HUFFPOST - FIRST PAPER PHOTOGRAPHS WERE MADE WITH SALT By Priscilla Frank. Note that images at this link for the full article include a nude.
EXCERPT: In 1839, British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot created the salt print, the earliest form of paper photography. ...
The technique went as follows: coat paper with a silver nitrate solution and expose it to light, thus producing a faint silver image. He later realized if you apply salt to the paper first and then spread on the silver nitrate solution the resulting image is much sharper. His resulting photos, ranging in color from sepia to violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-grey, and charcoal-black, were shadowy and soft, yet able to pick up on details that previously went overlooked -- details like the texture of a horse's fur, or the delicate silhouette of a tree.
These rare and early prints are the subject of Tate Britain's "Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860," the first exhibition in Britain to focus on this brief preliminary moment in photographic history. Talbot's method quickly spread from Britain around the world, not only to artists but to scientists, adventurers and entrepreneurs as well, all hungry to capture and immortalize the immediacy of the moment.
A link to the TATE where the exhibition is in London TAKE ORG - SALT PHOTOGRAPHY etc.
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If you'd like to bring up another post about DATING PHOTOGRAPHS, use the search feature embedded in the side bar of this blog. Now that we know that all old photos were not sepia toned, keep an eye out when you go antiquing for these collector items.
