1365
In 1850, he and his wife settled in Jersey, buying
some land and building a cottage at St. Brelade’s Bay.
There he received some lessons from a calotype pho-
tographer known only as Mr. Laverty.
From 1851–53, during an extended voyage to Italy
and Switzerland with his wife and son, Sutton made
the acquaintance of two photographers based in Rome,
Frédéric Flachéron and Robert MacPherson. Flachéron
gave him further lessons in the calotype process,
showing him the wet-paper technique he was using.
MacPherson initiated him in the albumen-on-glass nega-
tive process. After trying both methods, Sutton settled
upon the paper negative process.
Following his return to England in 1853, Sutton
was commissioned by the London publisher Joseph
Cundall to make twelve prints each of one hundred of
his best negatives from Italy. Dismayed by the task,
Sutton attempted to arrive at a developing-out printing
process similar to the one used by Louis Désiré Blan-
quart-Évrard—whose photographic printing facility in
Lille, France had published several impressive photo-
graphic albums. Failing at this, he sent Blanquart-Évrard
some negatives he had made since returning to Jersey,
asking him to print them. These were published by
Blanquart-Évrard in 1854, under the title Souvenirs
de Jersey [Souvenirs of Jersey]. Sutton also offered
to pay Blanquart-Évrard one hundred pounds for the
details of his developing-out printing process, but was
politely refused.
In 1855, Sutton published a technical treatise titled
The Calotype Process: A Hand Book to Photography on
Paper, which attempted to cover all facets of the photo-
graphic process on paper known at the time. This was
immediately followed by treatise titled A New Method of
Printing Positive Photographs, By Which Permanent and
Artistic Results May be Uniformily Obtained, in which
Sutton outlined the steps for a developing-out printing
process using whey, or milk-serum. The success of this
procedure induced Prince Albert to suggest that Sutton
set up a photographic printing facility.
Aware that he lacked experience with full-scale
industrial printing, Sutton again contacted Blanquart-
Évrard, asking for his assistance in establishing the
printing facility. Blanquart-Évrard—at this point suffer-
ing from fi nancial diffi culties and realizing that Sutton’s
published procedure was a serious rival to his own—ac-
cepted the offer, and invited Sutton to tour his printing
facility in Lille. There he showed Sutton his industrial
printing methods without reservation, which Sutton later
described in an 1862 article. Blanquart-Évrard’s printing
facility was then shut down; and in September 1855, the
two men launched a new printing facility at Jersey, the
Establishment for Permanent Positive Printing.
Sutton’s business partnership with Blanquart-Évrard
lasted about two years. During this time they published,
at irregular intervals, a series of installments to a larger
work titled The Amateur’s Photographic Album. Each
installment contained three to four photographs and sold
for the price of six shillings. In January 1856, they also
launched a photographic journal titled Photographic
Notes, which ran as a monthly journal at fi rst, then
becoming fortnightly from September 1856. Blanquart-
Évrard’s contribution to either of these undertakings has
yet to be fully determined.
As the editor of Photographic Notes, Sutton proved
himself to be a venomous and opinionated writer. The
journal was used for launching personal attacks and new
photographic innovations were often treated with deri-
sion and scorn—only to be accepted in a contradictory,
face-saving manner once Sutton’s initial reactions had
been proven wrong.
Largely overlooked, but nevertheless important, are a
number of articles Sutton wrote and published in Pho-
tographic Notes during the years 1856-61, in which he
expanded upon his earlier, 1855 developing-out treatise.
Here he outlined a method of developed-out salt print-
ing that yielded results virtually indistinguishable from
ordinary, printed-out salted paper, while at the same
time requiring much less exposure to light.
In 1858, Sutton published A Dictionary of Photog-
raphy, which featured encyclopedic articles on every
aspect of the photographic process, mostly written by
himself.
By the late 1850s, Sutton’s interests appear to have
moved away from the chemical operations of photog-
raphy and more towards optics. In 1859, he wrote that a
triplet lens he had made from two opposing, achromatic
plano-convex elements, with a small, bi-concave quartz
element in between, corrected curvilinear distortion and
curvature of fi eld. But the lens was never manufactured.
This was followed in 1860, by the introduction of a
ball-shaped water lens, capable of a 100 angle of view.
The lens was formed by two opposing positive menis-
cus elements, with water in between also acting as an
optical component. The lens reached a limited scale of
production and was capable of producing fi ne images,
but was never widely used—in part because it required
a curved ground glass, curved negative plates, and a
curved contact printing frame.
In 1861, Sutton was appointed lecturer on photog-
raphy at King’s College, London, where he succeeded
T. Frederick Hardwich; but within a few months he
had resigned from the position, citing domestic prob-
lems caused by repeated travelling between Jersey and
London.
In 1867, Sutton terminated his involvement with
Photographic Notes, it then being absorbed by The Il-
lustrated Photographer. Sutton and his family moved
to Redon, in Brittany. There he lived in semi-retire-
ment, contributing articles to the British Journal of