Viewpoint David Healey
Whether it’s art and science or painting and photography, some things always result in a ‘perfect chemistry’
Photography, they say, is where art and science meet. There are technically competent photographers whose work lacks visual appeal, and highly creative ones who struggle with the technical aspects. The best students understand that they need to cultivate both skill sets.
In 1843, David Octavius Hill was an Edinburgh-based painter, while Robert Adamson, an engineer, was the only professional calotypist [photographer] in the city. He was using Fox Talbot’s positivenegative film photography system invented just four years earlier. Out of necessity, a partnership was established between artist and scientist. Their cooperation was, to quote the name of an exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery about their work, A Perfect Chemistry. Why was this partnership so important?
In 1843, a group of ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly and formed the Free Church of Scotland. Hill decided to commemorate the ‘Great Disruption’, as it became known, in a large-scale painting that included the faces of some 470 ministers who founded the new church. Before the invention of photography, painters recorded events. Hill needed to sketch the ministers while they were still in Edinburgh so he could depict them accurately in his painting. But to sketch 470 would be too time-consuming, so he turned to Hill for help. He and Hill photographed the sitters and used the photos as ‘sketches’ for Hill’s project. You can see the painting at the exhibition, along with 100 of Hill and Adamson’s photos. It is testimony to how painting and photography became interlinked.
But it was not only the ‘chemistries’ of art and science, or painting and photography, that were established. Hill and Adamson’s complementary skills and interpersonal chemistry also worked. Together, they mastered this infant photographic technology and art form to produce photographs of Edinburgh, the Scots and Scotland that received critical acclaim. Their work has had an immense impact on photography and helped establish it as a medium as important as painting. Such combinations of artistic and technical knowledge and skill were pivotal, and still are, in truly great photography.
David Healey ARPS teaches photography at King Edward VI Aston School, Birmingham, and is chairman of the RPS’s Analogue Group. A Perfect Chemistry is open until 1 October at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Visit nationalgalleries.org.