The I of the Photographer: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

We will now turn to what Liliane Louvel calls “photography-in-text,” “a hybrid process that gives rise to a hybrid textual genre” (32). She claims that “although numerous studies have been devoted to the relations between painting and literature, in accordance with the ut picture poesis tradition, surprisingly few have focused on the photography/text relationship” (32), but it turns out that many seminal studies have in fact “focused on the photography/text relationship.” In Photography and Literature, François Brunet revisits the birth of photography through the prism of its cultural status, and more particularly of the cultural status of those who were its first practitioners. He states that William Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography’s pioneers, was also the one “who inaugurated, most concretely and brilliantly, photography’s alliance with the book and thereby the figure of the photographer as author” (36). This alliance was sealed with the serial publication of The Pencil of Nature between 1844 and 1846 which remains an artistic touchstone, since, at the time and even later in the nineteenth century, “the main avenues of photographic book publishing […] were scientific, especially anthropological, geographical, or antiquarian, and (more so after 1870) promotional or commercial; they were not artistic, literary, or ‘photographic’ in the reflexive sense so skillfully displayed by the The Pencil of Nature” (46). It was as well the first publication to suggest “the potential power of combined images and words” (Rabb: xxxvi). Talbot was a precursor, in the sense that one would have to wait until the “1900–1920 period” to see other “individual photographers take at least partial responsibility for big projects, whether ‘documentary’ or ‘artistic’, that resulted in large scale publications” (Brunet: 54). However, as essential as the publication of The Pencil of Nature was, the only reason I decided to start this historical overview with Talbot’s book stems from Teresa Bruś’s peculiar claim that “The Pencil of Nature, presented to the public in 1844, is the first autobiographical book of a photographer. […] aligning the ‘art’ of photography with a rhetorical, if not a literary, project” (247). When reading The Pencil of Nature, this autobiographical content is far from apparent. Composed of 24 plates, it certainly qualifies much more as an essay about a nascent art and its potentialities than as a memoir since its primary goal is to introduce the art of photography, or as Talbot puts it, the art of “Photogenic Drawing” (1). After a dozen pages of introduction, each chapter consists of one plate accompanied by one or two pages (but sometimes just a few lines as is the case with “The Bridge of Orleans”) describing the scene photographed, the conditions under which the photograph was taken and occasionally some additional technical details. Nevertheless, and this may support Bruś’s claim, the author’s introduction and comments may be perceived as a description of the budding art of photography, but of the art of photography as invented and practiced by Talbot himself. For instance, at the beginning of the introduction, he contextualizes and thus personalizes his narrative: “One of the first days of the month of October 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success” (3). Talbot goes on to describe how he came upon the idea of “Photogenic Drawing,”: “It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me … how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!” (4). More than the autobiography of a person, The Pencil of Nature can be read as the biography of pictures, how they came to be taken. The author refers to himself only as the author of these pictures, mostly in technical terms, but hardly as the subject of a memoir. Below is the entire description accompanying the first plate, “Plate 1. Part of Queen’s College, Oxford, Oxford” (Fig. 2.1):