The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Photography: A Victorian Sensation
National Museum of Scotland, June 19-November 22
A new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland explores the Victorian craze for photography, showing how it influenced the way we capture and share images today.
In 2015, when more photographs are snapped in two minutes than were taken in the whole of the 19th Century, it’s easy to forget how enchanting and miraculous photography seemed when it was a blossoming technology.
Photography: A Victorian Sensation will take visitors back to the very beginnings of photography in 1839, tracing its evolution from a scientific art practised by a few wealthy individuals, to a widely available global phenomenon.
It showcases National Museums Scotland’s extensive early photographic collections, including Hill and Adamson’s iconic images of Victorian Edinburgh and the Howarth-Loomes collection, much of which has never been publicly displayed.
Highlights include an early daguerreotype camera, once owned by William Henry Fox Talbot; an 1869 photograph of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Julia Margaret Cameron; a carte-de-visite depicting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a middle-class couple; and an early daguerreotype of the Niagara Falls.
St Andrews-born brothers Robert and John Adamson form part of the exhibition. They carried out pioneering work in one of the two earliest forms of photography, calotype photography.
Robert Adamson moved on to Edinburgh, where he founded one of the most influential first photographic studios, producing more than 3,000 photographs all over Scotland in just five years with his studio partner, the Edinburgh painter David Octavius Hill. Robert Adamson died tragically young, aged just 27 in 1848.
The exhibition covers the period from 1839 to 1900, by which point photography had permeated the whole of society, becoming a global sensation. Images and apparatus illustrate the changing techniques used by photographers and studios during the 19th Century and the ways in which photography increasingly became a part of everyday life.
From the pin-sharp daguerreotype and the more textured calotype process of the early years, to the wet collodion method pioneered in 1851, photography developed as both a science and an art form. Visitors can follow the cross-channel competition between photographic trailblazers Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, enter the world of the 1851 Great Exhibition and snap their own pictures inside the photographer’s studio.
They will also discover the stories of some of the people behind the Victorian photographs. These range from poignant mementos of loved ones, to comical shots and early attempts at image manipulation. Photographs of family members were important mementos for Victorians and on display will be jewellery incorporating both images of deceased loved ones and locks of hair.