Capturing History: St Andrews and the Invention of Photography
By Blanca Carolin Hahn
In John Adamson’s Coastal View of St Andrews from the East from around 1845, a distant outlook on the sea, the rocky coastline and the ruins of the St Andrews Cathedral as well as the St Andrews Castle are visible. In the misty atmosphere of the photograph, we can make out the tower of St Salvator’s Chapel and the cumulation of houses in the distant coastal town. This work is one of many examples of St Andrews’ important chapter in the history of early photography, in which it became the first thoroughly photographed town in the world.
John Adamson, Coastal View of St Andrews from the East, ca. 1845.
Photography was invented twofold: once in Paris by Louis Daguerre in 1839 with the photographic technique of the Daguerrotype, and by the English scientist and inventor Henry Fox Talbot, who developed the Calotype in London around 1840 after experimenting with light exposure, photogenic drawings and negatives for many years.
At this time, St Andrews was a rather small and poor community defined mostly by the golf club – the popularity of which was strongly declining at this point – and fishing. But even then, the University was a characterizing institution to the community and the cityscape. Around the principal of the University, David Brewster, a small group of intellectuals gathered, including St Andrew’s provost Hugh Lyon Playfair as well as John Adamson, the originator of Coastal View of St Andrews and a professor at the University. Brewster founded the Literary and Philosophical Society in 1838 and, being close friends with Henry Fox Talbot, used this space to discuss and explore Talbot’s ongoing photographic experiments and reported the results back to Talbot.
When Talbot then invented the Calotype, it sparked a great enthusiasm in the St Andrews ‘Lit and Phil’ Society, especially in John Adamson, who produced the first calotype in Scotland in 1843. As a physician himself he had great interest in the technology and developed it further by experimenting with different chemical substances and paper.
John Adamson, Melville Adamson and Aleck Bell, 1860, Album Print, Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
In addition to those technical processes, Adamson explored the artistic potential of the new technology and photographed the town and its people in numerous works. He was especially interested in the historical air of St Andrews, describing it as an architectural memento mori. The ruins, memorials and old stone houses breathed with the air of the past, while the declining population, the poverty in the fishing districts and the decreasing popularity of the golf club seemed to foretell the death of the town. Adamson captured that atmosphere in the photographs of buildings, coastlines and ruins of St Andrews between 1842 and 1843. At the same time, he aspired to record the social conditions of the poor, documenting the places where the fishermen lived and worked, while also depicting the lives of the bourgeoisie. With this, Adamson created a complex portrait of the whole town and with the contributions of his fellow photographic pioneers of the Literary and Philosophical Society in the early 1840s, St Andrews became the first thoroughly photographed town in history.
Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, St Salvators College Church, from A Series of Calotype Views of St Andrews, 1846, University of St Andrews Special Collections.
John Adamson’s brother Robert later became a defining figure in Scottish photography. In 1843 he opened a photographic studio in Edinburgh together with the painter David Octavius Hill. They produced a plethora of works depicting the Scottish landscapes, cities and people. In 1846 they published and sold a series of calotypes showing various views of St Andrews as advertisement for the town, continuing the ideas and techniques of John Adamson. With this contribution and the revival of the golf club by Brewster, St Andrews quickly gained popularity again and became a beloved destination for tourists, golfers and students.
Bibliography
Bailly, Jean-Christophe. The Instant and its Shadow: A Story of Photography. Fordham University Press, 2020.
Crawford, Robert. The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011.
Morrison-Low, A. D., and David Bruce. Photography and the Doctor: John Adamson of St Andrews. Edinburgh: NMS Enterprises Limited - Publishing, 2018.
Smith, Graham. “Hill & Adamson: St. Andrews, Burnside & The Rock & Spindle.” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 10, no. 2 (1979): 45–48.