In October 2022, a near-pristine example of the scarce 1846 Hill and Adamson album A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews came to light at the Signet Library in Edinburgh, and early last week I presented a talk about the album to the Royal Photographic Society’s Historical Group:
Bluntly, we at the Signet Library have a responsibility to the album and to the wider photographic history world to make the album’s presence and nature known as widely as possible and to make it available for study as far as its conservation and preservation allows. For the Signet Library this has complications: although we are one of the UK’s largest private libraries we do not have the academic stage presence of a national library or a major university collection. To become known for photography or to ensure that the presence of the St. Andrews album is at least acknowledged requires persistent effort sustained over years: single, occasional acts of publicity such as the RPS lecture won’t be enough.
The talk makes three principle arguments.
- The album is essentially a product of St. Andrews rather than Edinburgh, a response to William Fox Talbot’s 1845 Sun Pictures in Scotland , and the images show a clear line of creative descent from the compositional experiments undertaken by the brothers John and Robert Adamson alongside other members of the photographic group centred on Professor David Brewster. The album’s existence is a strong argument that there was no break between Robert Adamson and the St. Andrews group when Robert Adamson went to Edinburgh to practice professionally in 1843.
- The internal evidence of the album points to acquisition by unknown means by the Signet Library at some point between 1848 and 1858, during the librarianship of a sitter to Adamson, the historian and collector David Laing. The shortcomings of the Library’s record keeping under Laing prevent our getting any closer to the time or circumstance of the acquisition. Laing catalogued the album without acknowledging the presence of an artist or creator behind the images (Hill and Adamson are credited as publishers) in contrast to the treatment of engravings and lithographs by Hill, indicating to some extent the attitude of the time towards photographs as images with a creative force behind them. The likelihood – and only that – is that the albums remained at Calton Hill after Adamson’s death in 1848, in some cases for decades: the University of Glasgow copy in the Dougan bequest may still have been there in the late 1940s at the end of the long sojourn of the Inglis photographic dynasty at the property.
- The album is unlikely to have to do with the list of proposed albums published in Edinburgh newspapers by David Octavius Hill in the summer of 1844, and with the exception of the Newhaven album, the images of which were clearly in preparation although the final product did not materialise, the albums listed were all retreads of projects in engraving or lithography that had either enjoyed recent commercial success or which, like the clan costume volumes then being worked on by the Sobieski Stuarts or Robert Billings’ Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland, were actually underway. The calotype albums released by Hill were fashioned along the lines of bound copies of David Roberts’ hugely successful partwork lithographs of the Holy Land – imperial folios bound in oxblood leather, larger and very considerably longer than the Calotype Views.
In an earlier talk given in the Spring of 2023, I discussed the idea that the Calotype Views were a photographic response to a curriculum of ancient sites in St. Andrews that had developed over a century or more of antiquarian guides to the city, an idea explored by Anne Marie Schoonhaven in her 2002 thesis The Best Pompeii in Scotland: A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews. At least some of the sites explored by the thesis were included in the album, but I suggested the presence of modern buildings with Adamson connections such as Madras College, and purely scenic locations such as the Spindle Rock may indicate Adamson family memory relations as an alternative motive for the selection of the included images.
The rest of the talk to the RPS took the form of brief speculation about the nature of the Hill-Adamson relationship and I want to return to that here.
Hill and Adamson have been a part of my life since I was a child pouring over the images in David Bruce’s, Colin Ford’s and Graham Ovenden’s collections in the school library. Back then, I knew no greater symbol of the antiquity and strangeness of the past than these pictures in which (owing partly to the lower quality of reproduction available in the early 1970s) it seemed that the light had been dimmed by some Tractarian God of the high Victorians. It’s not like that now, and those collections were – alongside Katherine Michelson’s of 1970 – the start of a long golden age of Scottish photographic history which has made Scotland – and especially Edinburgh – possibly the best place in the world to study photography. There are many names to conjure, but Dr. Sara Stevenson, Alison Morrison-Low, Professor Graham Smith and latterly Anne M. Lydon and their predecessors have between them made the Calton Hill work more brilliantly explicable and accessible than any other comparable world collection.
I believe that there is a real issue at the heart of the classic tradition of the Hill and Adamson partnership which owes to the early scholarship – the c. 1882 pieces attributed to John Millar Gray that circulated privately before finally appearing in the 1928 “Elliot Book” on Hill and Adamson, and Heinrich Schwarz’s David Octavius Hill: Master of Photography of 1931-32, which both allot pretty much all of the creative achievement to Hill and shoehorn Robert Adamson into a mechanical, artisanal and backroom role with the paper and the chemicals (Schwarz to his credit exhibits some nervousness about this). The rowing back from this extreme position began with the Gernsheims’ ephocal History of Photography of 1955, and most modern interpretations of the work attempt a balance between the two men. But there are differences in emphasis. Compare, for example,
[Hill] appreciated the difficulties, rather than the supposed ease of photography; those were both the chemical and technical difficulties, controlled by Adamson and Miss Mann, and the unexpectedly difficult organisation of the subject to achieve an appearance of nature, which was Hill’s province.
