DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL
and ROBERT ADAMSON
Scottish, 1802-1870 and 1821-1848
Scottish Fishwives, Washaday Group, 1843-48
Calotype. 5 1/2 x 7 5/8 in. (14.0 x 19.4 cm)
Membership Purchase Fund. 74.15 |
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson's photographic collaboration-begun
just four years after the announcement of the discovery of the daguerreotype
process-involved making photographs as references from which painters could
work. Hill, using his training as a painter and lithographer, set up the
shots and arranged backgrounds and costumes, while Adamson manipulated the
chemical processes and the cameras. Using the calotype process in which
a sheet of smooth paper has been sensitized and then exposed for a period
of thirty seconds to five minutes, Hill and Adamson produced more than fifteen
hundred photographs of people, landscapes, and buildings in the four and
a half years they worked together. Although those who preferred the sharply
defined daguerreotype image were not satisfied by the calotype, Hill and
Adamson's fuzzy, painterly pictures illustrate perfectly this most beautiful
of nineteenth-century photoprocesses.
Some of the best known and most haunting works of Hill and Adamson are
the numerous representations of the fisherfolk of Newhaven, a village on
the Firth of Forth only two miles from the Rock House, their Edinburgh home
and studio. The Newhaven community, founded by Huguenot immigrants, depended
to a large degree on the fishing trade for its livelihood. Hill and Adamson's
project was conceived as a way to raise money to improve the working conditions
of these "fisherfolk." The women's distinctively striped skirts
identified the "fisher lassies" as they sold cod, herring, and
oysters from their baskets and creels on the streets of Edinburgh.
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