Reconciling image and reality in William Henry Fox Talbot’s early photographs

Abstract

From its public beginning in1839, the photographic image presented perceptual problems for the viewer. Even the inventor and developer of negative/positive photography, WHF Talbot (1800-1877) had to deal with the problem that what could be seen with eye did not appear to be exactly or accurately represented on paper in a photograph. With his publication, The Pencil of Nature (1844-1847), the first commercially available publication of photographs, Talbot sought to identify photography—with or without the use of a camera—as an easy process for the precise, fast and detailed copying of the objects of the world and for the rendering of entirely new perceptual experiences.

A highly regarded natural philosopher, Talbot was both an expert user of optical instruments and an experienced and skilled observer who was accustomed to encountering novel visual images, such as those seen through microscopes and telescopes, for example. Talbot showed, through his texts and the photographic images in The Pencil of Nature, that both seeing, and visual experience, were more complicated than the mere act of looking and perceiving with the eyes. For mid nineteenth-century viewers of the photograph the challenge was to determine how to look at these curious little pictures on paper, and to work out what senses to use in order to see, translate and understand the new kinds of images of a familiar world newly described by a photograph.

1

It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine seeing a (monochrome) photograph for the first time. The utterly strange experience of looking at, and seeing an image of the visible world—whether same size, reduced or magnified—made with or without a camera and rendered in exact detail, on paper, seems impossible to comprehend now. Too much can be taken for granted in human perception, particularly as observation is not a passive act. To make sense of such new and novel visual experience for oneself, it is necessary to describe, translate, compare and explain it in words, which is part of the process of comprehending and understanding. The new understandings required for photography were both discovered and invented by William Henry Fox Talbot.

Talbot, the English inventor of negative/positive photography as-we-knew-it, was born in Dorset in1800. As the family fortune had been run down the family home, Lacock Abbey, in Wiltshire, had been let out, so that Talbot and his family lived in various places around the country. His father had died when Henry was 6 months old but in 1827 better finances enabled Talbot, his mother, stepfather and sisters to return to Lacock to live. At age eight, Talbot instructed his family to keep all his letters and diaries, which they did, accumulating a substantial archive of notebooks and letters to complement his published papers, books and patents.¹ An exceptional scholar with a creative intellect, Talbot was privately educated, then attending Harrow school, before going to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1818. Talbot was a polymath, an accomplished and respected physical scientist or natural philosopher, whose researches covered mathematics and geometry, optics, physics, botany, electricity and mechanics, also the classics, etymology, philology, languages, and ancient and contemporary literature.² While Talbot's intellectual interests appear wide and varied, his scholarly pursuits were nevertheless inter-related. He drew broadly from among his fields of interest for the ideas and methods for the development of the concept of the photographic 'negative', for his invention of the photographic process and for describing the field of photographic practices now called photography. While many of his scientific experiments and ideas appear highly speculative, his willingness to imagine, investigate and test was very much in keeping with the nature of experimental natural science of the first half of the nineteenth-century. The highly speculative nature, and openness of the practices of the natural scientist resulted in a very productive period for British science.

Talbot wrote a rather linear 'discovery account' of the reason he started experiments with what became known as photography declaring that, as he couldn't draw using a camera lucida—a popular, but difficult to use, drawing instrument of the time—he set about inventing a method to quickly and precisely record the world around him by optical means utilizing the sun.³ In fact the beginnings of Talbot's invention are more widely and deeply embedded in his optical researches than he suggests. He published nineteen papers on optical matters from 1826 through the 1830s.⁴

Talbot was a 'gentleman scientist' who, despite expectations of his social status, looked for practical outcomes with his experimental work—from enhancing light using salt to make microscopic seeing easier, to an easier method of chemical analysis through colour observation.⁵ Some five years after revealing his photographic invention, Talbot undertook to publish a selection of his photographs. With them he gave an account of his discovery, brief commentaries on the possible relationships of the photograph to its subject, and even anticipated the future of the photograph and photography. The Pencil of Nature went on sale with Part 1 in 1844 and, although unfinished, Part 6 appeared in mid-1846. Each of the carefully selected twenty-four photographic Plates in The Pencil was a complex visual object, the product of an experienced scientific observer's eye and an almost exhaustive optical experimentation. But from the moment Talbot's 'photogenic drawings' were put in the public gaze viewers were confronted with a new way of looking at the world. At the same time, the optics of the photograph had not been fully resolved. Viewers faced two problems—how photographic optics and chemistry rendered the world and then, how the world looked as a photograph. It was a complex problem of translation.

