The Misses McCandlish 1843 - 1847

Editor: This is "The Misses McCandlish," a gelatin-silver print made between 1843 and 1847 by Hill and Adamson. It’s at the Met. The scene is tender, almost melancholic. What can you tell me about the conditions of its making, of 19th-century photography in general? Curator: A great deal! The early processes like the calotype, used here, were incredibly labor-intensive. Each print, due to the technology's constraints, had a texture unlike any mass-produced print. But note also how portraiture becomes accessible to the middle class through these technologies, democratizing representation while simultaneously changing how labour happens around images. How do you see that play out in this work? Editor: That's fascinating. It highlights the material realities behind art. Seeing it like this it is amazing it exists at all. It does feel different, seeing it in person versus in a book or online, especially knowing what went into it. Did that change their style? Curator: Precisely. And the artists responded accordingly. Early photography demanded long exposure times, so portraiture often favoured stillness and posed arrangements. But think too about what isn’t shown – the chemical processes, the darkroom labor. They're inherent parts of the photograph, like the smell of paint in an oil painting studio, material signs of image creation. And the class differences within that labor… the work required of those posing vs. the artists capturing. Editor: Right. So it shifts my thinking away from pure aesthetics, toward these issues of production and how the image became. Curator: Exactly! And how it circulates, what it represents to us now versus then. That tension makes these early photographs such interesting objects for critical inquiry. It really emphasizes labour and material. Editor: It does make me want to dig more into the actual steps. Thank you, I'll definitely be looking into that. Curator: Likewise! A focused dive into materials always unearths untold stories.