Calotype, 1858/1890
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This photograph, taken in the mid to late nineteenth century in Keti, India, is a calotype illustrating a mission house and sanitarium.
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2020-11-21T19:18:48-08:00
This photograph, taken in the mid to late nineteenth century in Keti, India, is a calotype illustrating a mission house and sanitarium. Along with the daguerreotype, the calotype, also known as the talbotype (named after its inventor William Henry Fox Talbot) was one of the first methods of photography to be invented. However the process of creating a calotype, unlike a daguerreotype, is fairly similar to ways in which photographs were made for years to come. The calotype is the first documented method of photography that involves taking a negative, which could be used to create any number of positive prints. While the calotype was invented and developed in England, its use was far-reaching, as seen here with this image taken in India. This particular photograph was taken from outside of a house on a hill. The foreground shows the front lawn from the house, the middle ground shows the house itself, and the background shows the mountain behind the house along with the sky. As the the distance from the camera to what is being photographed increases, the detail decreases, so the mountain in this image has almost no detail and the sky is nothing but a solid color. The camera and chemical process used here could not pick up enough information to show the house, mountain, and the sky in perfect detail, but this image still is a very nice depiction of this scene. Despite the technological limitations of the time, this image still gives us an interesting view of a rural landscape.
