Salt of the Earth

Santa Barbara Museum of Art is accentuating the negative with its latest exhibition Salt & Silver.

The show, featuring more than 100 seldom-displayed salt prints from the Wilson Centre for Photography in London, provides a rare chance to experience some of the earliest photographs ever made by many of the most important and groundbreaking figures in the history of the photographic medium.

It surveys the first two decades of photography’s evolution through the salted paper print process, unveiled in 1839 by the English scientist and scholar William Henry Fox Talbot. It was efficient, portable, and versatile, traits that allowed the practice of photography across the globe from the early 1840s onward.

Salt & Silver features the work of more than 40 practitioners, with one of the highlights including Talbot’s photo of Nelson’s column under construction in Trafalgar Square in 1844.

Lens lovers turning out for the show, which runs through December 8, included Hannah-Beth Jackson, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall, Penny Jenkins, Anne Luther, Bob Johnson and Lisa Reich, Nancy Schlosser, Peggy Wiley and Wilson Quarre, and Michael and Penny Arntz.