Cottage Door

Taken by the painter David Octavius Hill and the calotypist Robert Adamson in the first year of their brief but prolific partnership, "Cottage Door" is among the first of some 130 images the two would make that show the inhabitants of Newhaven and other small but vital fishing villages near Edinburgh. The project, entitled "The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth," constitutes the first sustained use of photographs for a social documentary project.
While the fishermen's work at sea was largely beyond the ken of the camera, the women's labor--baiting lines, unloading and cleaning the catch, hauling loaded willow baskets up the hill to Edinburgh, and hawking their fish--was highly accessible, and extensively documented by Hill and Adamson. The calotype, with its rough texture and strong contrasts of light and shadow, was the perfect medium to translate into graphic terms the patterning of the traditional striped aprons of the fishwives, their woolen petticoats, the woven baskets, and the line of fish hung out to dry in the sun.
Hill and Adamson's project seems intended to present Newhaven, in the age of the Industrial Revolution and its attendant social problems, as an exemplar of village life--a community bound by tradition, mutual support, honest labor, and continuity of generations.