Santa Barbara Museum of Art is the final venue for a rare presentation of Salt & Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860. The exhibit will be on view Sept. 8-Dec. 8.
Featuring more than 100 seldom-displayed salt prints from the Wilson Centre for Photography, London, the exhibit offers some of the earliest photographs ever made, by many of the most important and groundbreaking figures in the history of the photographic medium.
Salt & Silver surveys the first two decades of photography’s evolution through the salted paper-print process, unveiled in 1839 by the English scientist and scholar William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77). Talbot’s invention was a scientific and artistic breakthrough that created an entirely new visual experience.
Salt prints are velvety and soft-textured, with images formed by light-sensitive chemicals embedded in the fibers of the paper’s surface. The handmade photographs range in colors that include sepia, violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-gray, and charcoal-black hues.
The salted paper technique was efficient, portable and versatile, traits that allowed the practice of photography to spread across the globe from the early 1840s onward.
Featuring the work of more than 40 practitioners, Salt & Silver traces their networks and geographical reach from England into Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Mexico and the United States.
Exhibit highlights include:
» Talbot’s Nelson’s Column Under Construction, Trafalgar Square (1844), which shows how photography was used from the start to document both modernity and national patrimony.
» One of early photography’s best known images, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s study of jaunty Scottish fishermen (ca. 1845) exemplifies the beginnings of photographic portraiture.
» Photography presents a new form of reportage in Roger Fenton’s stalwart Crimean War captain (1855) and the matter-of-fact, unheroic vision of Union camp life photographed by Mathew Brady’s studio during the American Civil War (1864).
» Linnaeus Tripe’s dark, dramatic view of Trimul Naik’s Choultry in Tamil Nadu, southern India (1858) showcases photography’s early concern with recording and representing historical monuments.
» John Wheeley Gough Gutch’s evocative view of Tintern Abbey demonstrates photography’s ability to create mood and mystery via shadow and form.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is Salt & Silver’s final stop of a three-venue tour after the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, and the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont, CA. (A selection of these same works was on view at Tate, London in 2015.)
Salt & Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860 reveals the excitement and innovation of the medium’s first years. Early photography’s radically new ways of viewing the world remain important to this very day.
The exhibit has been organized by the Wilson Centre for Photography with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m Tuesday-Sunday. Free admission 5-8 p.m. Thursdays. For more, call 805-963-4364 or visit www.sbma.net.
— Katrina Carl for Santa Barbara Museum of Art.