What methods were used to duplicate photographs before the 1880's?

Question

I'm trying to figure out how easy or difficult it was to duplicate photographs prior to George Eastman's roll film? How labor intensive was the process?

Answer 1

The earliest photos were Daguerreotypes, which had no negatives at all. The only way to make copies was to use a camera with multiple lenses, thereby taking the same picture more than once at the same time. Various kinds of glass negatives were invented by the mid-1850s. With wet plates, the photographer had to carry his darkroom with him, and the camera back had to be as large as the negative. A wet plate was prepared (coated with chemicals in an emulsion) in the darkroom, exposed while still damp, and developed on the spot. The photographers who made stunning photos of the roadless natural areas of the American West worked under conditions of extreme inconvenience, to say the least.

Dry plates came along later, offering the convenience of being able to carry a few prepared plates with you and not having to develop them until you got back to your darkroom. But the plates were still glass - heavy and fragile. Either wet or dry plates could be used to make as many copies as the photographer wanted to make, but usually they were contact prints - I think enlargers only came to be used at about the same time as roll film, but I'm not sure about that. Even in the early days of roll film, though, contact prints (print the same size as the negative) were the norm.

Answer 2

There were *some* glass-plate negatives then -- in that case, a duplicate print could be made as easily as the first one, by contact printing the glass plate negative.
More often, if a copy was desired a photographer would take a photograph of the original print or positive plate, and that would be the copy. Like putting the print or plate in a copy machine today, except it was a wet process :)
There are, of course, "generational" losses in resolution and detail each time a copy is made this way.