Photography

The first practical photograph — a mirror that remembers. Silver-plated copper yielding ghostly, shimmering images.

Paper negatives yielding soft, warm prints. Talbot's invention — the ancestor of all modern photography.

Glass plate negatives coated with collodion — sharp, detailed, but must be exposed while still wet.

Egg white as binder — the dominant photographic print of the 19th century. Billions of eggs cracked for photography.

Prussian blue photography — iron-based process producing vivid blue images. Anna Atkins used it for the first photo-illustrated book.

Pigmented gelatin giving permanent, velvety prints. The most archival photographic process — immune to fading.

The most beautiful photographic prints — noble metals embedded in paper fiber. Warm greys with infinite subtlety.

The first practical color photography — potato starch grains dyed red, green, blue as a pointillist color filter.

The gold standard of color transparency film. Warm, saturated, stable — 'they give us those nice bright colors' (Paul Simon).

Kodak's cooler, bluer transparency film. Where Kodachrome was warm and golden, Ektachrome was crisp and clean.

The landscape photographer's film — hyper-saturated greens and blues that made nature look more vivid than nature.

The portrait photographer's film — fine grain, natural flesh tones, soft pastels. Designed for skin.

Self-developing photographs — peel apart or integral. Unique chemical palette, imperfect, irreproducible. Each print one of a kind.

Seeing beyond visible light — foliage glows white, skies go black, skin becomes translucent. An alien world recorded on film.