paper, what he called salted paper, paper dipped in very strong common salt solution and then some silver salt, silver chloride or silver nitrate. What that meant is that one could make in principle an indefinitely large number of copies, unlike a deGerotype, which is a unique one-off positive, what Talbot was offering was the dream and in which, in which, you know, many ways the possibility of an indefinite number of copies.

And that meant that photography might become a vastly diffused technique. And it was his that took precedent and gradually gained strength as time I've con. But not at the start. There was not the excitement there was in France. There was not the rushing. He patented his process in England, which in a way held it back, and it was expensive to do. Although in the longer run, it would overtake a archetype in popular...

well, just as a way of doing stuff. But he didn't paint in Scotland and enter Scotland. Well, yes, he had a scientific friend called David Brewster, who was based at St Andrews University, and they were in correspondence. Of course, the penny postage is another great way of sending your photographs through the post, which happens from this time onwards.

And Talbot is sending letters to Brewster and explaining what his process is. and Brewster suggests to him, in fact he says in so many words, don't extend your patent to Scotland, it would be unprofitable. And at that point you had to take out patents in all three of the kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland, and it was vastly expensive and really very troublesome. So Talbot, on his friend's advice, didn't.

And then I think was probably very annoyed to see how it was taken up by the famous partnership of Hill and Adamson. Now, Adamson was a young engineer who was in not very good health in St Andrews, and he learnt through Talbot's instructions how to take photographs along with a group of other academics and locals. And then he decided to go to Edinburgh and set up professionally as a callatipist on Colton Hill. Calatipist. They were a beautiful picture. Another, it's a words, I think, provided by Bruce.

Rooster, who was very keen on Greek roots to new inventions. Other people call them Talbot types, but it's certainly the process that Talbot produced. So can you tell us precisely how these two pushed it forward? I'm interested in forward movement at the moment. They, well, sadly, we don't know exactly what they did because Robert Adamson was quite young. He got together with an artist called David Octavius Hill who was a bit of a big cheese in the art world. He was secretary to the Royal Scottish Academy

and a landscape painter in his own right. Adamson essentially did the technology, the pointing of the camera, the preparing of the paper and so on, and he'll set up the pictures and grouped people into poses and worked out how to frame them and all that side of things. But he was also a very, I think, affable person, and he got on very well with his sitters.

Was there a sense of a bit of a boom in Scotland, not on a par with, but echoing the boom in Paris with Degere? Difficult really to say that, I think because people were really quite critical of the callotype. The very nature of it being a paper process meant that it looked quite fibrous. And to our eyes, they look perfectly, beautiful because of course we know

impressionism and we look with chuted eyes at the Hillen-Adamsons and think how marvellous they look. They're rather blurry and mysterious looking. But I think the Victorians in fact preferred the

pin-sharp truthfulness of the de Garretipe. Elizabeth Edwards, in 1840s it's now gathering steam outside France and so on. Can you just give us a some idea in this country and as Simon pointed out at the beginning we're in Sweden,

we're in Switzerland, we're in Germany, it's all, can you give us some picture of what's going on? It's only six, seven years after Deguer has come out with his first portrait. And I think we must remember that photography in the 1840s is still in a very profoundly experimental stage. We mustn't see Degger or Talbot's processes as fixed processes. There's continual experimentation. And in Britain, that experimentation really exists in the amortosphere. Gentleman of science, a lot of the people who are experimenting with photography also have other interests in either optics or sometimes a subject matter of photography. For instance, a lot of them are members of society of antiquaries as well, a lot of the members of the Royal Society, the

Linnaean Society, all these learned societies. And if you like, it's a network of scientific interest in which photography develops in this country. Is it expensive to do? It's very expensive, so it tends to be the gentleman, occasionally lady, experimenter. They are publishing in journals like the Royal Society, and increasingly there are discussions of photography in the kind of journals that class of person would have read, the quarterly review, the Athenaeum, Notes and Queries.

