Up until photography only the very wealthy
who could afford to have portraits painted
had any notion of what their ancestors looked like.
Photography was used primarily for portraits
because people is what we are primarily interested in.
We see it as a very popular way to do what we’ve always wanted to do
which is to record the features of people we love.
I’m going to show you a collodion negative on glass
very carefully.
This process was invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer.
In the 1850’s you have the daguerreotype,
you had the calotype paper negative.
The daguerreotype was a commercial success.
The plate that they hand the customer is the same
plate that was in the camera.
There’s no negative.
What you got with the calotype was a negative
and it was a negative that could be reproduced very easily.
You could print dozens even hundreds
of positive prints from that negative.
But it made a very soft photograph.
It was much less sensitive than the daguerreotype.
You couldn’t do portraits easily with that process.
The desire was to have the reproducibility of a positive / negative process
with the precision and detail of the daguerreotype.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented
the process called the wet collodion process.
The wet plate process can give you a negative
to make paper prints.
It can give you a direct positive plate called an ambrotype
and another direct positive plate called a tintype.
When you do the wet plate process
you make a glass negative
and that glass negative can then be contact printed
onto various printing processes and make 1000’s and 1000’s of prints.
By the time you get to the late 1850’s it really replaces the daguerreotype.
The positive / negative process won out
in part because it was more economically viable.
It does require some advance planning when you’re taking it on the road.
You have to have a portable darkroom.
You pour the collodion on the plate, you dip it in the silver bath
and while it’s dripping wet with silver nitrate
you take the picture
you come back and develop it and
you have to do all of that before the plate dries.
And so the people who made landscape images
they had to carry a wagon with all their chemicals.
It was a challenge.
So you can see on this negative the pour marks
which are characteristic of the wet collodion process.
See this kind of wave up here that’s a pour mark
from when the photographer poured the developer onto the glass.
The camera that took this photograph would have
had to have been quite large to accommodate a negative of this size.
You could do a lot of things with collodion besides make a negative
You could back it with black paper, or black cloth
and you ended up with a positive.
These kinds of photographs, they were called ambrotypes
were generally cased and presented in the same way that daguerreotypes were.
You could expose a positive onto a metal plate
and for funny reasons these were called tintypes
even though they weren’t made on tin.
Tintypes were one of the earliest truly democratic kinds of photography.
During the American Civil War we see hundreds, thousands
of tintype images made by soldiers to send a picture home.
This is a H.B. Lewis wet plate camera
your typical civil war portrait camera.
It’s the camera that the tintypes of the soldiers would have been made from.
Photography shaped the way we remember things.
It’s a really important cultural change.
No longer through ballads and poems and stories
but through looking at a likeness is the way we remember
what happened and who was.