History of Photography in Brighton

Instantaneous Photography

In the 1860s, Edward Fox junior, Brighton's leading landscape photographer, was offering to take "Instantaneous Portraits of Animals, Groups etc." in Brighton and the surrounding area. We do not have details of the special apparatus or techniques that Fox employed to take instantaneous photographs in the 1860s, but it was not until the introduction of the highly sensitive gelatin dry plates in the late 1870s, that other Brighton photographers started to use the term "instantaneous".

The greater sensitivity of manufactured dry plates reduced the length of exposure times to a fraction fof a second,. Although the use of gelatin-bromide dry plates did not have a great impact on the work of the photographer producing single portraits in the studio, it did enable professional photographers to extend their photographic repertoire.

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