Caroline Douglas’s research project focuses on a series of calotype salt prints made by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in Edinburgh in the late nineteenth century. Hill and Adamson’s series of portraits of Newhaven fishwives are one of the world’s earliest examples of photographic portraiture. Through her research and her own photographic practice, Caroline makes an exciting discovery after uncovering a series of outtakes from the calotype portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Johnstone Hall.
This project was supported by an Andrew Wyld Research Support Grant.
Retouching The Archive: Encountering the Paper Calotype
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Caroline Douglas is the recipient of the 2020 Andrew Wyld Research Support Grant. She is an artist undertaking her practice-based PhD project at the Royal College of Art. Her project Retouching The Archive: Gender and Class in Early Photography in Scotland looks at the gendering of photography since its invention. Driven by the archival, haptic and photographic, she focusses on the less dominant narratives of early Scottish photography. She is supported by technē - the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Caroline is also part of the steering committee for the RCA School of Art and Humanities Research Network ‘Speaking of Her’ and on the Advisory Board for the RSE Network ‘Women Make Cities’. This year she undertook two Doctoral Training Partnership placements, one at the V&A Museum as a Cataloguer (Photographs) and the other as resident artist at Collective, Edinburgh (2021).