Thanks to the magic of digital photography, these days we all expect to see a picture a nanosecond after it has been taken. Even Polaroid’s one-minute wait for a picture, that seemed miraculous when it was first demonstrated 76 years ago, seems super-slow now. But go back further, to the turn of the 20th century, and you find people amazed to see a picture of themselves within five minutes of exposure. This was the peak of speediness when photographs were usually shot on glass plates, followed sometime later by a lengthy darkroom development process to make a negative, before printing onto sensitised paper to make a positive.
While-You-Wait pictures were offered by photographers to people in the street, at fairs, carnivals, on holiday beaches and occasionally in studios, using specialised cameras. The cameras remained popular into the 1950s and, in some parts of the world, they are still in operation today.
In the early days, While-You-Wait cameras mostly produced ferrotypes, more commonly known as a tintypes. These were made by coating a photographic emulsion onto a very thin sheet of black-backed metal. When developed, the exposed emulsion appeared in a limited range of white/grey tones representing highlights in the image, while the unexposed, or less-exposed areas remained transparent, allowing the black backing to show through and represent the shadow areas. Thus a direct positive image was produced straight from the camera.
The Nodark
Made by the Popular Photograph Company of New York in 1899, this is one of
