Snap-Shots by Samuel Butler Esq. (1892-93)

(IX/Albums/2/38-39)

This is the second of five albums in the Butler Collection, which together contain about 1700 prints and document Butler’s European travels, his views of street life, and his personal take on architecture and art. Here, characteristically, images of the holy sites at Crea and Varallo are juxtaposed with snapshots of ordinary people, and a comical arrangement of animals that evidently caught Butler’s eye.

Butler proved a prolific and highly skilled amateur photographer from the late 1880s onwards, when glass ‘dry plates’ had just replaced collodian ‘wet plates’ as a staple piece of photographic equipment. This enabled photographers to work more freely out of doors, and to travel with their negatives before developing them.

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