Fox Talbot Research Articles

Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics.

This article explores the entangled histories of three imaging techniques in early nineteenth-century British physical science, techniques in which a dynamic event (such as a sound vibration or an electric spark) was made to leave behind a fixed trace on a sensitive surface. Three categories of "sensitive surface" are examined in turn: first, a metal plate covered in fine dust; second, the retina of the human eye; and finally, a surface covered with a light-sensitive chemical emulsion (a photographic plate). For physicists Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatstone, and photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, transient phenomena could be studied through careful observation and manipulation of the patterns wrought on these different surfaces, and through an understanding of how the imaging process unfolded through time. This exposes the often-ignored materiality and temporality of epistemic practices around nineteenth-century scientific images said to be "drawn by nature."

Their Proper Places

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).

Photographing Byron's Hand

This essay investigates proto-photographer William Henry Fox Talbot's decision (in 1840) to photograph handwritten Romantic poetry at the dawn of the photographic age and why, in doing so, he turns to the final lines and signature of Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814). I explore the poem's publication history and the theoretical implications of photographing Byron's flourish while situating the ode in relation to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Canto III, 1816) and other poems. Both Byronism and photography empty and subvert what are traditionally characterized as hallmarks of Romantic identity (e.g., boundless autonomy, authenticity, etc.). Negative-positive photography emerges and defines itself partly by its engagements with what was becoming even during the period an outdated conception of Romantic identity. By better understanding the relationship between Byron's art and Talbot's science, we may more clearly comprehend how the medium of Romantic poetry participated in the birth of this era's new medium of photography.

Signal Processing Leads a Photographic and Imaging Revolution [Special Reports

Photography and imaging have been radically transformed over the past couple of decades in ways that 19th-century pioneers such as Louis-Jacques-Mand? Daguerre (Figure 1) and Henry Fox Talbot could have scarcely imagined. Traditional photography and imaging, rooted in chemical processes, have now largely given way to digital methodologies and technologies. The result has been faster, less expensive, and more convenient ways of acquiring and presenting images, and in many cases the creation of clearer, more detailed, and less distorted pictures on many different types of media.

Celebrating photography’s two fathers

In early 1839, two very different geniuses, one French and one English, told the world about their discoveries of two different ways of creating permanent photographic images. Anticipating the 2014 celebration of the 175th anniversary of those events, Capturing the Light comes as a welcome gift recognizing the birth of photography. More than a rich, if condensed, dual biography of Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) and Henry Talbot (1800–1877), the book is a clear and fascinating account of the history of photography from its earliest roots in the camera obscura— essentially a wooden box with a lens on one end and, at the other, a piece of ground glass on which to focus an image. From at least the sixteenth century, artists, including Leonardo, Velasquez, and Vermeer, had used the camera obscura to create templates for their paintings. From the eighteenth century on, not only artists but also scientists and entrepreneurs were in search of a method to use chemicals to permanently record the images projected through a camera obscura onto paper or another medium. The daguerreotype made use of a sensitized metal plate that produced only a single copy of an image, while Talbot’s photogenic drawings of the 1830s, followed by his calotype of 1841, used sensitized paper; Talbot introduced the concept of the photographic negative, which could make one or more positive prints. Those who hope to find in this book an answer as to which man is ‘‘the true father of photography’’ will come away disappointed; about two-thirds of the way into the book, we read that the argument ‘‘over priority... is still not settled even today.’’ But readers in search of a lively, people-centered story of the birth of the technology will come away satisfied, whether they are practitioners of photography or not. It is a credit to the authors, both of whom are British historians and one of whom (Watson) is curator of the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire (home to the Talbot family estate), that they do not let nationalistic loyalties intrude on their

Wandering around the Library: On the Joint Book of Poet Harold Schimmel and Photographer Avigail Schimmel

This essay examines a book that offers a reading experience based on changing relations between different kinds of representation coexisting within the whole. Illustrating this alternative mode of reading, I analyze the characteristics of such an inter-medial publication placing it within a literary tradition established by English photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot in The Pencil of Nature . The essay will discuss not only the poetics of the poet Harold Schimmel alongside that of his daughter, the photographer Avigail Schimmel, but also the ways in which their joint work gives rise to a broader concept of an ideal library.

Painting in Light and Chemistry: D. O. Hill’s The Market Cross, Ayr (1835) and Its Relation to His Photographic Work with Robert Adamson, 1843–47

AbstractThis essay examines The Market Cross, Ayr (1835), an oil painting by Scottish artist David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), as part of an extended series of landscapes designed for publication and associated with the poet Robert Burns. The picture, which has recently reemerged, is significant for its relevance to issues that both lead to and inform the new art of photography in the 1840s. Concerns of time, light, and living figures in the picture added to the practical interest in large‐scale reproduction for a public audience.Hill was a painter by profession when he entered into partnership with the young photographer Robert Adamson in Edinburgh in 1843. In the course of four years, they explored and extended the possibilities of photography and established that it was indeed a potential aesthetic art form. The essay offers connections between the earlier painting and the photographs they took in William Henry Fox Talbot's calotype process—the first viable process for negative/positive photography.

