3 - Photography for the Few: The Activities of the Enthusiastic and Artistic Amateurs

Summary

The prominent early photographers who practiced photography out of personal interest were at least as technically proficient as the very best commercial photographers, if not more so. They could also be inventive and experimental, taking a personal and individual approach to their photography as they were not dependent on commercial considerations.

In the privately printed book Calotypes by D. O. Hill and R. Adamson Selected from his Collection by Andrew Elliot, which was not published until 1928, although the text was written in the 1880's, John Miller Gray, the first Curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, wrote about Edinburgh that ‘from the first days of photography our city has been celebrated for the number and skill of its practitioners of the art’. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for photography in Scotland from the very start, Gray goes on:

Shortly after the first discovery of the Calotype by Talbot, and its communication to Sir David Brewster, a few Edinburgh gentlemen visited the latter, saw his set of Calotypes, and were made aware of the method by which they were produced. On their return they entered eagerly on the study, and formed a little Calotype Club.

There is some vagueness about the date of the visit to St Andrews but it is estimated that the Edinburgh Calotype Club was active from about 1841 to 1856 and is claimed to be the first photographic club in the world. In a letter from Brewster to Talbot on 5 October 1841 the slow progress by Dr John Adamson with the calotype process is described but Brewster also mentions that ‘difficulties have been experienced by several persons in Edinburgh’.