Latent history: a landmark survey of British calotypes from the mid-19th century reveals the pleasures and pitfalls of curating historical photography

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Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum always promise to show us nothing but the best. "Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860" continued in this grand tradition, presenting a truly dazzling array of early photographs, some by recognized masters but others by photographers not previously known even to specialists in the field. Beautifully displayed at the Met on tastefully colored walls, the exhibition offered the viewer a digestible selection of greatest hits from the era of the calotype, and with that the opportunity to take a connoisseur's pleasure in being exposed to great photographic prints. (It opens at the National Gallery in Washington on Feb. 3.) But if you were to ask what this exhibition tells us about the actual history of the calotype, the answer is simple: almost nothing. "Impressed by Light" therefore exemplifies a dilemma central to both art-historical and museum practice: what kind of histories can (and cannot) be told in exhibition form?

When, just two years after the unveiling of his photogenic drawing process, William Henry Fox Talbot announced the details of his invention of the paper-based calotype process (from the Greek word kalos, meaning "beautiful") in June 1841, he heralded a potential transformation in the practice of photography. His calotype invention involved two major breakthroughs. The first was the making of a latent image such that a piece of paper soaked in his solution of silver salts and gallic acid responded to light but remained blank until the paper was soaked in a further developing solution. The second was a consequence of the first, allowing an amplification of the hidden image into full visibility and a significant increase in light sensitivity compared to the earlier photogenic drawing process. As he claimed in a letter to the Literary Gazette, dated Feb. 13, 1841, "A better picture can now be obtained in a minute than by the former process in an hour." Although Talbot had already made positive prints from a negative using photogenic drawing, the increased speed of the calotype made multiple reproductions from negatives a viable commercial proposition for the first time. Shorter exposure times also meant it was possible to make portraits in this medium.

Keen to make money from his invention, Talbot sold licenses for the use of the calotype to London-based professional photographers Henry Collen in l841 and Antoine Claudet in 1844. Despite their inability to turn a profit from it, Talbot also encouraged the formation of a photographic printing business, established in 1843 in the town of Reading by his former valet, Nicolaas Henneman. This business produced over 30,000 photographs from paper calotype negatives, primarily for two of Talbot's own publications (The Pencil of Nature and Sun Pictures in Scotland), but also for the Art-Union, a journal that issued an original photograph to each of its 7,000 readers in June 1846. Unfortunately for Talbot, many of these salted paper prints quickly faded, creating a public relations disaster. In the midst of uncertain economic times in the 1840s, the calotype was unable to compete in the commercial market with the more reliable and sharply detailed daguerreotype.

It was only after the poor British showing in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where French photographers won most of the awards for paper-based images derived from the calotype process, that a concerted effort was made to improve the quality of British calotype photography. Talbot was persuaded to give up his patent rights, encouraging amateurs in particular to take up the technique. An international exhibition of 1,000 exemplary calotype negatives and salt prints was organized by the Photographic Society of London in December 1852, with smaller versions subsequently sent to over 50 regional venues throughout Britain. With this impetus and some technical improvements, the calotype had a revival in fortune, especially among gentlemen amateurs, and was established in the public consciousness as a proudly British invention. Landscape became the major subject addressed by these gentlemen photographers, dominating exhibitions and filling the albums they compiled. Only with the advent of the collodion glass negative process in the late 1850s, with its detailed images and capacity for reliable mass production, did calotype-based photography subside in popularity and gradually become extinct.

Although articulated in scholarly detail in a copiously illustrated, 438-page catalogue by the show's principal organizer, Roger Taylor, former curator of photographs at the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford, England, very little evidence of this story can be found in the exhibition. It includes only four photographs by Talbot, no copies of any of the publications mentioned above, no photographs by either Collen or Claudet, and just one image attributed to Henneman. (1) Only the most desultory effort is made to demonstrate the peculiarities of the calotype as a photographic technique. At the Met, each gallery contained at least one negative, but no examples of multiple prints taken from a single matrix, the calotype process's most distinctive feature. Viewers were therefore unable to see the variable quality of prints taken from calotype negatives, a key issue for photographers at the time. Negatives were often exhibited along with positive prints in the 19th century, and photographers like Benjamin Brecknell Turner left behind over 400 of them, many more than his extant prints; nevertheless, only one of his negatives appeared here, with one of its own positives. These were displayed alongside six positives of other images. Nor did "Impressed by Light" dare exhibit any faded prints, the major impediment to the widespread acceptance of the calotype process. Similarly, no daguerreotypes or albumen prints from glass negatives were shown for comparative purposes, although some photographers featured in the exhibition worked with all three processes.