PHOTOGRAPHS
Howe, George M.
U.S. (active Portland, Maine, circa 1850 to 1860)
Middle Street in 1848
1848
Salted paper print from calotype paper negative
7 7/8 x 5 9/16 in. (20 x 14.1 cm) image size; 12 x 10 in. (30.5 x 25.4 cm) sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection
FA 2001.165

This seemingly quotidian view of a city street is a remarkably rare example of an American-made salt print from a calotype negative. Most early American photographers embraced the daguerreotype and did not adopt a negative-positive process such as this until the 1850s. The Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot had patented the calotype paper negative in 1841 along with a method of printing a positive image on paper treated with table salt and silver nitrate solution. Because of Talbot’s insistent, expensive licensing of his invention, the calotype negative was overtaken a decade later by other negative processes and the albumen print. The calotype negatives and the salt print processes, both invented by Talbot, share many characteristics. In both cases, the final visible image was finely divided particles of metallic silver (the brown colours presented by this are a natural result of the scattering of light). Both were based on the same kind of writing paper; the image is in the surface fibers of the paper, not in an emulsion or under a coating. Both were really negative processes (being itself a negative, the printing paper reversed the tones of the camera negative back to the tones of the original subject). Multiple prints, of course, could be made from one negative. The sensitivity of the paper was suitable only for contact printing, meaning that no enlargement took place and that the negative had to be the same size as the desired final print. The salt prints were a printing-out process. The final image was composed of fine particles of metallic silver - the energy to reduce this silver from the sensitive compounds came entirely from the light, and the visible image formed under its action. It was a relatively simple and economical process and produced pleasing print tones. The calotype negative process was a developed-out process. It gained a much greater sensitivity by chemically amplifying an invisible latent image left by the light. The colour of the negative was not of much import and the extra complications in its preparation were worthwhile in the context of shortening exposure times. (From: http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/hillandadamson/calo.html). -- Label copy for 150 Works of Art, October 1, 2005 to February 26, 2006.