Museum captures the Victorians' excitement at photography

Art, Science, Empire and elaborate taxidermy - the Victorians had it all, approached with the kind of verve and exuberance that marked out the era as one of outstanding innovation and exploration, not to mention one in which a vast number of small animals died in the name of stuffed pictorial tableaux. One of the chief inventions of that age was photography in 1839, a true marriage of art, science and rapidly evolving processes that began - quite necessarily, given the plethora of equipment, chemicals and free time required - as the preserve of the rich before filtering down the social scale to the man and woman on the street.

It is this process that is the subject of this major new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, a process marked in fascinating images that range from stiff studio portraits to the new tourist photos of top-hatted men standing on the precipices of magnificent natural phenomena and the twee still-life tableau of a stuffed kitten in a basket of fruit. There is a crocodile, too, hauled up on the banks of the Nile in this vast collection of photos, evidencing the dichotomy and delight of the Victorian exploration, both physical and mental, of their rapidly expanding world.

"We're not sure if the crocodile is stuffed," muses Principal Curator of Science, Dr Alison Morrison-Low, as she sits in front of a slightly temperamental computer screen, flicking through a selection of the eclectic images from this vast exhibition. But you wouldn't put it past them.

Morrison-Low, whose own remit encompasses collections devoted to the history of science, is a specialist in the history of scientific instruments. "My main areas of interest are the 18th and 19th centuries," she says. "I'm fascinated with the whole business of people being interested in how things work and how they come together with how the natural world operates. And the main way that manifests itself in this period is the sudden explosion in photographic processes in the mid/late 19th century. We are saturated with images from the cradle to the grave, today, and this all began with the Victorians' love of extraordinary images."

Those early images were captured in two different ways: the pin-sharp daguerreotype, the first photographic process to be announced in 1839, which comprised an image formed on a highly polished silver surface in a method pioneered by Henri Daguerre in Paris; and the more evocative calotype, which used silver on paper, invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841. Both created beautiful images: from the fragile silvery surface of the daguerreotype, which had to be placed in a special glass frame that kept the glass a fraction of an inch away from its smudgeable surface; to the calotype, whose slightly less fragile nature meant that it became an interesting alternative to the daguerreotype for many early amateur photographers, despite the fact that it meant lugging a heavy wooden camera and developing equipment up the slopes of the glacier or around the cathedral one was trying to record.

Both involved dabbling in noxious chemicals, as did later forms of photography, a procedure that the brilliant late Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, like many others, found somewhat nerve-wracking, wondering if she might be accidentally poisoned by the deadly cyanide of potassium as she made her innovative prints using the wet collodion process.

This wide-ranging collection of Victorian photography and photographic equipment is the result of much ad-hoc donation, random distribution of national assets and some important gifts. Among them is a substantial 1936 donation from the granddaughter of William Henry Fox Talbot, a donation of works by the inestimable David Octavius Hill, founder of the first photographic studio in Scotland in 1843 along with his pioneering partner Robert Adamson, and in more recent years a loan which will become a bequest from the collectors Bernard and Alma Howarth-Loomes, who fossicked for photographs in the junk shops and antique stalls of Bermondsey Market and beyond. "He said it was an illness!" says Morrison-Low.

Here, then, are the photographic portrait cartes de visites favoured by a Victorian society that had no knowledge of what the Queen looked like beyond her likeness on a coin. Here, the images from the Edinburgh Calotype Society, the first known photographic society made up of wealthy Edinburgh lawyers. Here again, the tourist photos from Niagara Falls taken by one Platt D Babbitt, who opportunistically photographed Grand Tour visitors in front of the falls, returning half an hour later with the image to sell. And here, the photographs of unknown families, showing off their prized horse and cart, taken by itinerant photographers. The amazement at this new way of recording their life is clearly evident.

"The only way you got to see anything before the advent of photography was on an engraving," says Morrison-Low. In the space of 60 years, a world of realist imagery, of photographs of unknown far-off places, of barely seen relatives posted to the corners of the Empire, of amusing curios and amazing wonders, would bring the Victorian expansion of their world into the heart of the most modest drawing room.

Photography: A Victorian Sensation is at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh from June 19-November 22, www.nms.ac.uk