St. Andrews 1843 - 1847

Curator: This is “St. Andrews,” a daguerreotype made between 1843 and 1847 by Hill and Adamson, currently held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a landscape study. Editor: My breath just hitched a little. It feels like I’m looking at a memory, something hazy but charged with history. It's heavy and brooding. The color is all sepiatone shadows... and those rough textures! It almost feels like you could scrape them off the surface. Curator: What grabs my attention immediately is the texture that speaks to the experimental and early adoption of daguerreotype techniques and its unique capabilities when capturing architecture and landscapes. I wonder what kind of weather the team had while they were exposing these plates... Scotland can be tricky, of course. Editor: It must've been a bit grey. The building rises directly out of the rockface; so stoic, lonely and eternal. Curator: Early photographic processes were labor-intensive. You would need on-site preparation, coating, and development... It brings up interesting questions of production; did they work alone, who transported equipment and did this limit image size? Editor: It’s strange how seeing the process like that, how grounded and heavy it all was, adds to the emotion. They captured this raw, wind-beaten feeling so precisely. Do you think the limitations of early photography drove a focus on architecture, that's the thing to last the time needed? Curator: Precisely. In addition to their partnership producing portraits, Hill and Adamson extensively documented architectural sites and daily life across Scotland, making the case for it through photography's capability for faithful rendering of the materiality. Editor: Faithful is definitely one word for it. I see the material here and I can't deny its place but also feel the ghosts a little too. Looking at it with you has unlocked some ideas about beauty being borne out of those rough, weathered truths. It gives "St. Andrews" so much more depth. Curator: It’s those interactions between process and place that create the most enduring qualities, even to modern eyes. I always learn from revisiting works like this.