Progress

[Mike Farley]

Yesterday I went to the "Salt and Silver" exhibition at Tate Britain where prints from the very early days of photography were on display, including some by Fox Talbot himself. Known as "salt prints", they are the result of the discovery that paper coated with silver salts became sensitive light. Around 20 years later they were superseded by albumen prints in which the light sensitive chemicals were held on the paper with egg white. When this new process came in, I wonder if there were those who bemoaned that it was inferior to the one it replaced in the way that images were rendered? Or is that a more modern phenomenon?