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inclusion in the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace,
London, in 1851. The restrictive effects which Richard
Beard’s patents had imposed on the development of
photography in Britain were underlined when the three
prizes awarded by the jury at the Crystal Palace all went
to American photographers—Matthew Brady, Martin
Lawrence and John Whipple.
The Illustrated London News described the American
daguerreotypes—some of them more than 12 by 10
inches in size—as ‘super excellent’ while the Ameri-
can response was an unequivocal ‘in daguerreotypes
we beat the world.’ John Werge later attributed the
American successes to the fact that they could buff
their daguerreotype plates without leaving marks on the
delicate silver surface which, he insisted, most British
practitioners could not.
Writing in his book The Evolution of Photography in
1890, Werge recalled his visit to the Hyde Park Exhibi-
tion—coincidentally his fi rst visit to London
After a night’s rest, which was frequently broken by cries
of “Stop thief!” I arose and made an early start for the
Great Exhibition of 1851. Of all the wonderful things
in that most wonderful exhibition, I was most interested
in the photographic exhibits and beautiful specimens of
American Daguerreotypes, both portraits and landscapes,
especially the views of Niagara Falls, which made me
determine to visit America as soon as ever I could make
the necessary arrangements.
While examining and admiring these very beautiful
Daguerreotypes, I little thought that I was standing, as it
were, between the birth of one process and the death of
another; but so it was, for the newly born collodion pro-
cess very soon annihilated the Daguerreotype, although
the latter process had just reached the zenith of its beauty.
In the March issue of the Chemist, Archer’s Collodion
Process was published, and that was like the announce-
ment of the birth of an infant Hercules, that was destined
to slay a beautiful youth whose charms had only arrived
at maturity. But there was really a singular and melan-
choly coincidence in the birth of the Collodion Process
and the early death of the Daguerreotype, for Daguerre
himself died on July 10th 1851, so that both Daguerre
and his process appeared to receive their death blows
in the same year.
Forty years after the event, Werge’s memory of the
early 1850s was imperfect. The daguerreotype and the
collodion process, together with countless variations
on the paper negative, co-existed in the British and
European markets for many years after Daguerre’s
death. In April 1853, he did realise his ambition, and set
sail from South Shields to the United States, where he
practised as a daguerreotypist with a number of Ameri-
can studios. Despite his recollections of the process’s
almost-immediate demise, he himself did not abandon
the daguerreotype until 1857.
Of British daguerreotypes in the Crystal Palace,
Werge made not a mention. The smaller number of
English practitioners at the time, limited by Beard’s
imposition of a geographical licensing regime must,
however, have played its part. Britain was the only
industrial country where the process was so strictly
controlled.
While the Crystal Palace was only one of the infl u-
ences which fuelled interest in the medium, it was,
however, as a direct consequence of that display that
Fenton and others organised the world’s fi rst exclusively
photographic exhibition at London’s Royal Society of
Arts in December 1852. With interest in photography
fuelled by the Great Exhibition, the organisers of that
1852 exhibition at the Society of Arts must have felt
assured of wide coverage in the journals of the day.
The exhibition was large, and the Illustrated London
News was not entirely supportive of the selection, noting,
in the issue for New Year’s Day 1853 that
The works of Mr Fenton, Sir William Newton, Mr Shaw,
Mr Goodeve, Mr Archer, Mr Horne and Dr Diamond are,
with several others respectively, examples of much inter-
est. Many among them are pictures of exceeding beauty,
and curiously suggestive; but many would not have passed
beyond the portfolio of the artist, since the subjects have
been badly chosen and the results obtained are very un-
satisfactory. Mr Fenton, on the occasion of the opening
the exhibition, read a paper on the ‘Present Position and
Future Prospects of the Art of Photography’ in which he
sketched briefl y the present state of our knowledge, and
judiciously pointed out the most important points for
research. ‘Though the excellence of the specimens now
exhibited’ says Mr Fenton, ‘might allow photographers the
indulgence of self-complacency, still everybody feels that,
as an art, it is yet in its infancy, and that the uses to which
it may be applied will yet be multiplied tenfold’.The lack of selection of subject, of viewpoint, and of
lighting conditions were failings to which many photog-
raphers succumbed throughout the 1850s, an era when
the successful navigation through the complexities of
the procedures was often seen as justifi cation in itself for
exhibition. Photographers who saw the medium simply
as a technical challenge would increasingly attract the
wrath of writers and lecturers. In a lecture to the Man-
chester Literary & Philosophical Society in April 1856,
the disdain in remarks made by James Mudd echoed
with a resonance which continued for years. Mudd
stated, “Nature does not show her loveliest things to such
careless seekers; and if she did they could not see, for
they have not the educated eye to discern them. These
are the mechanical workers who believe that processes,
lenses, and apparatus make pictures.”
Much of the photography in the exhibition was by
le Gray’s waxed paper process, while the majority of
images had been produced by the full range of paper
negative processes then available. A smaller proportionHISTORY: 4. 1850s