The study of photography collectors and collecting in the nineteenth century promises to open rich new ground for us in understanding about how the medium was received and regarded during its first golden age. In recent years albums created by such collecting have been the focus of some of the great digitizing projects taking place around the world, and examples in places as far apart as Los Angeles and St. Andrews in Scotland can be viewed remotely by researchers, often with the added help of IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework).
I have had the chance to make initial surveys on two albums of work by the Hill, Mann and Adamson partnership which are not yet available in any online form and offer brief accounts of each in the hope of getting them both more firmly on the record.
The first, which I'm calling here the "Mitchell Album", forms part of a large deposit of papers and albums collected by the great Scottish psychologist and antiquarian Sir Arthur Mitchell (1826-1909) placed with the National Records of Scotland by the WS Society/Signet Library of Edinburgh in 1995.
The second, which I'm calling here the "Brodie Album" relates to the circle of the Scottish artists William Brodie R.S.A. (1815-1881) and John Phillip R.S.A. (1817-1867) and is in the care of the National Library of Scotland.
In the case of the Mitchell Album, I am grateful to the National Records of Scotland for providing superb digital images to create a study surrogate for the delicate original volume (the prints are in excellent condition but the album's hinges are no longer suitable for reading room handling).
The Brodie Album is as yet unimaged but I have given references to the relevant entries in the Hill and Adamson "Bible", Sara Stevenson David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson: Catalogue of their Calotypes taken between 1843 and 1847 in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981) or, if "not in Stevenson", to the relevant reference in the Dougan Collection at the University of Glasgow. I'd like to thank the staff of the National Library of Scotland for their help in providing me with access to and handling of the album, and in particular Dr. Graham Hogg for information on the album's background and provenance.
The accounts are here:
Some thoughts in summary from the two albums:
- Image 6 of the Mitchell Album, a carbon print, is reversed from Stevenson's George Combe b in the same way as the carbon print at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the carbon print in Andrew Elliot's posthumous Calotypes by D.O. Hill and R. Adamson : illustrating an early stage in the development of photography (Edinburgh : printed for private circulation, 1928). This may further tie the prints in Elliot's book to Thomas Annan's studio c. 1879 and James Craig Annan's account of their production in his 1945 letter to Helmut Gernsheim (as opposed to Elliot using Jessie Bertram's superb carbon prints which has sometimes been suggested)
- In common with better-known Hill, Mann and Adamson albums (e.g. the Bicknell and Stansfield albums) both of these albums conduct a kind of tour of the partnership's activity and inventory, perhaps reinforcing the sense that an idea of what the partnership's work had consisted of both existed on Calton Steps during Hill's lifetime but also survived into a subsequent period.
- The Brodie album - uniquely, I think, amongst surviving albums - contains duplicate prints. A number of explanations work equally well for this, but one might be that pre-prepared selections had been made up at Rock House at some point, with fragments of two such selections acceding to the Brodie/Phillip circle.
- The captions to the MItchell Album, which are in Sir Arthur Mitchell's hand, suggest that by the time his album was compiled memories (and identifications) of the sitters were no longer fresh (and may no longer have been Hill's direct recollections if collecting took place after 1870)
- As the extraordinary and revelatory digitization of the MacKinnon Collection by the National Galleries of Scotland has shown, there are still "new" Hill, Mann and Adamson images waiting to be uncovered. Both Mitchell and Brodie albums contain images "not in Stevenson" or the Dougan and Getty collections, although this may be a matter of digitization catching up with large collections of that kind.
My interest in the albums comes as part of my continuing research into the background of the Signet Library copy of Hill, Mann and Adamson's Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews which came to light in October 2022 and which was the subject of an event at the Library in March 2023. The next stage of the project will be the release of a revised and much enlarged account of the album and its fellow survivors in other collections.
This will be in print, appearing later in the year and distributed to major institutional and photographic libraries, with sections covering:
The Signet Library album: discovery, provenance, conservation
Analysis of other surviving copies
Comprehensive review of existing scholarship
Relationship to St Andrews photography
Relationship with other Hill and Adamson albums
Album images
There will also be a new digital surrogate for the Signet Library album accompanying a shorter online version of the printed account. All enquiries please to James Hamilton, Research Principal at the WS Society at jhamilton[at]wssociety.co.uk
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