The Age of Salt: Art, Science and Early Photography

The latest in a series of monographic and thematic exhibitions addressing photographs from the earliest days of the medium.

The exhibition takes as its starting point one of William Henry Fox Talbot greatest works and one of the finest prints outside a museum. Entitled Veronica in Bloom, this exceptional print dates from the very moment in which the birth of phoography was announced.

The exhibition then traces the development of photography both through technical advance and through the forging of a new aesthetic, initially in dialogue with painting and then freed from such a relationship. These pioneering moments include intimate untrimmed salt prints by Calvert Jones and Edouard Baldus, remarkable salt prints made in Britain, France and Italy and then the evolution of new tehniques including collodion on glass, albumen printing and forms of photomechanical engravings from heliogravures by Charles Negre and Henri le Secq through to photogalvanographs by Roger Fenton.