Their Proper Places

Abstract

As digitally produced images proliferate, and the world appears as if transparent to representation, what becomes of our relationship to the prehistory of this delirium of images? An edited collection on Fox Talbot and a recent exhibition and accompanying catalogue at Tate Britain present an opportunity to consider the meaning and effect of our changing relationship to some of the first attempts to fix images of nature permanently. Another book reflects on the process of urban change and records traces of the past in the contemporary city. In different ways, these publications play out the deep tensions in our thinking about photographs as a unique class of historical object. William Henry Fox Talbot, Beyond Photography provides a new, authoritative perspective on one of the most important figures in the early history of photography. This collection of eleven essays with a postscript by Simon Schaffer derives from a conference at the University of Cambridge in 2010. The book exposes the full range of Talbot's interests ‘beyond photography’ (Botany, Assyriology, Philology and Literary Studies, Publishing, Mathematics, Optical Illusions, and Physiological Optics), assessing how these pursuits may have shaped Talbot's methodology and describing the scientific frames of reference that informed his better-known photographic experiments. The essays range across a variety of topics, revealing for us the privileged and now definitively alien world of a gentleman polymath on the cusp of the professionalization of science. This long overdue contextualization of Talbot's photography supplements and in some ways sets out to challenge existing art-historical interpretations, aiming to show how this new material might ‘enhance our understanding of photography itself’ (p. 17).