1101
Street, erected for the purpose, so that the light of day,
which acts to him the part of a pencil, may have free and
uninterrupted access.
Initially there was insuffi cient demand for a full-
time professional photographic studio, even in some
large cities. Photographers had to have another source
of income. That might be a bookseller, or even a print-
seller.
Itinerant photographers opened temporary studios for
a few days or weeks, then moved on to a new location.
Their advertisements were remarkably similar on both
sides of the Atlantic, separated only by time. In Wash-
ington, D.C., the National Intelligencer noted on June
30, 1840 that, “Mr Stevenson would inform the citizens
of Washington and the District that he has taken rooms
at Mrs. Cummings on Penn. Ave. a few doors from the
Capitol where he is prepared to take likenesses by the
daguerreotype every fair day from 10am till 4pm.” Three
years later, in the small Scottish town of Dumfries, The
Dumfries & Galloway Courier announced on March
27, 1843 that Mr Edwards ‘of the Adelaide Gallery in
London’:
respectfully intimates his arrival in Dumfries, where he
purposes remaining a few days, in the exercise of a pro-
fession which is altogether new in the South of Scotland.
He has engaged apartments at Mrs Williamson’s, Irish
Street, where his specimens may be seen every lawful
day from 10 to 4 o’clock. NB As Mr Edwards has pressing
engagements in Russia, Prussia, &c., this may be the only
opportunity of his being in Dumfries again, if ever, for a
lengthened period of years.
While early professional interest was predominantly
directed towards the daguerreotype, it was not exclu-
sively so. Robert Adamson became Edinburgh’s fi rst
professional photographer to use Talbot’s calotype in
early 1843. The Edinburgh Review noted in January
of that year that, “Mr. Robert Adamson, whose skill
and experience in photography is very great, is about
to practice the art professionally in our northern me-
tropolis.” He opened his ‘studio’ in May of that year at
Rock House on the Calton Hill, although the exposure
times necessary required the photographs to be taken
outdoors in the garden. Despite several daguerreotypists
having operated in the city since before the end of 1841,
Adamson remained, until 1846, the only professional
photographer listed as such in the city’s trade and street
directories.
Nicholas Henneman, Talbot’s assistant, also became
a professional calotypist when he was appointed man-
ager of the Reading printing establishment in December
1843, and took some of the images published in The
Pencil of Nature. By 1848, with the Reading establish-
ment closed, he was operating the ‘Sun Picture Rooms,’
the calotype studio Talbot had established the previous
year in London’s Regent Street.
The expansion of professional portrait photography
was, understandably, driven by price. While the high
price daguerreotype was the sole option, markets re-
mained small and exclusive. The ambrotype widened
those markets by providing a lower cost option to those
who aspired to a cased portrait, but it was the advent
of the carte-de-visite, introduced by André-Adolphe-
Eugène Disdéri in 1854 which really established photog-
raphy as a universal medium. With the carte-de-visite,
photography no longer sought to emulate and imitate
the painted miniature but, instead, evolved a new and
uniquely photographic alternative, which itself created
a market for albums, frames and the paraphernalia of
portrait collecting.
Interestingly, while no specifically professional
manuals were published, the 1850s saw the emergence
of handbooks directed specifi cally towards the non-
professional—recognition of the fact that the amateur
needed to know less about the manipulation of the me-
dium than his professional counterpart.
Not all so-called ‘professionals’ had any great
understanding of the medium. Henry Mayhew, in his
1861 London Labour and the London Poor included
as one of his case studies, a ‘Photographic Man’ who
had been a fairground performer before turning to pho-
tography, a subject he knew nothing about. Relying on
public ignorance of the workings of the photographic
process, Mayhew’s case study was just one of many
con men, who sold poor quality ‘sixpenny portraits’ to
their unsuspecting customers, often moving on to new
locations before their disappointed customers could
demand their money back. Relying on the fact that the
poor seldom possessed good quality mirrors—and thus
really did not know what they looked like—Mayhew’s
‘photographic man’ even managed to sell customers
portraits of someone else.
Such practices were in sharp contrast to the standards
maintained by the great portrait studios of Southworth &
Hawes, Whipple, Brady and others in the United States
or Mayall, Claudet or Kilburn in the UK, and the great
commercial photographers like Nadar or Hippolyte
Collard in France, Roger Fenton, P. H. Delamotte, and
others in Britain, or John Carbutt, Alexander Gardner
et al in America. Indeed, the rapidly falling prices,
brought about by the carte-de-visite, are often cited as
a likely reason for Fenton’s sudden abandonment of
photography in 1862.
By the 1870s, the majority of the professional special-
isms with which we are familiar today were in place.
Portrait studios in their thousands produced cartes and
cabinet photographs, while the expanding tourist market
was met by output from professional photographer/pub-
lishers such as G. W. Wilson, Francis Frith, and James
Valentine in the UK, Antonio Beato, the Zangakis, Bon-
fi ls and the Sebahs in Egypt, Adolphe Braun and others