Between Pandora and Diogenes: Fox Talbot and the Gender of Archives

Critical attention to Talbot has as yet failed to account with methodological consistency for a specific and significant way in which the archive figures as a symbolic object in his work and thought – for the way in which his understanding of visual and textual media acquires a kind of unity determined by the association of a series of terms: archiving, endlessness, and femininity. This article reconsiders key images and texts in Talbot’s work in order to re-contextualise his practices within the symbolic logic of the archive, and thus within a number of long-term transitions that concern the political, cultural, and technological spheres of later 19th-century British culture. Through this attention, and in the context of the rise of cultural and academic interest in technology and memory, the argument redefines existing historical and theoretical understanding of the gender politics of archive.

The Photobook: from Talbot to Ruscha and beyond

photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the publication of Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature heralded a new genre in the history of the book, one in which the photograph was the primary vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal if sometimes conflicted partnership with the written word. In this book, practicing photographers and writers across several fields of scholarship share a range of fresh approaches to reading the photobook, developing new ways of understanding how meaning is shaped by an image's interaction with its text and context and engaging with the visual, tactile and interactive experience of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual works, the photobook from fetishised objet d'art to cheaply-printed booklet is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.

<b>William Henry Fox Talbot</b>. <i>The Pencil of Nature</i>. Chicago: KWS Publishers, 2011. 164p. ISBN 978-0981773667. $149.95

Rediscovering William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially produced photography book, led my mind back more than 20 years to when, as a young photographer, I studiously devoured the lessons wrought from the photographers Eugène Atget, Man Ray, and August Sander. One day as I sat in a verdant backyard absorbing books filled with images by these three photographers, my father plopped The Pencil of Nature by my side. In his quiet but immutable manner he said, “He [Talbot] did it first.” Atget, a late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century photographer, took more than 5,000 pictures of Paris and . . .

Third Census of H. Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature

This article presents the third census of H. Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), the first commercially published photographically illustrated book. The first census was published in the Introductory Volume to the 1989 Anniversary Facsimile of The Pencil of Nature, the first complete examination of this seminal work. The publication of that census provoked the discovery of a number of new copies, and an updated census was published in History of Photography in 1993. Since that time, additional copies have emerged and quite a few changes of ownership have come about, leading to this third census. Since the original copies of The Pencil of Nature were assembled by hand, variations occurred, and defects in the original binding and later owners’ actions led to bibliographic confusion about what constituted an authentic copy. This question is considered in a brief bibliographical summary and analysis. Potential copies and known missing copies are enumerated in the hopes of promoting their discovery in future.

Photographic Simulation and Nineteenth-Century Expression

PHOTOGRAPHIC SIMULATION AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY EXPRESSION Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, by Phillip Prodger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 320. 7 color illustrations, 106 b & w illustrations. $39.95 cloth.In October 1843, predating William Henry Fox Talbot's celebrated The Pencil of Nature, which began to appear in installments in June of the following year, Anna Atkins (1799-1871) published Part I of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. It was the first photographically illustrated book in Britain. The only daughter of the scientist John George Children, Atkins used the cyanotype process, developed by John Herschel, to document specimens of algae she had collected. She was motivated to do so by a desire to record botanical minutiae that might be missed by other media. Atkins's methods of generating cyanotypes, which involved washing, drying, and arranging hundreds of delicate specimens of seaweed and preparing sheets of cyanotype paper, were in their own ways as painstaking as Herschel's chemical researches. The delicate photograms lent an incomparable transparency to the tender plant life reproduced. Facilitating a sort of seeing through the object, somewhat like the revelatory eye of a microscope, the cyanotype medium bestowed upon the observer's visual capacity a type of extra dimension. Scientific rationalization and faithful reproduction were at the heart of Atkins's project. When twenty-nine years later, in 1872, Charles Darwin published his photographically illustrated On the Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals, photography was an established medium, having undergone huge developments. The albumen prints of facial expression in Darwin's text seem a far cry from Herschel's haunting blue process that would achieve long-term cultural relevance in the form of the architectural blueprint. Indeed, while the latter records unique originals that stress the fragile substance of its objects, the former presents an infinitely reproducible medium that generates by the 1870s a more familiar monochromatic schema of browns. Yet in the historical and material distance between these two moments, and two very distinct photographic processes, a number of conceptual and philosophical debates had come to determine the ontological status of the photographic medium. At the same time, the ability of a photograph to uniquely make present an object, to render it with an unprecedented degree of veracity, remained a source of fascination for Darwin as he embraced it in 1872, as it had been for Atkins in 1843.Phillip Prodger 's fascinating, intricately researched, and beautifully produced book Darwin's Camera inhabits vital aspects of these four decades of photography. Indeed, the somewhat happy coincidence of Darwin's publication of Voyage of the Beagle in 1839 with the patenting of the daguerreotype in Paris, along with Talbot's announcement of photography in England, marks the beginning of what would become a developing correspondence between Darwin's scientific career and the photographic medium. While The Expression was Darwin's first and only photographically illustrated book, Prodger demonstrates that its content evolved over a considerable period of time. Darwin drew heavily on his notebooks labeled M and N that record his ideas about emotional expression, the first of which he began in 1838 and the second in 1856, three years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin also collected visual images, both as a means of cataloging examples of facial expressions (as data) and also with a view to using them as illustrations in his work. The Expression culminated in thirty photographs and a number of wood engravings. Some of the photographs were produced specifically for the project, while others Darwin sourced from a range of places, including the London Stereoscopic Company, English regional firms, and French, Italian, and American firms. …

