Types of Historic Photographs
DaguerreotypeThe first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate, which looks like a mirror. This technique was widely used in the 1840s and 50s.
Patented in Paris by photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854, although first used by Louis Dodero. From 1860 onwards these small paper photographs (usually albumen prints) mounted on card were made available to the masses. They were the size of visiting cards, hence the name “Carte-de-Visite.”
This was a cheaper technique which could be used to produce several portraits on one photographic plate. A special camera which had several lenses could be used, where you could uncover each lens individually or all at the same time to give multiple images (usually between 4 to 8 images) on the same plate. Or alternatively some of the cameras had a mechanism for moving the photographic plate along during use so that each image was recorded on a different area of the plate. Whichever technique was used, this was a major step forward as a number of positive prints could be made at the same time. The negative could be reprinted many times to produce the number of copies required by the sitter. In May 1860, J E Mayall took CdV portraits of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their children. These were published later that year and the popularity of carte portraits soared. People began to collect portraits of their family, friends and celebrities and mounted them in photograph albums. Celebrity cartes were sold at stationer's shops in the same way that picture postcards are today. They cost from 1/- (5p) to 1/6d (7.5p) depending on the fame and popularity of the sitter.
By the early 1870s, cartes-de-visite were supplanted by "cabinet cards", which were also usually albumen prints, but larger, mounted on cardboard backs. There larger size made it easier to show greater detail in the features of the person sitting for their portrait. Cabinet cards remained popular until around 1914, when Kodak introduced the Brownie camera and home snapshot photography became a mass phenomenon.
Cabinet cards are particularly useful to us today as a historical source, as they often have adverts on the reverse for the photographic studios that produced them.
Tintype (melainotype or ferrotype)
A direct positive is created on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s. Later it was used by photographers working outside for example on beach promenades and at fairgrounds. Because the lacquered iron support (there is no actual tin used) was resilient and did not need drying, a tintype could be developed and fixed and handed to the customer shortly after the picture had been taken.Oplotype (milk glass positive)
Printed on sheets of opaque, translucent white glass; early versions were often hand-tinted to enhance their effect. The effect of opalotype has been compared to watercolour and pastel artwork or even ivory miniatures. The basic opalotype technique, using wet collodion and silver gelatin, was patented in 1857 by Glover and Bold of Liverpool. Opalotypes exploited 2 basic techniques, using either the transfer of a carbon print onto glass, or the exposure of light-sensitive emulsion on the glass surface to the negative. Opalotype photography, never common, was practiced in various forms until it waned and disappeared in the 1930s.
Ambrotype (collodian positive)A positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. Like a print on paper, it is viewed by reflected light. Like the daguerreotype, which it replaced, and like the prints produced by a Polaroid camera, each is a unique original that could only be duplicated by using a camera to copy it.
The ambrotype was introduced in the 1850s. During the 1860s it was superseded by the tintype, a similar photograph on thin black-lacquered iron, which is hard to distinguish from an Ambrotype if under glass.
Autochrome
Early colour photography patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. It was the main colour photo process in use before subtractive colour film in the mid-1930s. Louis Ducos du Hauron utilised the separation technique to create colour images on paper with screen plates, pro-ducing natural colours through superimposition, which would become the foundation of all commercial colour photography.
The world's oldest postcard was sent in 1840 to the writer Theodore Hook from Fulham in London, England. Widely popular from the late 1890s onwards. From 1904 onwards studio portraits were often produced in postcard format. The study and collecting of postcards is called Deltiology.
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