Rural Group in Woods, with Ladder, France

The ladder suggests that this might be a group of fruit pickers, harvesting produce destined for urban markets. In his brief, sixteen-year career in photography, the Englishman Maxwell-Lyte was heralded as an innovator. After studying chemical engineering at Cambridge, he spent several decades in France working as a photographer. Among other advancements, he introduced the use of iodide in collodion emulsion for better color rendering and developed the honey process, through which the wet collodion plate stayed workable for several days.