In praise of negatives, the origins of paper photography in Italy 1846-1862 is an exhibition born from the close cultural collaboration between Florence and Paris in the field of photography and located at the Alinari National Museum of Photography in Piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Used in the 20^th century by professional photographers, amateurs and artists, paper negatives allowed the rising art of photography to blend perfectly with the world of art. During the 1940s, paper negatives became an innovative and fascinating instrument and launched the “era of reproducibility”, introducing a new visual culture.

The exhibition, supported by Paris Musées and the Fratelli Alinari Foundation, presents more than 110 original works from notable public and private collections that, for the first time, illustrate and document a relatively little known period of the history of photography, exploring the main genres developed by photographers with the calotype technique, focussing on architecture and landscape photography, as well as photographs of works of art and paintings.
 
The creation of paper negatives was an important chapter in the world of photography, after the first experiments that led to the creation of unique photographic images – such as daguerreotypes, photogenic drawings or Hippolyte Bayard’s “direct positive” prints.

This was until William Henry Fox Talbot discovered the first negative-positive process, a direct forerunner of modern photography, which generated several positive images from one paper negative.

In Talbot’s process, the photographer was directly involved in the various steps of the procedure, which required a knowledge of chemistry and ongoing technical experimentation, which gave images an almost magical allure, rather than a mechanical one.

Owing to the opacity and granularity of the paper, used as a support for imprinting negatives and printing, the calotype technique generated less accurate images compared to daguerreotypes. However, because of its more aerial and painting-like rendering it was more suitable to restore the “...the roughness and immense variety of natural tones...”, it was the technique of choice of artists and photographers for their works.

With changes and improvements to the technique, paper negatives were then used especially by travel photographers, also due to the considerable benefit of lighter materials and possibility of preparing them months in advance before using them.

Real incunables of the history of photography, paper negatives and the salted paper prints they generated are rare and invaluable items that mark an extremely important technical milestone and illustrate the extremely delicate relationship established between art and photography since photography was first created,

The exhibition is composed of four parts and offers an exhaustive tribute to the works produced in Italy by great artists from Italy itself, such as Giacomo Caneva, Domenico Bresolin, Stefano Lecchi, Vero Veraci, the UK, such as John Brampton Philpot, George Wilson Bridges, Calvert Jones and James Graham, France, with Eugène Piot, Frédéric Flachéron, Alfed-Nicolas Normand, Édouard Delessert, Gustave de Beaucourps and many more. 
 
From September 9^th to October  14^th

MNAF, piazza Santa Maria Novella 14 AR

Opening hours: Monday and Thursday 3pm – 7pm, Tuesday 10am – 3pm, Friday/Saturday/Sunday 10am – 7pm, closed on Wednesdays.
Tickets: € 9 Concessions € 7.50; Reduced tickets € 6,00; Students € 4. Free entry for children under 6.