Abstract

When, in 1844, William Henry Fox Talbot published his collection of essays and photographs titled The Pencil of Nature and so officially staked his claim to the mantle of inventor of photography, the question of who made photography first hung upon the answer to another question altogether: what exactly makes photography photography? Is it the combination of un distorted images and portability that allowed the prism-based camera lucida to displace the lens-cast shadows of the darkened room that was the camera obscura? Louis Daguerre's technique for fixing images on metal plates? For Talbot, the plausibility of his claim to priority rested, I want to suggest, on his locating his invention of a technology for both fixing images and render ing them endlessly reproducible within a history other than the one we might retrospectively assume, a history other than that connecting one light casting technology to the next.1 To illuminate this alternative history, which will eventually lead us to John Stuart Mill, I want to begin by considering a reflection by Talbot. On an early October day in 1833, by the shores of Lake Como, the erstwhile inventor, whose photographic experimentations drew on his training as a mathematician, chemist, and linguist, suddenly halted in frustration his ef forts to take sketches by using William Hyde Wollaston's camera lucida. When the eye was removed from the prism—in which all looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold, Talbot recalls in his essay A Brief Historical of the Invention of the Art.2 In 1839, six years after the failure of the Lake Como sketches set him casting about for an alternative method for storing images of light, he announced the success of his experiments before the Roy al Society, having hit upon a mixture of silver and iodine that produced negative images that could be printed repeatedly before they faded. By the time he finally published this reflection A Brief Historical Sketch along with a quarto of his own prints as The Pencil of Nature in 1844, Talbot no

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