About the Photographer
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
The partnership of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson is unequalled in the history of photography, the collaboration between the two resulting in the earliest substantial body of artistic photographic work. Together, they operated Scotland’s first photographic studio. A portrait painter, Hill joined engineer Adamson in producing more than three thousand calotypes during the four years in which they worked together before the latter’s death in 1848. Best known for their portraits, Hill and Adamson’s photographs of the working men and women from the fishing village Newhaven, located just outside of Edinburgh, are some of the earliest examples of social documentary photography.