1239
Salted paper was the principal medium for photographic
printing throughout the 1840s and 1850s; but it was
slowly displaced by a shift in public taste towards
albumen paper, which had fi rst emerged around 1853,
and achieved commercial dominance by the end of the
decade. From an esthetic viewpoint, the salt print was
seen as the positive complement to Talbot’s calotype
paper negative process, thus sustaining the artistic
ethos of ‘photography on paper’ as the medium of the
gentleman-amateur. The fi brous paper substrate had
the optical effect of diffusing the image to a softened
‘impressionistic’ look, much favoured for landscape.
On the other hand, the sharp albumen print was the
ideal positive counterpart to the highly resolved wet
collodion negative on glass, and the medium of choice
for portraiture by professional photographers. The ar-
tistic sentiments attaching to plain paper photography
may also have stimulated the temporary revival of the
salt print beween 1895 and 1912, contemporaneous
with the newly-perfected platinotype process and its
perfectly matte ‘engraving-like’ surface, which was
challenging—as one detractor put it—the “sharp and
slimy” albumen print.
Mike Ware
See also: Light-Sensitive Chemicals; Albumen
Print, Dry Plate Negatives: Gelatine; Dry Plate
Negatives: Non-Gelatine, Including Dry Collodion;
Photogenic Drawing Negative; Talbot, William
Henry Fox; Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré; Toning;
Daguerreotype; Le Gray, Gustave; Sutton, Thomas;
Photographic Exchange Club and Photographic
Society Club, London; Henneman, Nicolaas; Hill,
David Octavius and Robert Adamson; Taylor, Alfred
Swain; Calotype and Talbotype; Wet Collodion
Negative; and Wet Collodion Positive Processes.Further Reading
Crawford, William, The Keepers of Light, New York: Morgan
& Morgan, 1979.
Hardwich, T. Frederick, A Manual of Photographic Chemistry,
London: John Churchill, 1855.
Jammes, André, and Janis, Eugenia Parry, The Art of French
Calotype, Princeton, NJ: 1983.
Reilly, James M., The Albumen & Salted Paper Book, Rochester:
Light Impressions, 1980.
Sparling, Marcus, “The Theory and Practice of the Photographic
Art.” In The Circle of the Sciences, Volume VII. Practical
Chemistry, London: Griffi n, Bohn, & Co., 1856.
Sutton, Thomas, The Calotype Process. A Handbook to Photog-
raphy on Paper, London: Joseph Cundall, 1855.
Taylor, Roger, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from
Paper Negatives 1840–1860, New York: Metropolitan Mu-
seum, 2007.
Ware, Mike, Mechanisms of Image Deterioration in Early Pho-
tographs, London: Science Museum and National Museum
of Photography, Film & Television, 1994.
Ware, Mike, “On the Stability of Robert Adamson’s Salted Paper
Prints.” History of Photography 27, 1, (Spring 2003): 35–39.
Ware, Mike, Gold in Photography: The History and Art of
Chrysotype, Abergavenny: ffotoffi lm publishing, 2006.SALZMANN, AUGUSTE (1824–1872)
Archaeologist and painter
Impassioned by the early East, Auguste Salzmann went
to Italy (1844) and Algeria (1847) with his friends Gus-
tave-Henri Salzmann (a homonym) and Eugene Fromen-SALZMANN, AUGUSTE
Salzmann, Auguste.
Jerusalem, Saint Sepulcre,
Details de Chapiteaux.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gilman Collection,
Gift of The Howard
Gilman Foundation, 2005
(2005.100.373.86) Image ©
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.