On the Singularity of Early Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot’s Botanical Images

Art HistoryVolume 34, Issue 5 p. 958-977 On the Singularity of Early Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot’s Botanical Images Vered Maimon, Vered MaimonSearch for more papers by this author Vered Maimon, Vered MaimonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 August 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00852.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume34, Issue5November 2011Pages 958-977 RelatedInformation

An Investigation into the Creation, Stability, and X-ray Fluorescence Analysis of Early Photographic Processes: An Upper-Level Undergraduate Laboratory

Photography is one of the few fine art forms that were initially developed by scientists such as Herschel and Talbot; however, in the modern chemistry curriculum, photography has become divorced from its scientific beginnings and resides in the studio arts department of most universities. An upper-level undergraduate experiment is described in which students duplicate William Henry Fox Talbot’s original silver-based photographic methods and analyze their prints by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The students are able to successfully make prints and experimentally confirm whether the prints had been halide stabilized, thiosulfate-fixed, or toned with sulfur, selenium, or gold. Their experimental results are discussed in the context of preservation of museum collections and photograph conservation. This experiment introduced students to the field of conservation science, where chemistry is applied to the investigation and preservation of artistic or cultural materials, activities that often involve the re-creation of historic techniques.

Time and photography

Photography is fundamentally a time-based medium. The relationships between photography and time are manifold: snapshots are slices of time can be directly represented within the image, time can be photography's theme and philosophical horizon, photographic practices develop and change across time. This book brings together the various aspect of time in photography and of photography in time. Its chapters focus on seminal authors (including Fox Talbot, Victor Burgin, and Robert Morris) and genres (spirit photography, montage photobooks, and tableau photography), with examples ranging from the very first photographic pictures to the most recent uses of photography in and outside art. Given the multifaceted dimensions of the notion of time, the book fosters an interdisciplinary approach, gathering essays by historians of photography as well as by authors with a critical or philosophical background. It shows how some interpretations of photography are indebted to fields that have a great expertise in analyzing time, such as narratology and literature. Written by international specialists for a nonspecialist audience and displaying extraordinary breadth and erudition, this book reshapes our vision of photography, time, culture, and art.

Early Photography's Late Romanticism

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.

“Nothing Is So Dangerous as Hypothesis”: The Mission Héliographique, Photography, and the Spectacle of History

This article considers the place of photography within historical discourse by reexamining the maligned 1851 Mission Héliographique, a French government photographic survey of ancient buildings and sites, alongside competing forms of visual representation and contemporaneous theories of photography and historiography. Tracing the epistemologies and ideologies of photography, lithography, and architectural drawing, it contests interpretations of the Mission's work as derivative of earlier image-making systems, instead attributing the Second Empire's rejection of these photographs to perceptions of photography's evidentiary value and temporal disruption. Unlike a lithograph or drawing, the photograph's presumed spatial and temporal specificity contradicted efforts under Napoleon III to construct French cultural memory around ancient monuments as signs of historical continuity and unified national identity. This article combines close comparative analysis of mid-nineteenth-century drawings, lithographs, and photographs with conceptions of history, memory, and photography developed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Jules Michelet, William Henry Fox Talbot, and others.

‘Splendid Calotypes’ and ‘Hideous Men’: Photography in the Diaries of Lady Pauline Trevelyan

The diaries of Lady Pauline Trevelyan (1816–1866) provide an unusual and insightful perspective on the first years of photography. Her wealthy and scientifically minded husband was a friend of William Henry Fox Talbot. Pauline herself was highly intelligent, highly independent, a close friend of Sir David Brewster and John Ruskin, and interested in many aspects of science and art. Her diaries record not only her own photographic experiences, both in taking and in collecting photographs, but also commenting on other photographers – some well known, some previously unheard of.

Photographs of Early Ether Anesthesia in Boston

Photographs of Early Ether Anesthesia in Boston

Yucatán through Her Eyes: Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, Writer and Expeditionary Photographer

Yucatán through Her Eyes: Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, Writer and Expeditionary Photographer