When you describe very vividly what was happening in Paris, children in prams being told to sit still, folks from balloon shooting, rushing up and down street. That suggests that there was a popular take-up, and that suggests that it was more than a popular interest. It was accessible to more than you're giving us to understand it was in this country, England, as it happens. Yes, that's so. Because of the different technologies involved, the early processes on the early processes on the negative, positive processes were much, they were much less commercially orientated, for instance. They were much more experimental. We have to remember that at this period, just getting the

image was the challenge. It wasn't about just making pictures that are nice to look at. That doesn't really become the major concern to around about the 1850s when the chemistry and the optics are secure. Why was America in all this? America was also experimenting, but they took up the Degera type with much more enthusiasm than in this country. In this country, one of the reasons the Deggerotype was not taken up with such enthusiasm was that, I think it was in the mid-1840s, a wealthy coal merchant called Richard Beard bought a patent for the Degera type from Degere's agent. And he then basically franchised, licensed the technology.

and he's very clever about this. He did it regionally, so there was a Degera type studio in Bar control. He controlled it, and he controlled it. Made people pay a lot of money. Thousand guineas, a lot of money. Simon, Simon Schaeffer, every aspect of photography, as we know, is slow and cumbersome. Frederick Scott Archer, a butcher's son, like Cardinal Walsley,

speeded that up. Yes, Scott Archer is an extraordinary figure. Hartfordshire, man, his father, a bank, cropped, trained first in coin dealing, which drew his attention to the beauties of profiles. He became a sculptor, actually a sculpture of great virtue, I think, joined the so-called Callotype Club, that's to say, the Photographic Society, through the recommendation of his medical advisor, Hugh Diamond, someone who ran a psychiatric

asylum in Surrey. There's a lot of illness about all this, isn't it? Well, all you have to do is to reflect for just a brief moment on the chemicals you need to make a photograph. You need iodine and mercury vapour. And what Scott Archer used

was gun cotton, one of the least stable and most explosive substances he could find. And he was interested in gun cotton because As Alison pointed out earlier, the trouble with paper prints is that they look rough, they look fibrous.

Scott Archer was interested in making a smoother surface, so he introduces Collodion, which is gun cotton, an explosive, dissolved in ether and alcohol. You spread it, genius moment for Scott Archer, on glass, you salt it, you add iodine salts, and it turns out you've accelerated the exposure

time by times 30 or 40. It became portable. Scott Archer invented a collodion camera, which essentially made the whole of the dark room portable. He, like his French opposite numbers, was absolutely fascinated by landscape, by ruins, by documenting English monuments. And unlike Talbot, he was clearly not interested in income. He simply gave away the recipe for the collodian process and died a pauper. So just to speed this a little bit, what people were interested in the start

these persons, as Simon has said, and up in Scotland, are recording the past, isn't it? Showing the landscape or the monument. Is that the main concern? Well, the trigger for Hillen-Adamsson, in fact, was a schism in the Church of Scotland, believe it or not, So there's a whole load of images where groups of ministers in their presbyteries are gathered together. And it's group photographs to start with.

And then Hill realises the potential of this and realizes that they can photograph ancient monuments. Indeed, they're very keen on doing that. Then they go down to New Haven, which is a local fishing port, and they photograph the local fishwives. and it's really an attempt at social documentation well, well before these things were really thought of. And what are those photographs? Oh, you want to talk about this, right?

Elizabeth, Elizabeth. I just wanted to come in there because I think it's really interesting this idea of photographing monuments because I think in many ways what is seen as a suitable subject for photography isn't just technologically determined like monuments don't move very much,

so they're useful things to photograph. but it's a subject matter that is part of the aesthetic habitat of the experimental class. So if you look at Talbot's Pencil of Nature 1844, it has photographs of classical sculpture, it has photographs of documents, the kind of things that people have antiquarian, scientific, archaeological interests, would be interested in. And I think the aesthetic, if you like, point of reference, was in many ways the engraving.

And that's why this particular group of experimenters was so interested in the callotype because actually it looked like what a picture should look like in their cultural experience. And the deGerotype and Scott Archer's processes actually move away from that to a sort of nasty, sharp commercial precision. There's something called stereographs.

Now, did that speed things up a bit? What did that bring to the term? table? In many ways the stereo was the first mass... What was it first of all? Sorry, sorry. It's a pair of photographs

taken by a twin lens camera where the lenses are placed about two and a half inches apart to emulate natural vision, the eyes. When you look at these pairs which are mounted on little cards side by side and if you look at them

closely you can see that they're not quite aligned you put them in the viewer and they go 3D Why was that so important? Why did that have such an effect? Well, it was 19th century, virtual reality. Yeah. It really enhanced the reality effect of photographs. It was extraordinary. How did it in our barbershop in Wickland, Ronnie Graham's Barbershop?

