The calotype was William Henry Fox Talbot's paper negative photographic process, introduced in 1841. Learn how it enabled reproducible prints and shaped photography's future.
While Daguerre was polishing silver plates in Paris, an Englishman named William Henry Fox Talbot was doing something different. He was soaking paper in chemicals and putting it in a camera. The images he got were not sharp. They were not mirror-like. They were soft, textured by the fibers of the paper itself, and they had one enormous advantage over the daguerreotype: they were negatives. You could put the negative against another sheet of sensitized paper, expose it to sunlight, and make as many positive prints as you wanted. The daguerreotype was a unique object. The calotype was the beginning of photography as a reproducible medium.
The calotype is a photographic process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) in 1840 and patented in 1841. A sheet of high-quality writing paper is treated with silver nitrate and potassium iodide to make it light-sensitive, then exposed in a camera to produce a negative image. The negative is developed with gallic acid and silver nitrate, fixed, and then contact-printed onto salted paper to produce a positive. The word comes from the Greek "kalos" (beautiful) and "typos" (impression). Talbot called it the calotype, though it was also known as the Talbotype.
This entry covers how the calotype works, its invention, the photographers who used it, and why it matters as the foundation of the negative-positive system that defined photography for 150 years.
The calotype negative process begins with paper. Talbot used high-quality writing paper, carefully selected for smooth texture and uniform surface. The paper is washed with a solution of silver nitrate and dried, then soaked in potassium iodide to form silver iodide, which is light-sensitive. This "iodized paper" can be stored for weeks or months.
Immediately before use, the iodized paper is coated with a fresh solution of gallo-nitrate of silver, a mixture of silver nitrate and gallic acid. This solution is unstable and must be used within hours. The sensitized paper is loaded into the camera in near-total darkness and exposed. Exposure times ranged from a few seconds to several minutes depending on the lighting conditions.
After exposure, the paper is developed by washing it with more gallo-nitrate of silver solution. A latent image appears within seconds. When development is judged sufficient, the paper is fixed, originally with potassium bromide and later with sodium thiosulfate (hypo), the same fixer that became standard for all subsequent photographic processes. The result is a negative image, deep brown or black, on one surface of the paper.
The University of Glasgow's Archives and Special Collections, which holds the Hill and Adamson calotype collection, describes the process in detail. Because the paper negative has a visible grain, the resulting prints are softer and less detailed than daguerreotypes. But because the negative can be used to make multiple prints, the calotype was the first photographic process that separated the capture of the image from its reproduction. Read the full description at University of Glasgow.
Talbot discovered photography independently of Daguerre. In 1834, he was producing "photogenic drawings" by placing objects on sensitized paper and exposing them to sunlight, creating cameraless photograms. He did not announce these results until 1839, after news of Daguerre's process reached England. Talbot's early process produced negative images but lacked the chemical development step that made the calotype practical.
The breakthrough came in the autumn of 1840, when Talbot discovered that a very short exposure, too brief to produce a visible image, could be developed into a full image with gallo-nitrate of silver. This was the discovery of the latent image, and it reduced exposure times from minutes to seconds. Talbot patented the calotype in 1841. The patent applied in England but not in Scotland, which is why the most celebrated calotype photographers, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, worked in Edinburgh, free from Talbot's licensing restrictions.
The calotype dominated the 1840s but was gradually replaced in the 1850s by the collodion wet plate process, which used glass instead of paper for the negative, producing sharper images with finer detail. A 2019 study published in Microchemical Journal analyzed 138 French paper negatives from 1843 to 1856 using non-invasive spectroscopic techniques, identifying different process variants developed by French photographers including Blanquart-Evrard, Guillot-Saguez, and Gustave Le Gray. Read the study at Microchemical Journal.
Talbot is the inventor. His The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846) was the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. It contained 24 calotype prints, each tipped in by hand, covering subjects from still life arrangements to architectural views. Talbot's images at Lacock Abbey, his home in Wiltshire, demonstrate the calotype's ability to capture texture and atmosphere, even if the paper grain softens the detail. A 2025 essay published in Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte examined approximately 100 metal plates in the Talbot collection at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, shedding light on his later experiments in photomechanical printing. Read the essay at De Gruyter.
Hill and Adamson produced the finest calotypes ever made. Working in Edinburgh between 1843 and 1848, they created approximately 3,000 calotype negatives, primarily portraits of Scottish fishermen, ministers, and ordinary people. Their portraits have a quality that the daguerreotype could not match: a sense of ease and naturalness. The long exposure times of the calotype forced subjects to settle into their poses, and the soft paper grain flattered the sitters in a way that the clinical sharpness of the daguerreotype did not. The National Galleries of Scotland holds the largest collection of their work.
Le Gray was a French photographer who improved the calotype process significantly. His 1851 treatise described a dry waxed paper process that allowed sensitized papers to be prepared in advance and kept for days, making them practical for travel photography. Le Gray's seascapes, including The Great Wave, Sete (1857), used the calotype's tonal range to capture the interplay of sky and sea with a drama that sharper processes often lost.
Baldus used paper negatives for his documentation of French architecture and infrastructure in the 1850s. His large-format paper negatives of the Louvre, the railways, and the floods of 1856 demonstrate that the calotype was not limited to small-scale portraiture. Baldus developed his own variant of the paper negative process that produced exceptionally large and detailed images.
The calotype's specific process did not survive the 1850s. Glass plate negatives, collodion, and eventually film replaced paper negatives. But the calotype's fundamental innovation, the negative-positive system, defined photography for the next 150 years. Every film camera, every darkroom print, every reproduction of a photograph in a book or newspaper descends from Talbot's idea that the captured image should be a negative from which multiple positives can be made.
The daguerreotype produced a single, unreproducible image. The calotype produced a matrix. That distinction is why Talbot, not Daguerre, is the father of photography as a mass medium, even though Daguerre got there first.
The calotype was the negative-positive counterpart to the daguerreotype, which produced unique direct positive images. The positive prints made from calotype negatives were salted paper prints, a process related to cyanotype and later to silver gelatin printing. The calotype also relates to contact printing, since calotype negatives were printed by direct contact with sensitized paper. For more on the history of photography, read our post on photography as fine art, or explore our guide to portrait photography as art.
The National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh hold the largest collection of Hill and Adamson calotypes, including their remarkable portraits of Newhaven fishermen. The Musee d'Orsay in Paris has calotypes by Le Gray and other French practitioners. The Bodleian Libraries in Oxford hold Talbot's own archive, including original negatives and prints from The Pencil of Nature.
When you look at a calotype print, notice the paper grain. It is not a flaw. It is the texture of the paper negative transferred to the print, and it gives calotypes a quality that one critic described as "photographic drawings." The softness is the point. For more on the broader context of early photography, read our entries on daguerreotype and cyanotype, or explore our post on documentary photography and truth.
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