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the American courts, and for Archer’s process—given
freely to the world—to be freely available in the New
World.
The initial announcement of Archer’s wet collodion
process, however, and the dramatic improvement in im-
age clarity which that process permitted, was at least as
important a trigger as the Great Exhibition in launching
photography as a mass medium. Of similar importance
was the introduction of Blanquart-Evrard’s albumen
printing paper—although it would be the early 1860s
before that became widely used outside Europe.
Blanquart-Evrard’s printing establishment in Lille,
the “Imprimerie Photographique” that opened in the
summer of 1851, was where some of the fi nest photog-
raphy produced in France during the decade was actually
printed. That printing works produced, amongst many
others, the magnifi cent albumen prints from Maxime du
Camp’s pioneering 1852 journeys through Egypt, Nubia
and Palestine, and John Beasley Greene’s 1854 journey
up the Nile, as well as many magnifi cent architectural
views by Bisson Frères and others.
Upwards of thirty local women were employed in
printing tens of thousands of prints per year, and the
combination of albumen paper, rapid printing times
and cheap labour, enabled the factory to reduce the unit
price of an albumen print to less than a tenth of the cost
of a salt print.
When the factory closed in 1855, Blanquart-Evrard
moved to Jersey, where he opened a new factory in
collaboration with Thomas Sutton who, in 1856, would
become the founder–editor of the infl uential, if rather
opinionated, magazine Photographic Notes.
Albumen paper, gold-toned as an aid to permanence,
defi ned the photographic image of the 1850s, 60s, and
70s. It also marked photography’s fi rst tenuous step
into the world of mass production. Albumenised pa-
per—already coated with albumen, and needing only to
be rendered sensitive to light—became commercially
available in the mid-1850s, and relieved photographers
from one of the many tasks involved in the preparation
of their materials.
Given the enhanced detail and sumptuous tonal range
of the albumen print produced in capable hands, Fen-
ton’s decision to stick with the tried-and-tested salt print
for his 1855 Crimean oeuvre is perhaps surprising.
Had the albumen print not been introduced, the
multiplication of the photographic image would have
been severely impaired, and the growth of photography
undoubtedly slowed down. Collodion and albumen,
despite the intricacies of the former, were the combined
keys which unlocked photography’s potential, and both
were born at the start of the decade.
Interestingly, while the majority of photographers and
photographic printing establishments used it as a print-
ing-out paper, Blanquart-Evrard conceived albumen as
a developed paper, requiring much shorter exposures,
and considerably increasing the number of prints which
could be produced in a day. His Lille printing estab-
lishment was one of only a very few places where the
developed albumen print prevailed.
The complexity of the collodion process, and the
availability of only a few published manuals on pho-
tography, was an obvious encouragement for photog-
raphers to get together to share technical information.
That practice had been established for several years in
Britain—the Photographic Club, often referred to as the
Calotype Club, had evolved in the 1840s as an informal
gathering of like-minded photographers enthusiastic
about sharing information. Amongst its early partici-
pants, Peter le Neve Foster, Peter Wickens Fry and others
would, in 1853, be instrumental in establishing Britain’s
fi rst photographic association.
Most of the formal photographic organisations
grew out of informal groupings of similar like-minded
photographers who saw the sharing of information and
ideas, both technical and aesthetic, as being essential
elements in the development of the medium.
America’s fi rst attempt at setting up a photographic
association was initiated in July 1851, with the inaugural
meeting of the New York State Photographic Associa-
tion, later known as the New York State Daguerreian As-
sociation. The rival American Heliographic Association
was set up three days later, quickly changing its name
to the American Daguerre Association, with Jeremiah
Gurney as its fi rst chairman, and Albert Southworth
amongst its founding members. The two associations
reportedly developed an acrimonius relationship—with
the American Daguerre Association being branded a
‘secret society’ by some of those excluded from mem-
bership. Despite its title the ADA was not a national
organisation. By 1854 both associations has ceased to
exist.
France’s fi rst society, the Société héliographique,
enjoyed only a similarly short existence, being super-
seded in 1854 by the Société française de photogra-
phie. In Britain, however, the Photographic Society of
London—which later changed its name to the Royal
Photographic Society of Great Britain—established in
1853 by Fenton, Claudet, and others, had enjoyed more
than a century and a half of uninterrupted activity.
1852 was, in most parts of the photographic world,
a watershed year. It was the year which saw the start of
widespread acceptance of the wet collodion process,
and the glass plate replacing the paper negative in all
but a few areas of operation. One of the exceptions was
in photography far from home, where the transportation
of the bulky paraphernalia of collodion photography
was not immediately practicable. Thus Fenton and John
Cooke Bourne travelled to St Petersburg, Moscow and
Kieff in the autumn of 1852 with pre-prepared waxedHISTORY: 4. 1850s