Heard one of them, and you went to early to play with this thing. They were fantastically, you saw real 3D, didn't you? Yes, they're absolutely astonishing. And it actually affects the composition of photographs because you want a very strong diagonal line going into the image that really enhances the 3D. But these really take off in the beginning of the 1850s

and a loss of the commercial photographers who become the great commercial topographic photographers like George Washington Wilson and Aberdeen were back in Scotland. They start as stereo photographers in the mass market. Alison Morrison, I know you to come in. Yes, indeed they do.

But it's not just Washington Wilson. It's also people like Francis Frith and Francis Bedford. and oh, the chap who went up the Nile. That was Frith, actually, I think. Sorry, got them confused. Yes, when I was going to say when people looked at Hill and Adamson's images, they compared them to Rembrandts. It was very much an engraving sort of comparison that was coming out there. Simon, how readily did these people, the inventors, the developers, wanted to be...

How readily was it used by science for their purposes, and how much did it help some scientists in their purposes? I think that's a really important question, because science obviously gave an enormous amount to photography. Repaying the debt took a long time. It looked as it... She science is a series of gifts and deaths. Indeed. Oh, how very nice. Look at, for example, the puzzle of the daguerre type.

It's a one-off, so it's extremely difficult to print from, yet what science wants is reproducible images that can be distributed reliably. So Fox Talbot comes into his own. Talbot's technique could in principle, he argued, completely transformed the sciences. Tallbert was a very, very keen botanist. He got in touch with the head of Q Gardens, William Hooker, and said, why don't you use my process to record plants?

And Hooker's answer, I think, tells you everything you need to know about the problem. Hooker says this would be good for copying drawings of plants and no good for making an image of a plant that brings out what. a botanist wants to know. The establishment rarely lets you down. Indeed. You're saying something. Oh, you're about to?

I just want to respond to Simon's point, because I think it's a really important one, because the thing about photography is that it always records more than the photographer intends. So what you put in front of the camera is what you get a trace of. And for certain forms of science, this just simply doesn't work.

They couldn't control the information enough. What, sorry, Simon, quickly, because I want to go to... Yeah, there is one science where photography is completely transformative. Astronomy. That's the science of Arago, that's the science of Herschel. From the word go, it was clear that photography would be crucial for astronomy. Daggerre himself, before the beginning of 1839, had already made an image of the moon, which is extraordinary. think that these photos have quite long exposure time.

So stuff that moves is bad news. As the exposure times get quicker and quick win, quicker, astronomers find photography more and more important. And that would be a crucial area of scientific photography. Right through the century. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, intertive. That idea of movement takes us to you, Alison. It was still, as Simon's indicated, a bit too,

early to capture movement, which painters could do. But painters now begin to be affected by photography, as I understand it. Can you give us a few sentences on that? Yes. Well, the first street scene taken by Degger... 1838, I'm talking here. Right, Zahlerz. Degair managed to capture somebody standing still in a Parisian street,

having his shoes cleaned. So you can see these two people, the two figures, but you can't see anything else. The horses, the passes by, everybody else is just a blur, and the streets appear to be empty. And indeed, this goes on through both processes, the Degera type and the Calotype during the 1850s, up until 1851 with the new Frederick Scott Archer Collodian process.

Now, a number of people, Gustav Le Gray, in France and George Washington Wilson in Aberdeen were able to accelerate their processes by more light and the way you actually compose the picture so that you could get street scenes and waves on the ocean. But we're not quite there. Elizabeth Edwards, what was the relationship between photography and art in the 19th century? Because we're moving into that.

and photography as an art, because we're at the time of the Crimean War. We not only had this great event of being reported straight back because of all sorts of other developments, but Fenton taking photographs there and so on. So it's moving into something else. It's having an effect on painting. It's having an effect on literature. People start to write, like, as if they were foot,

and so on and so forth. Can you say something about that? It has an immeasurable influence on art and literature. I think it's the existence of first. Photography establishes new ideas of realism, new standards of veracity in writing. So you get writers like Zola, for instance, in the 1850s, who's writing with this almost photographic detail. And you find writers who are using photographs as metaphors. There's a wonderful example in Anna Karenina, which later is 1875, I think,

that she comes back from a trip with Ronski and she goes to the album to find a photograph of her son, and she can't get it out of the album, so she prods the photograph of the sun out of the album with a photograph of Vronsky. What a symbolic moment. It tells you everything. In painting, there's a symbiotic relationship from the very beginning.

