Museum no: 2022.1.37.1
Date: 1867?
Photographer: Possibly Anthony Horner
Object type: Gelatin silver film negative. Copy negative from an earlier print (digitally inverted)
Location: Scaleber Force, nr Settle, North Yorkshire
This photograph of Michael Horner (1843-1869) at work with his camera at Scaleber Force probably dates from around 1867. We can see his collodion darkroom tent on a tripod and he is loading a stereographic lens board from a leather carrying case.
We cannot date the photograph exactly, but it was almost certainly taken after 1864, when the Horner studio was established. Most of Michael’s collodion photographs were produced around 1866-67, and his kit here looks well used.
It is likely that this photograph was taken by Michael’s younger brother, Anthony (1853-1923) who would have been 14 in 1867. Just two years later in 1869, aged only 16, Anthony took over the business following Michael’s death from tuberculosis.
Photography was a still new and exciting technology in the mid-1860s. The 1861 Census recorded over 2,500 individuals working as photographers in England and Wales, compared with only 51 listed in 1851. This figure includes a great many working in photographic studios as assistants and technicians but indicates the overall growth of the industry up to this point (Pritchard 2010). Throughout the 1860s, the number of photographic studios increased, with individuals like Michael Horner taking advantage of the reliable photographic technologies developed during the 1850s, including the wet collodion process and albumen printing.
Michael set up his photography studio in his father’s tinsmiths shop in Settle in 1864, aged just 21. He advertised in the Settle Chronicle that he had “spent four months in one of the leading Photographic Studios in Manchester…” By 1865, Michael was advertising stereographic images and postcards of local landmarks for sale for the price of one shilling. Other early landscape images in the collection include Giggleswick Scar, Victoria Cave and many of the district’s other picturesque views. Michael and Anthony’s uncle, also called Michael, had been one of the discoverers of Victoria Cave in 1837, along with Joseph Jackson who took the first amateur photographs, possibly inspiring the younger Michael’s interest. Anthony’s mother and elder brother James may have worked in the studio at first too; both are recorded as photographers in the 1871 Census.
The Horner Photographic Studio went on to operate for over 100 years, run by three generations of the Horner family. Early images include studio portraits and local landscapes, and the Horner family went on to take images of local events, family gatherings, villages, buildings, farms and industry and document changing times such as the arrival of electricity and railways.
Photography Notes
Michael used the collodion (or “wet plate photography”) process to make photographs. By the 1860s, this was much the most common photographic process in use in Britain and elsewhere. However, the photographic plates needed to be prepared and developed right away before the plate dried, so he used a small tent on a tripod as a portable darkroom where he immersed the wet plate in a solution of silver nitrate before placing it in the camera. After taking the picture, he developed the plate in the dark tent, in a solution of pyrogallic acid, and finally fixed the image in sodium thiosulfate. The stereoscopic lens board would have produced two photographs which could be viewed together to create a 3D image, a stereograph.
This is a “copy negative”. A new photograph, on film, was taken of an existing print in order to make a copy, likely in the mid-20th century. This is the only surviving negative: the original glass plate has since been lost.