Robert Jefferson Bingham

Robert Jefferson Bingham (bapt. 7 March 1824 – 21 February 1870) was an English pioneer photographer, mainly active in France, making portraits and reproductions of paintings. He is one of the first photographers to use and write about the collodion process, which he claimed to have invented.

Early life and family Bingham was born in Billesdon, Leicestershire, England, where he was baptised in March 1824. His parents were John Cowener Bingham and his wife, Martha.

In 1853, at the British Embassy in Paris, he married Emma Reeve, daughter of surgeon John Reed of Kinver, Staffordshire. She died 15 years later at their home on rue de La Rochefoucauld in Paris.

Career Bingham first started working as a chemist at the London Institution.

He showed 19 photographs at The Great Exhibition of 1851, and was commissioned, as a result of the influence of Henry Cole, a member of the Executive Committee, to print the glass plate negatives by Claude-Marie Ferrier of prize winning exhibits as illustrations for the photographically-illustrated presentation copies of the Report by the Juries. Bingham set up a photographic printing establishment in Versailles in order to undertake this contract. Some of the photographs and others by Bingham were shown in 1852 at the exhibition Recent Specimens of Photography held at the Society of Arts, London, the first exhibition to focus solely on photography. Bingham moved to Paris to work there as a photographer, at first together with the American Warren T. Thompson until Thompson returned to England in 1856. Bingham not only worked at the 1855 Exposition, but also displayed his own life-size portraits, for which he won a Medal First Class. Due to a lack of commercial success, however, he soon stopped producing these huge photographs and stuck to more standard formats. It was followed over the next few years by similar works about other artists, including one in 1860 on Ary Scheffer and another one with photographs of the major works of the 1860 Salon. Smaller works with only a handful of photographs were produced for particular collections and for the Napoleon Museum in Amiens. making him the inventor of the process.

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