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A History of Photography in USC Libraries Collections

Members of mission household outside rear of mission house, Vizianagaram, Andhra Pradesh, India, ca.1885-1889

"London Mission House, Vizianagram (Back)". View of mission building with staff in fornt. One man holds a horse. A woman stands next to a samll seated child in the doorway.; One of 89 albumen prints mounted on 27 loose album pages, taken or compiled by Sarah Goffin, wife of L.M.S. missionary, Herbert James Goffin (1850-1932). Sarah Goffin sailed to India following her marriage in 1878 and spent the next eleven years at the L.M.S. station at Vizianagaram, before moving on to other districts in India. Engravings based on a number of these photographs appear in the Chronicle of the London Missionary Society, including 1886 and 1888.

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Albumen print, ca. 1885–1889
This photograph was taken of a mission house in Vizianagaram, Andhra Pradesh, India in the 1880s. This print belongs to a collection of 89 other albumen prints of the London Mission House taken or collected by Sarah Goffin, the wife of the missionary. This photograph is the result of the wet-plate collodion negative process, created by the British, and the albumen paper print process, created by the French. While the collodion adheres the silver salts to the glass plate, the albumen paper includes egg whites to produce a glossier print with reddish brown tones. The wet-plate process required the photographer to set up the camera completely, setting the focus and establishing the composition; then the photographer had to prepare the wet-plate in a darkroom set up on site, quickly put the plate in the camera, take the photograph, then immediately develop the negative while it was still wet. After developing the negative, the photographer would then put the negative on top of the albumen paper and leave it in the sun until it was properly exposed. This meant that the size of the negative would result in a final print of the same size. While this process was laborious and quick-paced, this technological advancement in photography allowed for photography to spread and circulate widely. The wet-plate collodion process allowed photographers to take many negatives and develop them but did not require photographers to make their positive prints immediately. The introduction of the albumen paper print allowed people to create detailed prints relatively cheaply and it allowed people to easily travel around the world with their photographs, which were very light. The fact that this photograph was taken of a mission in India while the prints made their way to the Mission Society in London demonstrates the importance and new possibilities created by the technological developments of the photographic process.