Page 4 - Expanded-Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 4/145
We’re going to begin with The publication of Thomas Wedgwood’s account of his experiments in ‘copying paintings upon glass’ during the 1790s.
Thomas Wedgwood: “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver. Invented by T. Wedgwood, Esq.” 1802. This paper, co-written by the chemist Humphry Davy, is the core account of Wedgwood’s exper- iments in what was to become known as ‘photography’ (christened by Julia Margaret Cameron’s friend John Herschel in 1839). Davy and Wedgwood completely describe the process of making an image on a photo-sensitised substrate (Wedgwood used leather coated with silver nitrate, as well as ceramic and paper substrates), but in all his experiments since the 1790s he had found no way to ‘fix’ the resulting image, which faded rapidly in daylight. The polymathic John Her- schel was to solve the problem of ‘fixing’ the photo-image in 1820, proposing hyposulphite of soda and silver, but until then Wedgwood’s paper acted as an inspirational beacon for chemists and inventors, predating the work of Niepce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot by twenty years or so. Thus the seeds of photography were sowed right at the beginning of the 19th century. The im- portant later discoveries (principally by Niepce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot in 1839), began the modern image-mediated age where we see (and take) billions of images in our lifetimes.
The ‘magical fascination’ of the mirror image, and the image projected by the Sun onto the ground glass plate of a camera obscura was always accompanied by the desire to capture the evanescent image - to somehow fix it forever. The Silhouette portrait was one way to do this, and it became a thriving business for aspirant portrait artists in the 18th century: