| Names: | | | Dates: | 1809 - 1893 | | Active: | UK |
Preparing biographies
A banker’s clerk by trade but an amateur watercolorist by passion, Fitt helped found the Norwich Photographic Society in 1854. He exhibited waxed-paper photographs that the Norwich Chronicle considered “very sharp and spirited, and the most successful attempts by that process that have been made in this city.” In 1855 Fitt became a commercial photographer in Norwich, not only promoting “Mr. Fitt’s Collodion” but also providing instructions in the waxed-paper process. In November of that year he visited the Liverpool Photographic Society and passed around prints made from his waxed-paper negatives, moving the chairman to observe in the society’s journal of November 10 that the photographers of Norwich “were no laggards in the practical application of the art.” At a later meeting, as reported on December 8, Fitt’s waxed-paper negatives were praised as having “produced some of the most pleasing and effective pictures ever exhibited to the Society.” The prints Fitt entered in the 1856 exhibition of the Edinburgh Photographic Society were drawn from negatives made in Norfolk, but the ones he displayed at the Norwich Photographic Society’s exhibition that year began to reflect the photographer’s growing interest in Edinburgh subjects. In reviewing these, the Norfolk News lauded Fitt, to “whose instruction and example the society was much indebted in its infancy, and whose skill in all the processes is universally acknowledged.”
Roger Taylor & Larry J. Schaaf Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 4 Nov 2012.
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