NEWHAVEN fishwives, church ministers and family portraits. The stock-in-trade of early Victorian photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson might seem quintessentially Victorian, but their images were anything but standard. Early pioneers of the photographic art, Hill and Adamson were together for only four years before Adamson’s untimely death at the age of 27, but in that time made an impact whose relevance and legacy still stand today. This innovative and best known of photographic partnerships explored their subject matter with an attention to artistic detail and a flair for technical innovation that marked them out only four years after the invention of photography had been announced in 1839, despite the huge practical restrictions of their art.

The National Portrait Gallery has huge holdings of Hill and Adamson material, and this “Perfect Chemistry” summer exhibition aims to highlight the evolution of their partnership whilst also bringing the universality of human experience – theirs and ours – into focus. Whilst the exhibition is presented chronologically, International Photography Curator Anne Lyden tells me, given the time frame of just four years (1843-48), chronology is almost moot. The pair were experimenting with altering negatives early on in their partnership, making images which told the tale they wanted to tell. Their enthusiasm brims from the images they produced.

There is a stereotype of Victorian photography, largely brought about by the technological restrictions the early art form was bound in. Cumbersome equipment and the necessity of holding a pose for many minutes at a time made spontaneity, the “snap”, very hard to achieve. Victorians were delighted at the new form, queuing up to have their likenesses taken in booths and studios that dressed them in the oriental fashions of the day or captured them in large family groups, each hair slicked into place.

At the time that Hill and Adamson were working, there were further restrictions. Studio or photographic lighting had not been invented; outside work was made hugely difficult, not least in Scotland, the windiest country in Europe, by the slightest breeze in the clothes, the trees, the hair, the equipment. To obtain the images which the pair did, outside at Newhaven and elsewhere, entailed both a persistence, skill and a patience which betrayed their belief – and enthusiasm – in the endeavour.

“When you go to Adamson's home in Edinburgh, Rock House, which doubled as their studio, you realize the challenges that they were working with and how skilful they were in finding a way to make these very beautiful, natural-appearing images. The wind cuts through you!” says Lyden. Their images of Newhaven fisherfolk, artfully and yet naturally posed in front of their creels, or the boats pulled up on Newhaven beach, are both superb social documents and full of individual personality. The images were recognized for their worth at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London in 1851, some three years after Adamson’s death.

It had begun in 1843. Hill was a painter of some 20 years standing, primarily known for his landscapes, when he met Robert Adamson from St. Andrews, a young man who had seized on the new medium of photography and arrived in Edinburgh with the intention of setting up the first studio offering calotypes as opposed to the prevalent daguerrotype. It was the Church that brought them together, perhaps ironically as the Church itself, as Presbyterian Scotland knew it, was in the process of splitting itself apart.

The Church schism was a “polarizing time for the country” says Lyden, who is keen to point out the similarities to our own time. “The world was changing around them, as it is around us.” Across Europe, there was a backdrop of social unrest. In 1843, a group of ministers, eventually some 400 strong, would elect to leave the financial stability of their livings and form a new church, the Free Church of Scotland. Hill, whose own brother became a Free Church minister, recognized the historic nature of the occasion and decided to mark it with a vast history canvas, comprising individual portraits of each of the many hundred ministers.

“He quickly realized it was going to take forever,” says Lyden. When the physicist Sir David Brewster, who had experimented in the calotype process in St. Andrews in 1841 and had instructed the young Adamson in the process, suggested he contact the young photographer to help him in getting portraits of the ministers before they all dispersed to their parishes, Hill agreed. Within weeks the pair were in partnership and a month later, were exhibiting in Edinburgh.

“It must have been a real 'a-ha!' moment for Hill”, says Lyden, who says the painter quickly realized just what this new process could do for him. These images, captured relatively quickly, were painstakingly transferred in paint to the portrait of First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland which Hill completed some 23 years later. The painting, on loan from the Free Church to the Portrait Gallery for this exhibition, opens the exhibition, throws it into context and also, in some way, marks the end of the partnership, for whilst Hill sporadically continued with photography after Adamson’s death in 1848, he never again found a partner with whom he could work so productively.

Hill and Adamson: A Perfect Chemistry, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, May 27 – 1 Oct 1

www.nationalgalleries.org