The evolution of photography was catalyzed by the advent of the daguerreotype and the calotype, each of which had a unique impact on the fields of portrait and landscape photography. Daguerreotypes became popular for portrait photography due to their fine detail, while calotypes were used for artistic expression due to their reproducibility and similarity to printmaking.
The emergence of photography was the product of a long history of experimentation, combining scientific curiosity with technological innovation. Humans have long harbored a desire to permanently record visible objects, which has led to the development of various forms of artistic expression, such as painting and sculpture. However, all of these attempts have had to be made by hand, and there are limitations to accurately reproducing objects as they are. To overcome these limitations, inventors and scientists began to explore ways to automatically record objects using natural light.
Photography emerged from long and tedious experiments on the photosensitivity of various materials. After collaborating with Niepce, a pioneer in the art of fixing images, Daguerreotypes were made in 1837 by applying silver iodide, a light-sensitive substance, to copper plates, exposing them to light in a dark box, and then bathed in mercury vapor to produce images with extraordinarily fine detail. In 1835, the Englishman Tolbot succeeded in producing the first “photosensitized engraving,” a negative of an object or plant on a sheet of paper sensitized with silver chloride. Shortly thereafter, he was able to fix the image of the object on the paper using a small darkroom, but his images, fixed on the rough paper surface, were not nearly as sharp as the smooth Daguerreian copper plates.
In 1839, an event occurred that would separate the fortunes of the two technologies. Daguerre was promised a large life pension in exchange for handing over his technology, which he named the Daguerreotype, to the French government. The French government officially released the secret of the daguerreotype, and the technique became out of copyright, meaning that anyone could use it anywhere in the world without restriction, except in England, where Daguerre had patented it. The daguerreotype spread rapidly in France and the United States.
Meanwhile, Tolbot’s technique, despite its portability, attracted little attention. Undeterred, Tolbert continued his research, and in 1840 he succeeded in developing the negative-positive technique, in which a negative image from a darkroom was developed to produce multiple positive prints. While daguerreotypes could only produce a single photograph from a single exposure, Tolbert’s new technique allowed him to produce multiple identical paper photographs, ushering in an era of mass reproduction. Tolbot named his new technique “calotype”. However, the spread of the technology was slowed by the fact that Tolbot filed a patent for the calotype and demanded a large royalty for its use.
The first area where photography showed promise as an industry was in portraiture. Daguerreotypes, with their precise detail, were very popular in portrait photography. Photographic studios sprang up all over the place, making a lot of money from leaving permanent portraits on metal plates. The calotype, on the other hand, with its sharp contrast and few intermediate colors, was limited to landscape still lifes rather than portraits. It was in France that the patent-bound calotype was able to spread. French painters and printmakers recognized the similarity of calotype to printmaking in its stark contrast of black and white and utilized the technique to create their own works.
Under constant pressure and persuasion, Tolbert relinquished his patent rights in 1852, except for portraits. However, it was too late for the technique to catch on in England. In the early 1850s, the collodion technique, in which a collodion was applied to glass to obtain a clear negative image and from which a positive image could be obtained at will, was published without patent, and both the daguerreotype and the calotype began their decline.