That there was indeed a problem for both the rendering of the world photographically and the interpretation of that image was quite clear, prompting many commentators into print. In 1846, the year that Talbot produced the last part of The Pencil of Nature, Sir David Brewster (1781-1868) gave an anonymous account of the already complicated development of the photographic process to date.⁶ Simply called 'Photography' he included a report on experiments conducted by Antoine Claudet (1797-1867), holder of the first daguerreotype license in England.⁷ Claudet gave a practical demonstration of the by now well known peculiar responses of light-sensitive chemistry used to make a photograph.⁸ The experiment was widely noted at the time and remembered for some years to come, not only for its novelty, but because it accurately showed a most troublesome problem for the new photography—the apparent impossibility of exactly tonally translating the world of colour into a monochrome image. What appeared to concern commentators most was the photograph's strange and varied renderings of human flesh, eyes and hair in portraits. Presented at one of the Marquis of Northampton's⁹ regular evening soirées, Claudet showed a painting of a strangely coloured female head—the hair was painted yellow, the eyes red, the lips were blue and the skin of the face had been painted in various shades of indigo, violet and yellow. When this bizzare coloured painting was made into a daguerreotype photograph, however, its tones were perfectly rendered into a monochrome image. The face now looked to those present at the meeting as if it were a chalk drawing, that is, as if it were drawn with white line and shading onto a dark or black ground.¹⁰

Claudet also presented the gathering with a second painting, one in which the colours appeared to be 'correctly' painted—that is light colours were painted where one would expect to see light tones, and dark colours used in dark areas. The artist had in fact used yellows, greens and their mixtures to produce the highlights, and violet, blue and indigo for the shadow areas. Claudet photographed this too, with the result that the 'daguerreotype copy of this picture was as ridiculous in appearance as the party-coloured female head which gave a correct picture.'¹¹ What the soirée attendees would have seen rendered as the photograph of the second painting was almost a negative image, or, at least an image of strange opposites: of shadows appearing light and highlights appearing dark. Despite dark blues being used in shadow areas the photograph rendered blues pale, and where the highlights would have been expected through the use of yellows and yellow greens, in the photograph these colours were dark, as though they were the dark blues and indigos of the shadows.

Because of the difficulties of translating colour into a realistically exact monochrome image, tonally, it was difficult for many to imagine that a truly correct image—one that not only showed every detail but also rendered colours tonally precise—could be possible. Neither the chemistry nor the optics of the camera lens, still in its infancy, could be made to solve this problem just yet. Brewster viewed the sun as carrying 'upon his palette only one colour.'¹² To his mind it was 'obvious that coloured paintings and drawings cannot be successfully copied by the photographer….' He went on to say that while 'some enthusiastic photographers consider it as possible or even probable, that the gay colours of the natural world may yet be brought out by the agency of light', he 'had no such expectation.'¹³

Claudet's experiments with light, colour and silver salts very efficiently summed up one of the main perceptual problems people were experiencing when looking at a photograph. He showed that, of the colours rendered in a photograph, 'Blue appears the whitest, indigo the next, and then violet. Light yellow and green appear the darkest although but little difference can be distinguished between them and red and orange colours.'¹⁴ Brewster's continued resistance to the wave theory of light led him to declare that he thought photographic colour rendering would be all but impossible because 'the photogenic rays which form the pictures in the Talbotype and daguerreotype,¹⁵ are not rays of light, nor rays of heat, but are actually invisible radiations, with which colour has no connexion whatsoever.'¹⁶ Talbot, however, had accepted the theory of light waves by 1835—his optical and photographic experiments presupposed it.

The photographic application of chemistry, however, was viewed as a problem of 'hard' science rather than one relating to perception. The apparently strange tonal renderings of fair human flesh, for example, were also perceived as the camera's inability to observe 'natural' good taste. What the eye saw in colour, and what the chemistry of science 'saw' in monochrome did not correspond in a photographic image. Yet Talbot’s photographic process was absolutely faithful in its rendition of nature, with nature.

2

Numerous new and never seen before 'problems' regarding seeing, interpreting and understanding the new photograph were apparent to Talbot from the outset.¹⁷ 'Photogenic drawing,' as he called his process initially, was an entirely new means for rendering the known world and so he couldn't, and didn't, expect immediate understanding of the process and its images. Those experienced with using drawing devices such as the camera lucida and the camera obscura would have had a partial idea of what a photograph meant, having witnessed with the aid of light, a real image, in real time, thrown onto another surface. What Talbot's process did was to actually imprint and fix that image, still, on paper. Talbot's own experimental practices as a natural scientist, or natural philosopher, meant that he was used to encountering unfamiliar visual phenomena and in fact, he sought out novel perceptual experiences. His expertise was in interpreting unfamiliar visual phenomena, thus giving unusual perceptual experiences meaning.

By the time he came to actually produce The Pencil of Nature Talbot well understood the many and varied factors involved with making firstly, a recognizable image and secondly, a meaningful photograph. Factors such as the camera and the lens choice showed how different 'views' of the same subject could be made; that a lens could distort the subject, just as camera position or angle of view could render the subject 'strange'; that perceived problems with perspective and the way in which the lines of buildings receded upwards in a photograph when in fact they didn't, were all the product of camera viewing; that 'depth of field' or area of acceptable sharpness across the depth of scene was determined by the lens and the selected aperture; that image appearance could be altered through use of focus and sharpness and softness or blur; that the length of time of the exposure of the negative meant that ideals about sharpness and precision could not always be met, because the subject moved away or was blown in the wind, for example, or the camera could move.

