533
photographs which sold widely. A house fi re in 1904
destroyed many of his negatives unfortunately.
Fiske, reportedly ‘tired of living,’ killed himself in
1918, and but for the interest of the young Ansel Adams,
many of his images might have been lost. Adams printed
from the surviving large format negatives in the 1920s,
and campaigned for their proper conservation but was
ignored. The plates, stored in the attic of a Yosemite
Park Company sawmill were destroyed in another fi re
in 1943.
John Hannavy
FITZGERALD, LORD OTTO AUGUSTUS
(1827–1882)
Lord Otto Augustus Fitzgerald was a man of many
talents. Apart from attending most high society parties
and functions, he was also a composer. He composed a
piece in the 1840s called The Spirit of the Ball. Fitzger-
ald married Ursula Lucy Grace Bridgeman, formally
known as the Dowager Lady Londesborough, on De-
cember 14, 1861. Fitzgerald held numerous posts in his
lifetime: he was a Lieutenant in the Lancashire Hussars,
a Treasurer of the Household in 1866 and an MP for
Kildare. Fitzgerald was also a founding member of the
Dublin Photographic Society. Along with other keen
photographers, Fitzgerald regularly attended meetings
at the premises of Mr. W. Allen, a local chemist who
resided at 48 Henry Street, Dublin. In 1854 the group
named themselves the Dublin Photographic Society and
Fitzgerald was appointed to be its President. He held
this position for four years, from Nov. 1854–1858. From
1857 the society held exhibitions, which continue today.
It is the second oldest photography society in the world,
and many of its early members went on to immeasurably
infl uence photography and its development. An example
of Fitzgerald’s own work is an image that he took and
printed himself in the inaugural year of the society,
entitled ‘The Meeting of the Waters, Killarney.’
Jo Hallington
FIXING, PROCESSING, AND WASHING
The impetus for work on fi xing, processing, and wash-
ing was motivated by the problem of image stability in
photographs. From 1798 until 1839, Thomas Wedgwood
and Humphry Davy, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, William
Henry Fox Talbot, and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
all encountered diffi culties in fi xing their photographic
images. Yet the answer was established as early as 1777,
when Carl Wilhelm Scheele published a dissertation on
the chemical action of light, in which he observed that
ammonia checked the light sensitivity of silver chloride.
In 1819, John Frederick William Herschel discovered
the solubility of silver chloride in ammonia hyposul-
phite. Herschel’s published results (1821) led Joseph
Bancroft Reade, in 1839, to test the properties of sodium
thiosulphate in fi xing silver chloride images on paper,
and it has been suggested that Reade apprised Herschel
of his work. In 1839, Herschel proposed sodium thiosul-
phate (termed ‘hypo’) as a photographic fi xing agent and
made his results known to Talbot. Like Daguerre, Talbot
was fi xing his photographs in a concentrated solution
of sodium chloride, which inactivated the unexposed
silver chloride but did not remove it, so that the photo-
graphs remained somewhat light-sensitive. But whereas
Daguerre adopted hypo once he learned of Herschel’s
discovery in 1839, Talbot used potassium iodide and,
later, potassium bromide to fi x his calotype negatives,
and only in 1843 did he try sodium thiosulphate, in a
heated solution.
Sodium thiosulphate became the standard fi xing
agent for silver halide processes and was used for wet
collodion negatives. However, the gelatin silver prints
and dry plate negatives of the 1880s and 1890s carried
thicker photo-sensitive coatings, and the action of theFIXING, PROCESSING, AND WASHING
Durieu, Eugène. Nude.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection,
Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis Gift, 2005
(2005.100.41) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.