The Metropolitan Museum doesn’t do things by halves. “Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860,” the first major exhibition to survey British calotypes, fills three sizable galleries and spills into a corridor. The exhibition presents work by 40 artists — some well-known, some littleknown, and several previously unknown — and 118 images. The contemporary British photographer Martin Parr noted ruefully at a recent New York forum that it was hard to understand why British photographers accomplished so little in the 20th century when they had done so well in the medium’s beginnings in the 19th century. “Impressed by Light” illustrates one part of what he meant.

The calotype was William Henry Fox Talbot’s first major improvement on the photographic process he introduced in 1839, the same year the daguerreotype was introduced. The calotype, announced in 1841, captured a negative image on a piece of chemically treated fine writing paper. When sandwiched in a glass holder with another similarly treated paper and exposed to the sun, it produced a positive print. This was an immense advantage, because it meant multiple prints of the same picture could be made with relative ease. The concept was the foundation for virtually all photography until the recent emergence of digital technology, although glass negatives were introduced in the early 1850s and largely replaced paper.

But a committed corps of photographers continued to use paper negatives. Although paper required longer exposures than glass and the results were not as sharp, it did have some technical advantages; the chemically treated paper could be stored for long periods before being exposed, and then stored again after being exposed before being developed. It weighed much less than glass, and it was not subject to breakage. These characteristics made it handy for traveling, especially to places where it was impossible to get photographic supplies, which at that time was most places outside major cities. And the muted, relatively static quality of the prints appealed to a romantic sensibility.

Nearly all the calotypists were well-to-do, and a considerable number of them were friends or relatives of Fox Talbot. They had the wherewithal to buy the necessary equipment, they had leisure time to travel to scenic and exotic locales, and they were sensitive to the beauties of calotype prints. Besides, glass negatives became associated with commercial photography — with taking pictures for a living — so paper had a certain class appeal. But the work in “Impressed by Light” is not the weekend output of mere hobbyists; these are impressive pictures by people of considerable culture and learning, and the visual understanding without which art is impossible. As Mr. Parr knows, British photography started at a very high level.

Benjamin Brecknell Turner’s “Anstey’s Cove, Torquay” (1861) is a dramatic rendering of a section of the southwest coast of England. Massive marble outcroppings rise from the sea, framed as a recession so the nearest seems within reach, the rough texture and fissures in the stone clearly visible. Because of the long exposure required even on this sunlit day, the moving waves are homogenized into a misty carpet, making the solidity of the rock all the more conspicuous. Geology was one of the sciences in which Victorians were especially interested, and the picture could serve as an aid for naturalists, but the image also presents the rocks symbolically as sentinels defending the island kingdom.

Alfred Capel Cure’s “Blasted Tree at Badger” (1856) is one of several pictures of trees. Roger Taylor, the English scholar and curator who organized “Impressed by Light” in cooperation with Malcolm Daniel, the head of the Met’s department of photography, and Sarah Greenough, who has a similar position at the National Gallery of Art, wrote an interesting section in the exhibition’s catalog about the importance of trees — particularly old, long-enduring trees — in English culture; each species has a different resonance. Cure’s oak tree has been split down the middle by lightening. The painfully broken branches reach out beyond the frame of the picture, and the accompanying wall text suggests it may have reminded the photographer of the shattered limbs he saw the previous the year in the Crimean War where he was severely wounded at Sebastopol.

But the ruined oak reminded me of the many calotype images in the exhibition of fallen churches, abbeys, and castles. The snapped branches could be wrecked arches, their silhouettes against the sky like the tracery of Gothic vaulting. Cure himself has several pictures of such moldering structures, “East Window, Tintern Abbey” (1857), “Glastonbury Abbey, Looking West” (1857), and “Hereford Cathedral fromtheNorthwest”(1857–1896). In each of these he maneuvered with sensitivity and technical skill to capture the quality of light, and imbue the shattered architecture with grandeur and pathos.

There is a section called “Echoes of the Grand Tour” with Calvert Richard Jones’s “St. Paul’s Cathedral, Valetta, Malta, with Bell Tower” (1846), George Wilson Bridges’ “Taormina, The Amphitheater” (1846), Jane Martha St. John’s “The Colosseum” (1856), and other pictures from around the Mediterranean and the Continent. Many of these were shown off at the frequent contemporaneous photographic salons, but others, like St. Johns’, were pasted in albums and kept as personal mementoes.”ImpressedbyLight” concludes with a room of pictures from India and the farthest reaches of the Empire, where the sensibilities of Englishmen stretched to capture the beauty of the East.

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The Met last week inaugurated the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, a space designed to showcase the large — and the very large — works being produced today. I have a prejudice against such big pictures, but I’m educable and hope to be surprised.

Until December 31 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).