David Octavius Hill at the Gate of Rock House

In four and a half years and nearly three thousand images, the Scottish team of Hill and Adamson pioneered the aesthetic terrain of photography, creating the earliest substantial body of self-consciously artistic work in the new medium. Hill was a locally prominent painter in Edinburgh with a keen sense of composition and an affable manner that put his sitters at ease; Adamson, twenty years his junior, brought to the partnership an extraordinary mastery of the negative-positive photographic process invented just a few years earlier by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot. Although Hill and Adamson’s portraits lacked the extraordinary precision of contemporaneous daguerreotypes, they were much admired for the warm tones and Rembrandtesque massing of light and shadow that were characteristics of Talbot’s process. Hill, handsome and naturally relaxed in front of the camera, here stands at the entrance to Adamson’s studio, Rock House.