The First Hertfordshire Photographers

Photographers

David Simkin, who runs the Sussex Photohistory web site kindly drew my attention to the fact that P & C Monson had been taking pictures in Hertford as early as 1853. I decided to follow this up by using the British Newspaper Archive, via FindMyPast, to see if I could reconstruct the early history of commercial photography in Hertfordshire, using references in the Herts Mercury and  the Hertfordshire Guardian, both of which have been digitised for the relevant period.

Newspapers

It turns out that a photographer called Mr Williams had been at the Bull Inn, Hertford, in 1851. The first local photographist was a daguerreotypist called H F Cox in Fore Street in 1856 while Hart & Craddock were operating from North Crescent (later Arthur Elsden) in 1857. Charles Forscutt was operating at the Old Cross by 1859 and a plumber called John Charles Garrood started taking photographs in Ware Road, Hertford, in 1864.

More Information

I have also added many early photographic adverts to the Arthur Elsden page.

Take care of your Daguerreotypes

The very earliest photographs in your family archives could be Daguerrotypes - which are firmly mounted in a glass photo frame to protect them.  The photograph is on the surface of a silver plate, with the light areas being silver/mercury crystals (which reflect the light and appear white) and plain silver (which appears dark). There is no negative - so each one is a "one-off" and they can be irreparably damaged if not looked after carefully. After some deteriorated when they were shown to the public in a museum, some detailed research was carried out to find out why they were so sensitive.

If you own such precious pictures from about 1850 you may be interested in an article "The Case of the  Disappearing Daguerrotypes" in this month's Scientific American. There is also a slide show of what can go wrong on the Scientific American web site.