Early Photography's Late Romanticism

Abstract

Appearing between Mary Shelley's edition of Percy Shelley's Poetical Works (1839) and the posthumous publication of Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850), William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844–46) exemplifies a late Romantic aesthetic characterized in this essay in terms of a retrospective avant garde. The first commercially produced book illustrated with photographs, Talbot's mixed media project folds into its claims for and predictions about the future of art in the age of its technological reproducibility an attention to that which remains obscure or invisible, such as the past or the condition of temporality, or what Walter Benjamin in his “Little History of Photography” will famously call the “optical unconscious.” In its simultaneously retrospective and projective gestures, The Pencil of Nature marks not only a significant turning point in the history of a new medium, but it also more broadly signals the turn into modernity, which is a return, this essay wants to suggest, to a Romanticism as invested in what we cannot see as in what representation makes available to view.