Nixon, Nicholas.Pictures of People. Introduction by Peter
Galassi. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988.
Nixon, Nicholas.School: Photographs From Three Schools.
Essay by Robert Coles. New York: Bulfinch Press/Little,
Brown, 1998.
Nixon, Nicholas, and Bebe Nixon.People with Aids. Bos-
ton: David R. Godine, 1991.
Ollman, Arthur.The Model Wife. San Diego, CA: Museum
of Photographic Arts, 1999.
Renato Danese, ed.American Images. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1979.
Szarkowsi, John.Mirrors and Windows:American Photo-
graphy Since 1960.New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1978.
Weski, Thomas.How You Look At It. Hannover, Germany:
Sprengel Museum, 2000.NON-SILVER PROCESSES
For the past hundred years, when we speak of a
photographic print, we speak of a silver halide
emulsion on paper. Silver salts suspended in gelatin
have been the mainstay of the photo industry since
mass production began in 1886. Yet although the
earliest experiment to capture light in the late eight-
eenth century and early years of the nineteenth
century did involve the use of silver, in the 1840s
when photography was finally established, the list
of newly discovered light-sensitive emulsions reads
like a cookbook of photochemistry. Most processes
were short-lived. The few that survived were
employed at various times during the twentieth
century as important alternatives to the silver pro-
cess in fine arts photography and printmaking.
Tintype, daguerreotype, cyanotype, kallitype, car-
bon prints, bromoil, Van Dyke brown, platinum
prints (platinotypes), palladium prints, and gum
bichromate were among the most popular early
processes that are still used today. They are labor-
intensive, difficult, sometimes dangerous processes
that often produce images that cannot be duplicated
in a subversion of photography’s modern definition
as a process by which multiple, identical copies can
be produced. Inherent in all these processes, how-
ever, is a pictorial style that alters and transforms
the photographic image through surface, texture,
color, and tonalities that are unique to the process.
All of these processes reflect the struggle of early
photographers to make photographic images that
would not fade. Many of these processes used silver
in some step of the process yet came to be called
‘‘non-silver’’ to differentiate them from the silver
gelatin print, which solely relies on silver. As early
as 1822, Joseph Nice ́phore Nie ́pce, a printmaker
with poor drafting skills, made the first successful
photographic plate after coating a glass plate with
bitumen of Judea thinned with oil of lavender. The
bitumen was exposed to sunlight through an
engraving, oiled to make it transparent. After sev-
eral hours, the exposed areas of the bitumen coat-
ing became insoluble. The still soluble bitumen,
protected by the lines of the engraving, washed
away in turpentine and oil of lavender. Further
experiments with pewter plates instead of glass led
to the first permanent photograph from nature. In
1826, using a camera aimed from his third floor
window in Gras, France, Nie ́pce recorded the view.
It was an eight-hour exposure.
In 1829, he formed a partnership with Louis-
Jacques-Mande ́ Daguerre. Legend has it that
Daguerre, aware of Nie ́pce’s experiments with sil-
ver-plated copper and vapors of iodine, began
experiments with iodized silver. By chance, he
placed an iodized silver plate in a cupboard used
for storing chemicals. Upon opening the cupboard
a few days later, he was surprised to find an image
on the plate. Through the process of elimination,
he discovered that mercury vapors from a broken
thermometer had revealed the latent image. The
Daguerreotype was born a few years later in 1837,
when Daguerre discovered that treating the plate in
a salt solution after exposure would stabilize the
action of the mercury on iodized silver.
Meanwhile, just across the English Channel,
another struggling draftsman, Wiliam Henry Fox
Talbot, unhappy with his efforts to capture the
view from Lake Como using his pencil and a pro-
jection device called a camera lucida, switched to a
portable version of the camera obscura and began
his own experiments with the photographic print.
Talbot began his research with silver salts, patent-NON-SILVER PROCESSES