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paper negatives for their pioneering industrial photog-
raphy project on the construction of Charles Vignoles’
suspension bridge over the River Dneiper. Even so, their
cameras and ancillary equipment, according to Vignoles’
diaries, fi lled two coaches on the railway journey from
St Petersburg to Moscow.
Gustave le Gray and O. Mestral used le Gray’s waxed
paper process for their contributions to France’s mis-
sions héliographique, and Dr. Thomas Keith used his
variant on the same process to create a signifi cant body
of soft romantic views of Edinburgh and central Scot-
land. In America Victor Prevost was probably the fi rst
of a very small group of photographers to experiment
with le Gray’s process.
One application where the glass plate was slow to
gain acceptance was high-class studio portraiture, where
the daguerreotype endured for several years into the
so-called “collodion era” in Europe, and even longer
in the United States. Leading photographers in Paris
and London stayed loyal to the process well through
the decade. Antoine Claudet, William Kilburn, and T.
R. Williams, amongst others, produced some of their
fi nest daguerreotype portraiture in the mid 1850s, many
of them stereoscopic.
The stereoscopic daguerreotype also played a promi-
nent role in the commercial photography of the Exposi-
tion Universelle in Paris in 1855. But while the great
portraitists displayed their names prominently on labels
on the reverse of their work, the photographers who
produced multiple views of the great halls and gardens
of the Exposition remained largely anonymous.
For photography’s fi rst decade, camera design had
evolved little. Cameras for large format paper negatives
were constructed as larger versions of the small sliding
box cameras used for daguerreotypes. In a number of
Roger Fenton’s photographic views in Kyiv, these large
instruments can be clearly seen, and their weight must
have been considerable.
But with the granting of an American patent to Wil-
liam Lewis in November 1851 for a new daguerreotype
camera, a feature was introduced which infl uenced
large format camera construction for a century. The
considerable weight and bulk of the simple sliding box
design of instrument was dramatically reduced by the
introduction of square-section concertina bellows. The
‘tailboard’ design of camera had arrived.
A plethora of lighter-weight camera designs fol-
lowed, and for photographers who used le Gray’s waxed
paper process—which allowed negative papers to be
prepared days in advance—the weight of equipment
the photographer had to carry when working in the fi eld
seemed destined to reduce considerably. However, with
many photographers converting to collodion as soon as
Archer’s process became known, all such weight ben-
efi ts were quickly cancelled out, triggering the design
and marketing of a wide choice of backpacks, wheelbar-
rows, and other means of transporting darktents and all
the other paraphernalia of the wet plate.
In a short presentation to the recently formed Pho-
tographic Society of London on 21 April 1853, Marcus
Sparling, later Fenton’s assistant in the Crimea, demon-
strated Major Halkett’s design for a large format 11x8
inch fi eld camera, fi tted with a conical India-rubber tube
connecting lens panel with back standard, and remarked
that, “the camera sent by Major Halkett is not a new one,
but has been now for some years in use in the army in
most parts of England and Ireland.” The use of a fl ex-
ible material in this way was not new. Richard Willats
had exhibited a camera with a fabric body at the Great
Exhibition, and although the source of the army design
is unknown, it may well have been developed from
Willats’ prototype.
The ingenious construction of Halkett’s camera,
however, permitted the use of rising front for perspec-
tive control, and combined lightness of weight with a
collapsible design which enabled it to be folded down
into a very small unit packed in a small bag for ease of
transportation. Scottish photographer Charles Kinnear’s
design of 1856–1857 for a lightweight camera for the
travelling photographer introduced tapered bellows for
the fi rst time, as well as several other features which
became standard.
The photography of the Crimean War (1854–1856)
was one of the milestone’s of the decade, albeit after a
somewhat hesitant start. The ill-fated Richard Nicklin,
and the unsuccessful military photographers Ensigns
Brandon and Dawson were followed by photographers of
several nationalities who ensured that, while photographs
‘of war’ were still a practical impossibility, the camera ‘at
war’ established itself as a potent illustration medium.
Historically, accounts of photography in the Crimea
are dominated by Roger Fenton, but he was just one
of many. The Romanian Carol Popp de Szathmari, the
Frenchmen Colonel Charles Langlois, George Shaw
Lefevre (Baron Eversley), Léon-Eugene Mehedin,
Pierre Lassimonne, and Jean-Baptiste Durand-Brager,
the German Friedrich Martens, and British born James
Robertson, then resident in Constantinople, all contrib-
uted to a very rich legacy of images taken during and
immediately after the confl ict. The Russian author Leo
Tolstoy is also believed to have photographed in Sevas-
topol at the time of the lengthy siege of that city.
Other photographers added to the story. The Brit-
ish photographers Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett
photographed soldiers before they embarked for the
war zone—and published them as Crimean Heroes and
Crimean Braves—while le Gray and Nadar did the same
for French commanders and offi cers. At the cessation
of hostilities, Parisian portrait photographers Mayer &
Pierson photographed the signing of the peace treaty.HISTORY: 4. 1850s