Salt and Silver, published by MACK in 2015, centres on the earliest surviving photographs on paper. Salt prints were made during photography’s first twenty years, when fixing a shadow on paper coated in silver salts required esoteric knowledge and uncommon skill. The process could be unpredictable and even magical: it was understood as a kind of alchemy in which nature seemed to draw its own picture. That mix of technical precarity and pictorial authority gives these objects a distinct place in photographic history.

The book gathers more than one hundred plates drawn from the Wilson Centre for Photography. Its examples include prints by Edouard Baldus, Mathew Brady, Roger Fenton, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Gustave Le Gray, Charles Marville, Felix Nadar, Felice Beato, William Henry Fox Talbot and Linnaeus Tripe, among others. Together they show how rapidly paper photography became a medium for architecture, landscape, portrait, travel and reportage.

Salt and Silver also includes two roundtable discussions, with curators, academics, historians and collectors from institutions including Tate, the V&A, De Montfort University, Tate Britain, the Wilson Centre for Photography, Hans P. Kraus Jr Inc, the Mediatheque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, and the National Gallery of Canada. These conversations make the book a forum for interpretation, not merely a catalogue of early prints.

For collectors, the appeal is this combination: a substantial gathering of salt prints from a major photographic collection, paired with informed discussion of the medium’s first decades. It offers a concentrated way to study the period’s material and aesthetic questions—paper, chemistry, authorship, reproducibility, and the strange authority of the earliest photographic image. Published in 2015, it remains a considered reference on a foundational episode in photography.