Description:
This important survival of American photographic history is a very early calotype of a water tower in Philadelphia. Paper photography from this era is a rarity and the image was created by two of America's great photographic pioneers, the Langenheim brothers.A calotype (or talbotype) is a negative-positive photographic process in which a paper negative is produced and then used to make a positive print using exposure to light. It was introduced by William Henry Fox Talbot, from whom the brothers had obtained the rights to the process, soon after Daguerre's advancement in France.
The Langenheim brothers were some of the first entrepreneurs to utilize the calotype process in America. They began creating their own photographic images and revolutionizing the field of American photography soon after the process's invention. "In 1842 they made the first advertising photograph in history, a picture of the restaurant in the Exchange Building in Philadelphia" (Pennsylvania Arts and Sciences Society, 1940) and… Read More