John P. Nicholas and James Perratt Nicholas were the founders of the earliest studio in Madras (Chennai) from 1857 to 1905. Their sister Emma married a clock-maker and photographer called John Parting, who left England for Ceylon to set up a daguerreotype studio. John and James Perratt Nicholas followed them, but John P. Nicholas went on to Madras where he opened a photographic studio in 1857. James Perratt Nicholas came from Colombo in 1858 to join his brother and they established the firm Nicholas Brothers.
In the 1850s and 60s, Madras was an important centre for arts and it was rapidly developing the art of photography. In 1850 surgeon in the East India Company’s Madras Army Dr Alexander Hunter set up India’s first arts institution, the Madras School of Industrial Art and in 1857 he established Madras Photographic Society, one of the earliest photographic societies in the world. John Nicholas served as one of the committee member and has contributed photographs to the Madras Photographic Society Exhibitions.
By 1865, John P. Nicholas and James Perratt Nicholas had three studios in Madras Ootacamund and in England. The England studio was established and managed by James Perratt and his wife Ellen Isabella Higginbotham.
In 1868, James Perratt Nicholas partnered with Herman Ralph Curths, a photographer but more importantly an expert colourist of monochrome photographs, to create a firm Nicholas and Curths. In 1873, when Herman Ralph Curths left, the firm name was changed and relaunched as Nicholas and Company.
James Perratt Nicholas opened a studio in Ootacamund and appointed A.T.W. Penn, a young photographer whom he met in London to look after the studio. In 1875 A.T.W. Penn acquired the Ootacamund branch of Nicholas and started to run the studio in his name. During the same time, John P. Nicholas moved Nicholas & Co. out of Madras to the west coast, now known as Kerala. After the death of James Perratt Nicholas in 1895, the studio was managed by his brother-in-law George Higginbotham until 1905.
At a meeting of the Madras Photographic Society in 1858, John P. Nicholas explained and demonstrated his improvised wet plate Collodion glass plate using a special iodising mixture for Collodion suited to the climate of Madras.
This was Fothergill process, used for the formation of a photographic dry plate.
The advantage of the wet Collodion process was being more sensitive to light than the Calotype process and it reduced the exposure times drastically. The process was producing a great level of detail, clarity and consistent results. The major disadvantage was that wet plates had to be prepared, exposed and processed immediately, thus photography in the field usually required a cart or a van to transport the bulky equipment, chemicals and water. The intense heat and humidity in India caused the collodion to crack up and chemicals dried far quicker than normal.
For the photographers in that period, apart from short exposures and consistent results pre-prepared plates, convenience and mobility were also an important component.
Although all the pioneers experimented with methods of depositing silver salts in a dry medium onto glass plates, the first widely practised dry plate process was announced in France in 1847 by Niepce de Saint-Victor. Albumen was used as the binding agent to hold the sensitised silver salts to a glass plate. Albumen plates produced high-quality negatives and were widely used by landscape photographers throughout Europe. However, exposure times were long.
During the 1850s and 1860s, several dry Collodion processes were proposed.
More useful was the Collodio-Albumen process published in 1855 by the French scientist, J.M.Taupenot. The process involved washing wet Collodion plates in a silver nitrate bath. After coating with a protective layer of Albumen, the dried plates could be stored. The dried plate was given another silver nitrate coating a few hours before taking photographs. Taupenot’s process formed the basis of several similar processes.
One such process was Fothergill process it was first described by Mr Thomas Fothergill in The Times newspaper early in 1858. The method was to coat a glass plate with Collodion containing dissolved nitrate of silver, and pour over the coated plate a solution of Albumen containing Sal-ammoniac (NH4C1) dissolved in it, and then allow the plate to dry. It was one of the earliest and best of the dry plate methods but is now entirely superseded by the Gelatino-Bromide process.
John P. Nicholas and James Perratt Nicholas photographs are found in collections like Cambridge University: RCS Collection, NYPL: Photography Collection, Sarmaya, India and many more museums around the world.
Reference
A history of photography (1887), by W. Jerome Harrison
Photography: Its History, Processes, Apparatus, and Materials: Comprising Working Details of All the More Important Methods, By Alfred Brothers
The Nicholas Brothers & A. T. W. Penn: Photographers of South India 1855 – 1885 Hardcover – 27 October 2014, by Christopher Penn
Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0009.208/–south-india-addresses-the-world-postcards-circulation?rgn=main;view=fulltext
http://www.bmarchives.org/
