This is the first exhibition in Britain devoted to salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography. A uniquely British invention, unveiled by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, salt prints spread across the globe, creating a new visual language of the modern moment.

This revolutionary technique transformed subjects from still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images with their own specific aesthetic: a soft, luxurious effect particular to this photographic process.

The few salt prints that survive are seldom seen due to their fragility, and so this exhibition, a collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography, is a singular opportunity to see the rarest and best early photographs of this type in the world.

Salt prints are the very first photographs on paper that still exist today. Made in the first twenty years of photography, they are the results of esoteric knowledge and skill. Individual, sometimes unpredictable, and ultimately magical, the chemical capacity to "fix a shadow" on light sensitive paper, coated in silver salts, was believed to be a kind of alchemy, where nature drew its own picture. 'Salt and silver' brings together over 100 plates drawn from the Wilson Centre for Photography, accompanied by two roundtable discus- sions with curators, academics, historians and collectors from world renowned institutions. Encompassing many of the great works of the period, the publication includes prints by Edouard Baldus, Louis Blanquart-Evrard, Mathew Brady, Charles Clifford, Louis De Clercq, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, Jean-Baptiste Frenet, Charles Hugo, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Calvert Richard Jones, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, Felix Nadar, Charles Negre, Felice Beato, Auguste Salzmann, William Henry Fox Talbot, Felix Teynard and Linnaeus Tripe.