Sarah Stevenson, Facing the Light: The Photography of Hill and Adamson p.54 (Edinburgh 2002)
with
With any partnership the success (or indeed the failure) is drawn from a certain alchemy of personalities, talents, skills and compatibility. The collaboration is defined by a sum of its parts, and attempts to separate out individual contributions run the risk of dissolving the very nature of the partnership. This is especially true for Hill and Adamson, and is further compounded by the lack of information about Robert Adamson… Evidently Hill held Adamson in high regard; in his correspondence he continually referenced the photographic talents of the young man. Hill also played down his own role in the partnership, often relegating himself to a mere aid in the artistry of the photographs and even confessing that he knew nothing of the photographic process, despite the fact that it was done under his nose.
Anne Lyden A Perfect Chemistry: Photographs by Hill and Adamson (Edinburgh 2017)
The vigorous and entertaining 1999 debate at the Getty Museum between David Featherstone, Sue Stevenson, Anne Lyden, Weston Naef, Alison Morrison-Low and Jonathan Reff, published in In Focus: Hill and Adamson. Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles 1999) covers all of the hinterland between those two positions, and there’s another – hinted at by Larry Schaaf on occasions in the series of publications he edited for Hans P. Kraus – which allows Robert Adamson both a creative input and occasions on which he could be said to have operated independently of Hill (these including elements of the St. Andrews photography).
My own view, roughly put, that the lack of documentary evidence for the work of the partnership is key and that putting too much weight on what does survive is both easy and liable to distort our view of the partnership. If the entire Hill and Adamson oeuvre was to be rediscovered today Vivian Maier style, there is no doubt as to where the creative loci of the relationship would be placed: we are on the weather side now of Stieglitz and Szarkowski and have no hesitation in taking a photographer-first view of things that would give Robert Adamson (and St. Andrews photography more generally) a steering role from the outset.
If Adamson takes the leading creative role, it becomes far easier to account for the presence of Jessie Mann in the circle and to do justice to it. If Hill is the promoter, opener of doors and advocate for the partnership, as the surviving evidence of his activity (as opposed to his written claims to “artistic direction” which I regard as ambiguously coded) seems to suggest, then we have a fascinating case study available to us of one of the very earliest flag wavers for photography as an art and a clearer sense of what this asked of him and how it impacted onto the art world in Edinburgh, London and elsewhere. Clarifying the roles not only makes the surviving evidence less replete with internal contradictions and queries: it opens up new opportunities for study and understanding that the currently-accepted scenario obscures. Nor, for what it’s worth, do I think that Hill loses out in any way by this approach: if anything, this role is the more interesting one from the point of view of modern scholarship.
The historiographical process by which Hill came to have a disproportionate role in the creative side of the activity on Calton Hill is interesting in itself and has much to tell us about attitudes to photography during its first century and about those who were attempting to shape them. Furthermore, this is not a study that suffers from the usual Hill and Adamson complaint about the lack of documentary record and evidence – the material is there, for all that it is currently misdeployed as unwieldy scaffolding for the Hill-as-creative thesis.
There is another issue at stake, however: a version of the Calton Hill partnership that posits Adamson as auteur and Hill as impresario (which is roughly where I stand) means that the St. Andrews relationships – Robert and Dr. John Adamson, both Adamsons and Professor David Brewster, all three and the wider St. Andrews intellectual and scientific community – come to the fore, and the story ceases predominantly to be an Edinburgh one, or entirely an Edinburgh one. Calton Hill becomes to some extent an artistic and scientific colony of St. Andrews, instead of St. Andrews being the erstwhile and abandoned site of an origin story as it is now.
There is in any case no described mechanism in the existing literature to account for Hill’s alleged creative predominance in the partnership. The scenario usually advanced is one in which Hill physically arranged the subject or sitters, managed the light (the use of mirrors etc.) and advised on settings and backdrop, before standing back to allow Adamson to prepare the sensitized paper, aim the camera, make the exposure, complete the negative and process the prints. This is an imagined process rather than a studied one, and dismisses the difficulties of the calotype (or any photographic process) too easily.
So much of the success of the Calton Hill photographs is the silent result of the knowledge of and skill around concepts specific to the photographer and absent from the conventional early Victorian atelier: awareness of depth of field, exposure, lens distortion, the orthchromatic nature of the process, etc.: Stephen Shore (interviewed for Aperture by Lucy Sante in 2007) criticized the easy confusion of the painter’s idea of composition with that confronted by the photographer and regretted that the same word was used, inevitably misleadingly, in both contexts:
“Composition” seems to me to be a term borrowed from painting. A vocabulary was developed in the critique of painting, and then along came a new medium that also takes place on a flat rectangle—and so photography borrowed those terms. The word “composition” comes from the Latin root componere, which means “to put together.” “Synthesis” derives from the Greek root with the same meaning. With a painting, you’re taking basic building blocks and making something that’s more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: it takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it. It is an analytic process.
In any case, the application of the values of the Victorian atelier to photography gives us Henry Peach Robinson, not Robert Adamson. But a starting point of Robert Adamson as the partnership’s auteur and Hill as the partnership’s impresario sits well with the remaining evidence that we have for the partnership, requires less in terms of speculation and interpretation and allows for Hill’s ebullient, room-filling personality to express itself within the partnership to the full, the D.O. Hill, esq., Secretary of the R.S.A, the extraordinary friend and advocate of the arts in mid-century Scotland.