Like
many other gentleman-amateur photographers in mid-19th-century Britain—a period
of industrialization and the social and political changes that came with
it—Henry White most frequently turned his camera on serene passages of the
English landscape or scenes that spoke of a time-honored way of life. The mill
shown here was likely the old Ham Haw Mill that sat between the River Wey and
the adjacent canal near their confluence with the Thames about twenty miles
southeast of London. Over time, the water-powered mill, first built in the late
17th century, was used for the production of paper, then flour, brass and iron
work, and eventually oilseed crushing.

In this
photograph, the crystal-clear atmosphere and exceedingly fine detail—every
brick, every leaf is visible—were made possible by White’s use of a new process
introduced in the early 1850s: a negative of glass rather than paper. Glass
negatives combined the best attributes of the first two photographic
processes—the clarity of the daguerreotype and reproducibility of Talbot’s
negative-positive process—and would become the dominant photographic process
for the next few decades.