National Science And Media Museum Reveals The Story Of Photography Through Historic Images Of Pets

Ahead of National Love Your Pet Day on 20 February, the National Science and Media Museum reveal how photography and photographic processes have changed over time through archive images of beloved animal companions.

Mr Burbank’s favourite cat

This might look like a drawing, but it is in fact a photographic print. In the mid-1830s William Henry Fox Talbot, made major breakthroughs in photographic experiments, and successfully printed a ‘positive’ print from one negative. This revolutionary technique established the basic principle of photography as a negative/positive process and immortalised him as the father of the photograph.

This cute kitty is believed to be a copy of a ‘favourite cat’ by J.M. Burbank, an artist who exhibited animal photos during the 1830s in Britain.

Miss Mary Mitford’s dog
In the 1840s, Talbot’s new photographic process was made available to the public at selected studios. In 1847, celebrity author Mary Mitford visited one of these studios to sit for a portrait, and brought along her dog for the occasion, insisting that her pet sit for their own picture. Much to everyone’s surprise, the dog sat perfectly still for four minutes as if he were dead.

The ‘dog’uerrotype’

Calotypes weren’t the only photographic format on the market in the 1840s. In fact, much to Talbot’s dismay, the invention of photography in France was announced to the world by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in 1839. Daguerre developed a new way of taking pictures, using a polished silvered plate and a camera. This produced a single image printed directly onto a plate, with astonishing clarity, named the daguerreotype.

Daguerreotype studios offered people the opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind keepsake of their loved ones. However, in the museum’s ‘dog-uerrotype’ you can see that the pet wasn’t keen on sitting still for their portrait, and the dog’s movement has caused the blurred lines around his face in the image.

The Old Batchelor

Introduced in the 1860s, the cabinet card became the next big photographic trend. Much like its smaller companion the carte-de-visite, cabinet cards were a highly social form of media, designed to be shared by family and friends.

The distinctive brown hue of the cabinet card shows that it was produced using the albumen process – a way of printing photographs using a thin sheet of paper and egg white. Albumen prints produce a sharp and rich image, perfect for capturing senior kitties as handsome as this one.




To learn more about the history of photography, visit: https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/pet-photography/