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Ambrotype of a 19th century gentleman.

History and photography:
Evolving technologies captured a century of images

Kodak recently announced that it would be retiring its Kodachrome color slide film. Undoubtedly, the popularity of digital photography adversely affected sales of this former mainstay of film.

Kodachrome follows in the footsteps of many other photographic formats and processes that were popular “in their day” but became out-of-date when new innovations came to the fore. The Tallahassee Museum’s collections include examples of photography’s evolution, including these early photographs: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes.

During the 1840s–1860s, daguerreotypes were the most popular of the early photographs. Frenchman L.J.M. Daguerre in 1839 discovered that a thin sheet of light-sensitive, silver-plated copper, when exposed in a camera to natural light, developed by mercury vapor, and fixed in a hypo solution, left a “truthful likeness” on the plate.

While not the first photographic process, Daguerre’s invention made photography commercially viable. Daguerreotypists opened studios in major cities and courted the rich and famous to sit for the 3 to 15 minutes it took to make an exposure. Each sitter received his or her likeness enclosed in a velvet-lined, ornate case, known as a union case.

By the late 1850s, the ambrotype began to surpass the daguerreotype in popularity. Patented by James Ambrose Cutting in 1854, the process involved exposing a wet collodion glass plate in a camera, developing, fixing, and drying the plate to produce a negative, then backing the glass negative with black paper or paint to produce a positive image before placing it in a union case. The ambrotype was less expensive and required a shorter exposure/sitting time than the daguerreotype, factors that led to its ascendance.

Tintypes took photography to a new market, the working class

A processed daguerreotype was washed, dried, sandwiched between
a brass mat and glass cover, sealed in a brass frame, and placed
in a hinged union case.

Within a decade, the tintype became the new photographic fad. Though it was introduced by Frenchman Adolphe Alexandre Martin in 1853, Hamilton Scott obtained the U.S. patent for the process in 1856. The tintype also used the wet collodion process but instead of collodion being applied to a sheet of glass, it was coated onto a sheet of black-enameled iron. The tintype process was fast, allowing the sitter to receive his or her likeness within minutes of the tintypist preparing, exposing and processing the image. Once again, innovation reduced costs. Tintypes were cheap to produce and resilient enough that they didn’t require encasement.

By the end of the 19th century, newer photographic processes overshadowed the early ones. However, the daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes in the Museum’s collections help us chronicle and remember photography’s changing developments, and their images help us chronicle people and events of the day.