4 - Photography in Demand: The Work of the Increasing Number of Professional Photographers to Meet Public Demand

Summary

Photography quickly became an important and pervasive part of Victorian society reflecting tastes and interests. In an atmosphere of consumerism there was huge demand to own photographs and commercial photographers responded to this, resulting in an almost industrial level of production.

There is a distinct contrast to Chapter 3. The photographers looked at then were free from commercial considerations and could take a personal and individual approach to their photography. They could afford to indulge themselves, be innovative, experiment and make mistakes. This chapter is about photography as a product where the purpose was to produce images which would sell and cater to popular demand. This photography was only innovative in improving the efficiency of the means of production, introducing different product lines and responding to changes in taste. Quality and originality in the image produced was not the over-riding consideration. However, among the mass of commercial photographers, while many were undistinguished, there were some very competent practitioners and a few whose work transcended commercial considerations.

The rise of commercial photography started in 1851 with a discovery from an unlikely source. Frederick Scott Archer (1813-57), who was a sculptor by profession and a keen amateur photographer, discovered a method for sensitising glass plates which became known as the wet collodion process. Glass had been thought of as the ideal backing for photographic negatives but the difficulty was getting the sensitising material to stick to the glass surface. It was Archer who utilised the recently discovered collodion as the sub-stratum coating to adhere to the glass. His method was published in The Chemist magazine in March 1851 but Archer did not patent or try to profit from his invention.