The piano maker and music publisher John Muir Wood was a prolific amateur photographer who created more than 900 photographs, including a small group of self-portraits, of which this is one. Interestingly, he has recorded himself holding a photographic printing frame – a device used in the mid-nineteenth century to make positive prints from paper negatives. This process of negative-positive printing was known as the calotype and was first introduced by the English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841.

Wood’s pursuit of the new medium was purely one of pleasure and was not indicative of any commercial operation, so his decision to portray himself with this piece of apparatus is of particular note. Although a new medium, photography typically followed the conventions of portraiture whereby the subject was often shown with attributes associated with a chosen profession or character. In Wood’s case, one might have assumed that his portrait would allude to his musical background and training, yet he has chosen to represent himself with a printing frame, aligning himself with photography and, in particular, the printing process. In fact, Wood was interested in experimenting with the chemistry involved in making prints and often included different metals such as copper, tin, gold and uranium in order to produce photographs with varying tonalities and permanency.

While photography was Wood’s passion, music was his business. Born into a family of Edinburgh piano makers and music publishers, Wood travelled to Paris and Vienna in 1826 to study the piano before returning to Scotland as a music teacher in 1828. He, along with his brother George, continued the family business under the name Wood & Co., but when he later relocated to Glasgow he then established John Muir Wood & Co. The Glasgow operation was successful with Wood also arranging classical concerts in the city. In 1848 he was responsible for organising and hosting the Polish composer and piano virtuoso Frédéric Chopin on his tour of Scotland. Surprisingly, there are no known photographic portraits of Chopin by Wood, but there are several portraits of Dr Jasper MacAldin, who likely inspired Wood’s photographic interest.

MacAldin was an eye surgeon based in Belfast, who shared his knowledge of optics and chemistry with Wood and is responsible for instructing the piano maker in photography. Wood brought his camera to Ireland to record his friend. In these early years of photography the various equipment and materials required were not necessarily as compact as today’s technology. Nevertheless, Wood travelled far and wide with his camera, visiting and recording towns as far away as Belgium and Germany. The majority of his images are of Scotland however, with an extensive series of views made on his journeys across his homeland, often to remote locations to record the landscape and its people.  

This text was first published in Facing the World: Self Portraits From Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (2016)