Throughout photographic history, France is important in the creation and improvement of early processes. Great Britain also had their hand in analog and alternative processes that helped form modern photography. One of which was the Calotype process.
Read on to find out about Calotypes - why they were important and how they differed from the French Daguerreotype.
cover photo by William Henry Fox Talbot
Officer onboard the HMS Superb - 1845 by Nicolaas Henneman
What is a Calotype?
A calotype was an English photographic invention by William H. Fox Talbot; an inventor, and member of the House of Commons. He was very interested in the photographic process, for the simple fact that he wanted to capture beautiful landscapes and scenes. He tried his hand at drawing and decided he had no talent for sketching images.
NB - You might know Talbot's name from photographic or photoglyphic engravings (which came later than the calotype).
For this reason, he looked towards chemistry and optics to capture the scenes he couldn't draw. He and other photographers already knew that solutions of silver and salt created a light-sensitive medium. Niépce had previously discovered this with his photography experiments. Talbot started experimenting in 1934 with photograms by laying leaves and plants on light-sensitive paper.
The Ladder - 1845 by William Henry Fox Talbot
These photograms, or as William Talbot called them photogenic drawings, made a reverse impression on the paper. The sun darkened the paper where the plants were, yet bleached the paper where the plants were not. This showed beautiful forms and shapes from the plants, and the first paper print (and negative were born).
From this idea, he continued experimenting with a Camera Obscura – a light-proof box with a pinhole or lens that allowed the user to capture a scene. The sensitized paper was then placed in the box. This created a negative as the paper registered light and dark areas from the scene. Talbot then created a positive from a negative through contact printing.
Black box drawing by Louis Mornaud
The Calotype or Talbotype was patented in 1941, probably from pressure placed on the photographic processes from Daguerre. Daguerre had worked on his photographic experimentations which gained a lot of interest from the French government. He allowed the French photographic community to use his findings for free, yet the UK had to pay. Talbot felt his negative/positive process was being threatened and patented his photographic findings. Some say it halted further Calotype and British photography experimentation in the years to come.
Talbot came to create his Calotype (beautiful impression in Greek) by using silver nitrate/silver chloride. Coating the paper in the solution allowed for quick and cheap replications. If you had a negative, you could print consistent copies continuously. Talbot printed a series of publications entitled Pencil of Nature, which included paper prints and info on his processes.
The improvement with the calotypes came in the fixing of the image. As early processes used silver to sensitize the paper, the silver had to be removed to stop the development. This was a huge issue for those before Fox Talbot, such as Wedgwood and Niepce. It was Herschel that discovered hypo (sodium thiosulfate) removed the leftover silver halides. This fixer stopped any further development of the image. Talbot was the first to stabilize his images using this method. In doing so, he advanced the early photographic process and created a popular method of replication printing for the next 25 years.