This is a featured article for the topic Hill, David Octavius.

The Scottish fishing village of Newhaven lies a mile north of Edinburgh, on the estuary of the River Forth. In 1841 its recorded population was 2,103, including 300 fishermen. Between 1843 and 1847, the village saw a remarkable exploration in photographic art. When D. O. Hill and Robert Adamson first entered into partnership, Sir David Brewster sent a letter to Henry Talbot explaining their intentions which included the confusing phrase: ‘Mr D. O. Hill, the Painter, is on the eve of entering into partnership with Mr Adamson and proposes to apply the Calotype to many other general purposes of a very popular kind, & especially to the execution of large pictures representing difft. bodies & classes of individuals.’

Hill had first met Adamson to discuss the use of photography in assisting his painting commemorating the formation, in May 1843, of the Free Church of Scotland, and was thinking of wider applications of such natural studies for painters. Before this, he had painted in the village of Newhaven, and his earlier work expresses a concern for the immediate translation of experience which offers a parallel to photography. In 1835 he exhibited three paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy: The Peacock Inn: Sketch at Newhaven; Evening: Scene on the Beach at Newhaven—Painted on the Spot; Sketch of an Oyster Boat Painted on Newhaven Beach. His enthusiasm presumably derived principally from the work of the surgeon Charles Bell (1774-1842), who advised painters to observe people active in their natural setting: ‘At the gaming house, on the exchange, in the streets, this study affords amusement of the highest interest and gratification.’ In Edinburgh at this time there was some difficulty in studying from the figure—in practice, painters worked mostly from plaster casts rather than from life. Hill was unquestionably fascinated by the opportunity offered in photography to study single figures and to construct groups. His enthusiasm was echoed in the reaction of the marine painter Clarkson Stanfield to the Newhaven calotypes: ‘They are indeed most wonderful, and I would rather have a set of them than the finest Rembrandts I ever saw.’

But the Newhaven photographs have a larger ambition. In August 1844 the partners announced the publication of six volumes of pictures on particular subjects. First on the list was The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth. They had taken a few calotypes of the fishermen and women in 1843, but this announcement signalled a new intention—the idea of a coherent work on the subject.

Hill admired the calotype process in Adamson's hands in terms of its unevenness and imperfection: ‘The rough surface and unequal texture throughout of the paper is the main cause of the calotype failing in details before the process {or ‘precision’} of Daguerrotypy—& this is the very life of it. They look like the imperfect work of a man—and not the much diminished perfect work of god.’ This slightly cryptic phrase defines the aesthetic of the calotype—it has a human character and can be used as a medium for fine art. It has life.

Newhaven was remarkable in the context of the 1840s. It was a small working-class community flourishing in times of distress. The periodic slumps of the Industrial Revolution, endemic disease, the potato famine, and the Highland clearances had driven the poor into the cities and generated disastrous slums. By contrast, the village was self-governing, heroic, educated, and moral. Work there was hard and hazardous. The men fished at sea from small, unprotected boats. Fanny Kemble wrote of the fishwives: ‘It always seemed to me that these women had about as equal a share of the labour of life as the most zealous champion of the rights of her sex could desire.’ They were remarkable for their singing voices and for their self-confidence; they were also distinctive in both their dress and their beauty. At the time of the ‘Disruption’ in the Church of Scotland, the Newhaven congregation were active supporters of the Free Church.

The Fishermen and Women series of calotypes focused on Newhaven with a few additional pictures taken in Portobello and St Andrews, including the extraordinary group of the Fishergate containing more than twenty women and children. Around 120 pictures were taken of men, women, children, and groups involving, in the organization and taking, a phenomenal amount of time and cooperation. The subjects must have been well aware of the purpose of the photographs and in agreement with it.

The original objective was not realized, and the series was never published as a discrete group of pictures. It includes a proportion of failed negatives which reveal the intention to explore the village's working activity: cleaning lines, selling fish, bringing in the catch, and even—a technical impossibility—the boats in the water (simulated by positioning a boat on the beach with sail set). The calotypes picture the social structure of the village: the way fathers educated sons, and fishwives supported each other. They are also concerned with subtler questions of the community's human and cultural sophistication, from the minister's bible class to people simply thinking.

There would appear to be no 19th-century parallel for such a large-scale visual exploration of a community, apart from anthropological studies overseas. The admiration it aroused implies that it was a model offered to help solve the social problems of the 1840s; which in itself answers the question raised later of voyeurism in examining the lives of the poor. The Newhaven series most closely resembles the kind of social documentary work of the 20th century, seen especially in magazines like Picture Post or Life. It connects most interestingly, in the 20th century, with Paul Strand's celebration of village life, including his 1954 Hebridean study Tir A'Mhurain (The Land of Bent Grass), which pays visual tribute to Hill and Adamson's work.

The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.