“Salt and Silver” Unearths Early Photography

The images themselves are unassuming, small and faded. It can be like that at the birth of a new medium, a new technology. And thanks to the Yale Center for British Art’s absorbing special exhibit, ​“Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860,” we get a sense of what it was like to be present at the creation, to be there for photography’s first hesitant steps, and then, like a gifted child, its astonishingly quick spread across the globe — full of promise and already containing the seeds of the medium’s future. It connects to now in a flash.

“Salt and Silver” runs on the fourth floor of the Yale Center for British Art through Sept. 9.

As the accompanying text explains, British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot — in a race with French inventor Louis Daguerre — produced the first stable photographic images on paper in 1839 using table salt and silver nitrate. He called it ​“an Art of so great singularity, which employs processes entirely new, and having no analogy to any thing in use before.”

Way to keep it humble, Talbot. But in a sense, he was right. Photography was a new medium, and as it spread, its practitioners quickly put it to use.

Talbot’s own first images were more proof of concept than anything else. He took a picture of a printed page (the first photocopy?). He took pictures of glassware. He took pictures of people that mirrored the forms of painted portraits. Then, in 1844, he took a picture of the column that would soon bear aloft a statue of British Navy Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson under construction in London’s Trafalgar Square. It was a document of hazy London in the 19th century, a news photo that’s now a slice of history.

The problem Talbot found in taking pictures of people — and it’s a problem that persists to this day, as those of us who try to take pictures under suboptimal lighting conditions know — was that getting sharp pictures of people required them to stand still, and people don’t like to stand still. This included Talbot’s own mother. ​“Talbotypes taken all day,” she wrote not long after Talbot began taking pictures in earnest. ​“Sat for mine, very hot.”

But these technological limitations didn’t stop early photographers from taking their equipment out of the studio and into the world. Fellow Englishmen David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson prefigured documentarians like August Sander in photographing fisherwomen in the street. Even if the scenes had to be staged, it still offers us a glimpse into their lives. (“It’s not fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives,” they called out while selling their wares.)

Likewise, photographer Robert Fenton honed his craft taking pictures of statues in the British Museum. But in 1855 he was commissioned to go to Crimea to document some of what he could see of the British war against the Russians there. He captured images of harbors full of ships, of Croatian commanders who had joined the battle.

It was said that Lord Balgonie, when this picture was taken, was suffering from shell shock. If so, Fenton’s photograph is one of the first to capture the horrors of war, as American Civil War photographer Matthew Brady would do on a much larger scale only a few years later, using the same techniques.

The exhibit documents how, as photography spread, it was put to ever greater uses. Photographers in France did nudes. They also hustled around Paris taking photos of medieval architecture out of a sense of preservation, hoping to fix the contours of those buildings on paper and in people’s minds before the buildings themselves disappeared. Though Edouard Baldus, a landscape and architecture photographer, also took pictures, like an early news reporter, of houses damaged after a Rhone River flood.

The exhibit widens to include photographers who journeyed to Africa and India to create images of those places for people back in Europe, as well as American and Mexican photographers who adopted the technology and quickly put it to similar uses as the Europeans had. As the exhibit describes the ways in which these early adopters wrestled with their cameras, the conversation seems as modern as ever. Within just a couple years, Talbot’s ​“Art of so great singularity” with ​“no analogy to any thing in use before” was known and only getting more popular, and photographers were pushing their equipment to do more, whether it was taking a detailed picture of the darkened interior of a temple in India or capturing a moment in a moving parade.

The equipment has progressed by leaps and bounds since Talbot’s days. Paper and chemicals have given way to pixels. But in other ways, not much has changed. It’s still hard to take good pictures in dark spaces, or to capture a dancer’s unblurred gesture at a street fair. No matter how good cameras get, we’ll always be asking them to do more, to work more easily. As ​“Salt and Silver” points out, photography allowed more people to become visual artists, but it’s possible that the technology will never quite be able to catch up to our eyes, or our imaginations. The images will always be a little blurry around the edges.

“Salt and Silver” runs at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through Sept. 9. Click here for hours and more information. Admission is free.