| Dates: | 1813 - 1857, 2 May | | Born: | Great Britain, Hertfordshire, Bishop's Stortford | | Died: | Great Britain, London | | Active: | Great Briain |
In March 1851 he published his invention of the wet collodion process that became the dominant method used until the 1870s. Rather than patent the process, he made a gift of it to the nation and died in impecunious circumstances.Preparing biographies
A sculptor by profession and possessed of an active imagination on practical matters, Archer is best known for his invention of the wet-collodion negative on glass, the very process that displaced the paper negative (especially quickly in the commercial world). Archer’s interest in photography dated back to its earliest days. He was a daguerreotypist and invented an economical water-filled lens. This, like most of his ventures, proved unsuccessful commercially. One of Archer’s trades in the 1840s was as a Talbotype portraitist. In 1875 the British Journal of Photography described such works as “portraits possessing great vigour and undoubted merit, although devoid of delicacy.” While his daguerreotypes “fulfilled the highest requirements of sharpness and delicacy,” Archer was keenly aware of the advantage of Talbot’s negatives, from which multiple prints could be obtained. Perhaps for his portrait work, or perhaps to achieve smooth and full-toned prints of his sculptures, Archer worked to combine the merits of the two processes and succeeded with glass negatives using collodion. He published the wet-collodion method freely, continuing to work as a photographer and inventor. Archer died in great poverty not long afterward. In a belated effort spearheaded by M. Digby Wyatt, architect and secretary to the executive committee of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and widely supported by a grateful photographic community, a subscription was raised to support his widow and children.
Roger Taylor & Larry J. Schaaf Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 4 Nov 2012.
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