On 31st March photographic historians joined Writers to the Signet and their guests at a private event to mark the conservation and preservation of an extraordinary Scottish photographic pioneer: Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill’s 1846 Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews. Since its re-emergence as part of a re-cataloguing project in October, the volume has been in the care of WS Society conservator Jo Hockey, who has taken it through a programme of careful cleaning, stabilisation, interleaving and rehousing which has set it up for its next 180 years of life. The event combined a drinks reception with an exhibition drawn from the Signet Library’s collections of historic photography, and guests also had the option of attending a short talk about the volume. Hill and Adamson – and their assistant, Jessie Mann (now acknowledged as the world’s first female photographer) worked from a studio on Calton Hill in the mid-1840s and at a time when photography was supposedly in its infancy produced a body of work that carries charisma, presence, artistic achievement and documentary power undiminished into the present day. The album is one of six known complete copies, the only one to carry contemporary provenance and to reside in Edinburgh. It retains its original binding and the full roster of 25 calotypes, and is most likely to have been bought directly from David Octavius Hill in 1849 by the then Librarian to the Signet, historian and bibliographer David Laing, who had himself been a sitter for Hill and Adamson.