As we've already discussed, there is a very strong aesthetic quality in what it is to make a picture in photography. But also, painters are beginning to collect photographs. They're beginning to use them as aid members. One thinks of people like Holman Hunt's paintings of Middle Eastern scenes. He's using photographs from biblical tourism as a memoir. And also, the next thing that happens is around about the 1860s,

you get a second wave of amateurs. And what these second wave of amateurs do is actually they're interested in moving photography itself for. You're talking about camera now. I'm talking about people like Cameron and Dodgson, Lewis Carroll. They, the new debate about photography isn't one of, if you like, technical and processual stability, which it was in the early first wave experimentation. The second wave of amateurs are interested in positioning it as an art form. As an art form. Simon, let's take, let's go back to chemistry because it's a,

accompanied this story and it was intricate and essential and so on. So late 19th century advances in chemistry, what were they and how did they assist this process? What was decisive

in my view was the realisation which is there early and then delivered on really much later that the rays that affect silver salts overlap with and aren't the same as the rays the human eye sees. So photographic plates are far more sensitive at the blue and violet end

than they are at the red end. That meant that there was always the possibility of capturing on a photographic plate marks of things we cannot see. For two reasons. One is because photographic plates pick up radiation, we can't see. Talbot had already anticipated that back in 1844. And secondly, with long exposures,

photographic plates could pick up images too faint for us to see. So both in the chemistry laboratory and in the astronomical observatory, photographic technique could completely change what counted as the detectable universe. And that then fed back into impritional. processes of photochemical capturing. You see, for example, from the 1880s onwards,

the most exquisite attention by chemists, astronomers, indeed antiquarians, to ways in which you could make the plates more sensitive, more quickly, and work out how to see those invisible radiations. And that would bring about a revolution, both in photography and in science. Alison, we're getting towards the end now, but it's sort of enter Kodak, isn't it?

Yes, it is. And what happens then? Everything goes further down the social scale, although it's not just Kodak. No, but it's a useful shorthand. It is a very useful shorthand. But the real revolution... So lots of people are going to get involved now and it's much cheaper. Not really until after 1900.

Well, we can risk that. Well, I don't know. 1900 is... No, I'll cross that time. I'll cross that sense. There are other ways that people become engaged with photography, if you like. For instance, there is a form of the wet collodian process called the Tin Type, and this was extraordinarily cheap, could be developed inside the camera,

and was used, for instance, on beaches, where people could go on day trips after the bank holiday legislation in 1871, and they could bring away a picture of themselves for sextments. And it's really feeding into what became quite soon became mass photography. Absolutely. Working class people's ancestors were photographed in the early 20th century. And then the war came, photographed there, photograph, photographed. How Elizabeth Edwards do you think photography changed the way people in the late 19th,

early 20th century saw the world? I think photography changed everything. I think it's one that's community technologies of the 19th. century, which intervene with space and time. Photography makes the past, present the whole time. You can

access whole narratives through photography. And I think we need to understand photography in relation to things like railways, steamships, the telegraph. And basically, I think photography changed the world. In that,

it changed how people saw the world around them, how they had access to knowledge, therefore how they thought about the world and therefore how they acted in the world. So I think it's one of the great transformative technologies. I'd also change personal relations, been able to carry a photograph, being able to look at a photograph,

became part of movies, novels, life, as an enrichment. It's also sort of melancholy, happiness, all employed by these little photographs. And I think it gave ordinary people and access to their own pasts. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Alice and Morrison Lowe, Elizabeth Edwards, and Simon Schaffer.

we'll take a break now. We're back on the 22nd of September, but I'm told you can keep in touch till then on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

We missed out women. Yes. I think that it's absolutely fascinating that a process which is so complicated, so long drawn out and so dangerous, if not in many cases fatal, is also implicated in what Victorian women not only became devoted to,

but in many cases we mentioned Julia Margaret Cameron, I would mention Anna Atkins. Cecilia Glacier. Cecilia Glacier are extraordinarily in command of. I mean, Atkins is fantastic. Atkins makes, in the 1840s, essentially the first book with photos, before Talbot.

