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Photographic Society, London.
1895 Exhibition of Photographs, Process Work and
“Black and White,” City Art Gallery, London.
Third Annual Photographic Salon—The Linked
Ring, Dudley Gallery, England.
Fortieth Annual Exhibition of the Royal Photographic
Society, London.
Special Exposition of Photography Arts and Sciences,
Imperial Institute, London.
See also: London Stereoscopic Company; Wet
Collodion Negative; Wet Collodion Positive
Processes; and Albumen Print.Further Reading
Auer, M.&M., Photographers Encyclopaedia International: 1839
to Present, USA, 1985.
Darrah, W.C., The World of Stereographs, USA, 1977.
Gernsheim, H., Masterpieces of Victorian Photography, USA
1951.
Hernsheim, H. & A., Creative Photography, 1826 to the Present,
USA 1963.
Jeffrey, Ian, An American Journey: The Photography of William
England, Munich, London & New York: Prestel, 1999.
Parry, Photography Index: A Guide to Reproductions, USA,
1979.
Sobieszek, R. British Masters of the Albumen Print, London
1976.ENLARGING AND REDUCING
In photography’s fi rst decade, the practice of enlarging
or reducing a negative image was largely unknown,
although several pioneers had suggested the idea, and
even practised it. John Draper had proposed making
enlarged copies of daguerreotypes as early as 1840,
and Alexander S Wolcott patented an enlarging camera
in March 1843. In June of the same year, Henry Fox
Talbot patented a calotype enlarger, and therefore has
priority claim to the invention of a system for making
an enlarged print from a negative. None of these early
devices achieved widespread popularity, due in the main
to the length of exposure necessary.
By the end of the century, however, such procedures
were a commonplace part of the photographic process,
with ‘enlarging lanterns’—enlargers—available pow-
ered by gas, petroleum, limelight, magnesium and even
electricity. The half-century in between was a period
of invention and innovation, during which a range of
instruments were patented and marketed.
Intriguingly, the practice of reducing image size
evolved more rapidly than that of enlarging. The
pioneer in this respect was John Benjamin Dancer of
Manchester, England who, in May 1853 produced a
micro-photograph, 2mm in diameter, of a memorial
tablet to William Sturgeon, a pioneer in the science ofelectricity, from a 5" × 4" (125mm × 100mm) negative
he had taken the month before.
It is interesting to note that Thomas Sutton, on seeing
his fi rst micro-photographs, commented that they were
“of little or no practical utility” and “somewhat child-
ish and trivial.” Their uses proved to be anything but
childish and trivial, and micro-photographs, produced
by René Prudent Patrice Dagron (1819–1900) proved an
effective means of getting messages out by pigeon post
during the siege of Paris 1870–71. Dagron’s technique
involved reducing messages to microdots of just over
1mm diameter, a reduction of up to 100 times.
The micro-photograph also found a perhaps trivial
but nonetheless engaging application in the “Stanhope,”
the invention of the same Rene Dagron who, in 1859.
combined a tiny lens—invented in the late 18th century
by Charles, the 3rd Earl of Stanhope—with a micro-
photograph to form a single miniature magnifying unit
which he called his “cylindre photomicroscopique.”
Reduction frequently involved the use of a camera.
During the carte-de-visite era, photographers such as
Francis Bedford produced large photo-montages of
captioned scenic views which were then copied on to
small negatives and contact printed and mounted for
sale as cartes-de-visite.
At the other end of the scale, initial approaches to en-
larging in the early days of photography rarely involved
negatives—enlarging daguerreotypes could be effected
by using a copy camera—a sliding box camera designed
to permit photography at a scale greater than 1:1.
With the introduction of the collodion negative in the
1850s, and increased availability of smaller format cam-
eras, Achille Quinet invented a vertical enlarging camera
in 1852, but it was an ineffi cient light-gatherer, and
required very long exposures. In an attempt to resolve
that problem, David Acheson Woodward designed and
patented the idea of the solar enlarging camera in 1857,
able to make enlarged life size prints from quarter plate
and half plate negatives with an exposure of about forty
fi ve minutes. The camera used a mirror and condenser
lens to focus sunlight on to the negative, the image be-
ing projected on to the paper via a copy lens. Patented
improvements to the solar enlarger, in the 1860s and
1870s saw it equipped with a heliostat—a clockwork
motor to rotate the mirror—thus ensuring that the light
beam remained concentrated on the condenser lens
throughout the exposure.
A modifi cation of Woodward’s design was introduced
in 1864 by Desiré Charles Emanuel van Monckhoven.
It was the fi rst instrument to really look like an enlarger.
Fitted into the wall of the darkroom, it gathered light
in the same way as Woodward’s apparatus, but used a
more complex lens assembly to correct for spherical
aberration and thus produce a sharper more evenly il-
luminated print.ENGLAND, WILLIAM
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