Victorian Wood Street was home to several photographic studios where the people of Wakefield could pay to have their portraits taken professionally.

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New techniques and discoveries had made photography accessible to more people. Having your photo to keep and display in your home was no longer the reserve of the rich.

1839 is often seen as the birth year of commercial photography.

 

The new daguerreotype process produced images through the reaction of light on chemicals on a silver copper plate. The following year William Fox Talbot’s accidental discovery of the paper negative enhanced the process.

The first studio opened in 1841 and soon spread across Europe and America.

These are some of the early portraits taken in Wakefield at studios like Warner Gothard and Mr Wilson’s. The subjects would have had to sit completely still for the duration of the exposure, which could have been up to 15 minutes.

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At Wakefield One, you can currently see a studio camera used by Mansfield's photographers at Gillygate in Pontefract during the 1890's.

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