This is a book on British algae, unbelievably beautiful cyanotypes. Julia Margaret Cameron, who I think is the greatest photographer of the 19th century. A bit of head wagging going on on the lady to your left and the lady to your right.

agrees. Has this extraordinary... This deep silent disagreement. Mime disagreement. Has this extraordinary career in which she uses her acquaintance network as a source for her photography, but she also uses her photography

to break out of what would otherwise be, I think, a rather confined life. Yes, I would agree with that. I'm just not as bowled over by her photographs, perhaps, as I should be. I find them a bit manoured, perhaps. And, you know, reading the descriptions of her unfortunate nephews and nieces as to how, you know, they look miserable,

and this is because they were, and because she was a terrifying old battle axe who shouted at them. But all those early photographs, I mean, they look very stern, don't they? I mean, I managed to, not managed to collect, I haven't done it. Anyway, there are a few, we weren't in a photographic class, really. I mean, my mother once got a camera, and she took about three a year, and they're basically the camera, if you look at the shot, the shot is a Blackpool Tower with a little dot in front of it,

who is me or me with a pal. That's the photograph, but the real. photograph is Blackpool Tower. That's what we did. Well, I suppose his monument's going to think of it. Yeah. But I think also, the other thing I think we did leave out was the scale of mass circulation.

That photographs just penetrate everything from 1860 onwards. There's not a single aspect of human endeavour. Even things like philosophy, it changes how people think about realist philosophy and several. You know,

it just changes every single. aspect of human activity. And, no, the point about everybody looking stern, because I think, you know, ideas of naturalism... I finished, I didn't finish my sentence, did I? No, no, that's when you've said it. They all look very, very stern and do, yeah. But I think people look stern because

they're not, naturalism isn't something that immediately is related to photography. It's something that doesn't actually come into the 1920s or 30 to the Leica Revolution. Smile, smile for the camera. You went to the studio to create a social icon. Right.

And that's why these photographs look stern and proper, and everybody in their correct dress. Sunday best. Absolutely. Also, going to the Degera type studio was not a cheap operation. It cost a guinea. And a guinea translated into today's terms is £300. You didn't just drop in and have your photo taken.

You thought about it very carefully. But later on, we're talking about the early 20th century now. I tempt you into the early 20th century. I know it is very difficult. Modern life. But I think there is very interesting sort of procedures for early working class access to photography. Factories had clubs and so forth. And you put a penny a week in to the photographic club.

And when your number was up or it was a big thing like you got married or something, you took your two and sixpence to the local studio that you'd saved up in the photography club and had your photograph taken. So there were sort of collective ways of getting a photograph. image. It's in many ways why school photographs from some working class board schools in the 19th century is so fascinating. Because

of course, often it's the only photograph taken of a child and that's why everybody's faces have to show in order. So, because that's the only record of that child. And the things, talking about working class traces in photography, the things I find fascinating, the things that are coming out of the archives now

which are these records from jails where you have mugshots and These date from the late 1850s onwards with people's names, ages and their crime. And the number. And their number, of course. But it's fascinating. We didn't have time to go into that.

I do think the use of especially wet plate collodion technology in institutions of confinement must have been an extraordinary moment. We mentioned Hugh Diamond, who was head of the Surrey Asylum. And one of the things he did, and it was taken in a very complicated way, was to basically photograph the faces of his inmates. And there was a huge debate about whether that was intrusive, whether it was science, could you learn from the physiognomy? Phenomenology was very prevalent. And I think when Elizabeth talks about the transformation and philosophy here, the whole of medicine changed. Yes. The whole of medicine changed because of it.

of photography, not because, as in the William Hooker case, because all of a sudden you could capture something that was transient, but because you had vast arrays of data. So we say a lot now about big data, photographs of big data already in

the 1860s. Anecdote, the number of glass plates that say Greenwich Observatory accumulated in the second half of the 1800s is vast. Thousands and thousands and and thousands of images, which are almost but not quite of the same thing,

so that you have these wonderful data series of sunspots. Long, long before, actually, you quite have the mechanism for managing them. And I think there is that instability inside what photography could do, the faces of the mad, the image of stars, the images of remote sites and so on. Talking about stars, our producers about Trenton. And making an offer you can't review. It's very much eclipsed moon. Who'd like to your coffee?

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