Edinburgh Calotype Club

The Edinburgh Calotype Club (1843 – c.1850s) of Scotland was the first photographic club in the world. Its members consisted of pioneering photographers primarily from Edinburgh and St Andrews. The efforts of the Club's members resulted in the production of two of the world's earliest assembled photographic albums, consisting of more than 300 images.

The group was formed after the introduction of calotype photography to Edinburgh gentlemen by David Brewster, then Principal of St Andrews University, and also a close friend of the inventor of the calotype process, Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot sent Brewster examples of his work well before publishing on his findings, and it was Brewster who suggested that Talbot only patent his invention in England, and not Scotland, which eventually allowed for the club's formation.

Talbot sent Brewster examples of his calotype photography, but Brewster had to turn to a colleague at St Andrews, the Professor of Chemistry Dr John Adamson, in order to discover how to reproduce his friend's process. Although John Adamson was the first person in Scotland to use calotype photography, it was his brother, Robert, who was to take up photography as a passion and a profession, eventually establishing the country's first photographic studio, Hill & Adamson, with painter and pioneering photographer David Octavius Hill.

A visit from James Montgomery, who was studying in Edinburgh to enter the Faculty of Advocates, and a group of friends who were interested in Brewster's and John Adamson's reproduction of the calotype process, allegedly led to the formation of the Edinburgh Calotype Club itself.

The membership of the Club was composed of professional gentlemen from a variety of backgrounds - including clerics, academics and physicians - in both Edinburgh and St Andrews. Meetings of the club are described as being generally informal, and retrospective on the Club from an 1874 edition of The British Journal of Photography states that had "neither laws, office-bearers, or formalities of any kind":

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