| Names: | | | Dates: | 1809 - 1870 | | Born: | Great Britain | | Active: | Scotland |
Scottish photographer and brother of Robert Adamson who worked with David Octavius Hill.Preparing biographies
Dr. Adamson received his education in his hometown of St. Andrews, continued his medical education in Edinburgh, and became a physician in 1829. Following additional medical training in Paris he was a ship’s surgeon in the China seas before returning to St. Andrews to establish a medical practice. When Sir David Brewster founded the St. Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society in 1838, Adamson became not only a member but also the curator of its museum. It was through Brewster’s close friendship with Talbot that photography flourished in St. Andrews during the early 1840s. Adamson, Hugh Lyon Playfair, and Thomas Rodger were some of the chief advocates for the new art. Using the calotype process exclusively, Adamson took studies of the landscape, topography, and notable worthies of St. Andrews, and is credited with having taken the first calotype portrait in Scotland, sometime during the early months of 1842. He is most remembered for introducing his younger brother Robert Adamson to photography, which would lead to the remarkable partnership of Hill & Adamson. John Adamson may have been the author of the photographs, dating from 1842 to 1845, which document his efforts to clean up the typhoid-ridden Fishergate area of St. Andrews. In the 1854 exhibition of the Royal Infirmary Fund in nearby Dundee, Adamson showed a collodion portrait. He expanded his collodion work for the 1855 exhibition of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, displaying both scientific and artistic work, but, significantly, also displaying calotypes he had made in 1842. He once again showed calotype portraits, apparently freshly made, in the 1856 exhibition of the Photographic Society of Scotland in Edinburgh. Even as photography matured as an art, his antityphoid efforts and his medical practice increasingly demanded Adamson’s time. It was not until 1864 that he once again contributed some collodion photographs to the Photographic Society of Scotland exhibition.
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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