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Whipple, John, photographer.

Harvard College Class of 1854 [cover title.]

Cambridge, Mass., 1854. 4to, full original black morocco, sympathetically renewed spine, raised bands with gilt rules, gilt border and title to upper cover, a.e.g., marbled endpapers. 104 salt prints, ranging from 3.625” x 2.875” to 3.25” x 4.25, 4 mounted engravings (apparently supplementary) on 97 leaves, additional blank leaves including two with student’s names in pencil but no corresponding photograph (and no sign that they were ever present); most portraits signed in ink by the subject, all with early pencil identifications as well. CONDITION: Very good, tonality generally strong, adhesive stains to first engraving and the leaf it is mounted on, leaves rippled, as usual.

The first photographically-illustrated Harvard class album to include outdoor views, and an important example of early American paper photography.

Photographs were first used to illustrate Harvard class albums beginning with the class of 1852. Boston photographer John Whipple, the official Harvard class photographer from 1852 to 1859, made daguerreotypes of each member of the class of 1852, then created negatives of each, from which he created copy salt prints for inclusion in class albums. The following year (and every year thereafter until 1859) Whipple and his partner James Wallace Black made salt prints (or ‘crystalotypes,’ as he termed the process he developed) from glass plate negatives taken directly from the students. In 1854, Whipple branched out, taking photographs of Harvard College buildings, eight of which are included in the album offered here (the number of photos included in class albums varies according to the choices made by each student). These are some of the earliest known paper photographs of the Harvard Campus, and indeed, of any college campus in the country.

This album consists of ninety-seven student portraits, arranged alphabetically by surname, and the eight outdoor views. The portraits, as is often the case with 1850s class albums, are especially beguiling, capturing the students in the promise of their youth and a wonderful variety of visage. The subjects of the outdoor views are Massachusetts Hall; Harvard Hall; Hollis Hall; Morris, Stoughton, and Holworthy Halls in one image; University Hall; Dane Hall; and west and south-east views of the library, known as Gore Hall. Together here for the first time in a class album the students and buildings of one of the most consequential and revered colleges in the nation appear before the camera.

John Adams Whipple (1822–1891) was born in Grafton, Massachusetts to Jonathan and Melinda (Grout) Whipple. An important innovator among the first generation of photographers, he made his first daguerreotype in 1840 at the age of eighteen, “using a sun-glass for a lens, a candle box for a camera, and the handle of a silver spoon as a substitute for a plate.” Whipple was a keen student of chemistry from his youth and following the introduction of the daguerreotype process in the United States, was the first person to manufacture the necessary chemicals. He opened a daguerrean studio in Boston in the 1840s, becoming well known for the high quality of his daguerreotypes and pushing the boundaries of photography. Between 1847 and 1852 Whipple collaborated with Harvard astronomer William Cranch Bond using the College’s refractor telescope (the largest in the world at the time) to make a series of extraordinary daguerreotypes of the moon, for which Whipple was awarded a prize at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, as well as the first photograph of a star. Among the numerous innovations Whipple made was an improved method of making salt prints, which had previously suffered from a lack of definition, by using albumen on a glass plate to create a negative, calling such photograph ‘crystalotypes,’ for their higher degree of clarity.

A rare and compelling example of early paper photography by an important photographic pioneer and innovator.

REFERENCES: Banta, Melissa and Bulat, Elena (2015) "Salted Paper Prints and The Harvard Class Albums," Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies. Vol. 2 , Article 4; Pierce, Sally. Whipple and Black: Commercial Photographers in Boston. (Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, 1987); John Adams Whipple at americanart.si.edu.

Item #7889

Price: $9,500.00