But the feature of the photograph causing the most controversy was that light-sensitive silver salts do not respond evenly across the visible light spectrum, reacting quickly to the blue end of the visible spectrum, and more slowly at the red end. Thus the sky in a landscape scene was overexposed and rendered as paper white, while at the other end of the spectrum yellows, greens and reds—exposed for the same time as blue sky—were slow to register, appearing almost black. Thus, in a print of a portrait, pink cheeks and red lips appeared unnaturally dark and blue eyes did not appear at all—it was as if the subject had no eyes to see.

Portraits, people and time in the photograph

There were no portraits in The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially available photographically illustrated publication. A substantial undertaking, produced and paid for by Talbot himself, it was remarkable not only for the inclusion of original photographs, but for having been printed so soon after the invention of negative-positive photography. Fully aware of the controversy already surrounding the rendering of human faces–particularly of women–it is likely that Talbot deliberately avoided presenting any portraits in The Pencil so as not to draw attention to this, as yet, unsolved rendering problem in which nature, apparently, couldn't record itself, with itself. Instead of a close-up portrait of a living human being, Talbot presented two views of a white plaster bust (Plate V, 'Bust of Patroclus' and Plate XVII, 'Bust of Patroclus'), noting that: 'Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic Art; and also very rapidly, in consequence of their whiteness.'¹⁸

In fact, Talbot included only one image which clearly showed human figures. Plate XIV, 'The Ladder'¹⁹ is a curious assembly of a ladder and three men standing as if at the points of a triangle. The men were, however, at a distance from the camera, but clearly imaged—even if the two closer men had their backs to the camera. In his accompanying text Talbot observed:

Groups of figures take no longer time to obtain than single figures would require, since the Camera depicts them all at once, however numerous they may be: but at present we cannot well succeed in this branch of the art without some previous concert and arrangement. If we proceed to the City, and attempt to take a picture of the moving multitude, we fail, for in a small fraction of a second they change their positions so much, as to destroy the distinctness of the representation. But when a small group of persons has been artistically arranged, and trained by a little practice to maintain an absolute immobility for a few seconds of time, very delightful pictures are easily obtained.²⁰

There are at least four other images in The Pencil where people were most certainly present at the time of making the photograph. Due to the long exposure in the camera, their presence has been more or less removed from the image, leaving ghostly traces.

Photographic rendering of movement is a unique rendering of time—painters had not depicted movement like this, in fact the rendering of movement was not then part of the painterly repertoire. While Talbot noted the problem of movement in a photograph he does not point out any examples of people moving, even though at least three Plates clearly illustrate the photographic movement described in his quotation. Plate II 'View of the Boulevards at Paris', pictured what would have been a busy street, in the middle of the day. Only the dark blurred areas record the traces of the movements of horse-drawn carriages in the street. Plate I, 'Part of Queens College, Oxford' and Plate XVIII, 'Gate of Christchurch' both show the presence of human figures. The image of the Gate of Christchurch, pictured in the afternoon, also depicts three people, but Talbot does not acknowledge their presence. Their forms are indistinct—but in two different ways. One of the figures is a man in a top hat and coat standing, legs apart, on the left at the corner of a wall. He is recorded clearly but also as a transparent, ghostly form. He would have been present for only part of the exposure—standing quite still for some seconds. But there are two other figures in the middle foreground on the right, whose movement over time is registered quite differently to the ghost in the top hat who was both there and not there. Appearing as blurred, detail-less forms in the shadows of Pembroke College, a woman and a man appear to be walking towards the camera (the woman holds a white parasol).

Colour and the Still Life

A desire to see what different objects looked like as a photograph seems like an odd goal today but Talbot's investigations reflect the depth of the novelty of the photographic image then. From 1834, Talbot made many thousands of photographic images, most of which were experiments. Such experiments were not only practical investigations related to the camera and the chemical mixture but were also visual, optical and perceptual experiments. Nearly every image in The Pencil of Nature demonstrates Talbot's interest in the photographic rendering of surfaces, their textures, reflective properties, tone, details, their clarity and sharpness. Talbot writes in The Pencil about the various different surfaces he photographs—from weathered and smoke damaged stone surfaces of historic buildings, to glass, china, paper and leather. The Literary Gazette was enthusiastic about Plate VIII, 'A Scene in a Library,' which showed two shelves of leather and paper bound books and journals, announcing that 'the very titles on the backs of the books are as legible as in the library itself.'²² To make images such as his 'library scene,' Talbot had in fact constructed the shelves outside in sunshine or bright overcast weather in order to shorten his exposures.

In his quest to see how different materials would be rendered photographically Talbot set up a number of still-life photographs. He photographed a small number of vases of flowers, but the majority of his still-life photographs were odd arrangements of selected utensils and crockery, domestic glass, metal and china objects which he placed awkwardly on tables—the settings apparently constructed for the camera—and without any evidence of food or drinks. The idea and settings for his still-life arrangements appear to be based on the seventeenth-century, Dutch 'Breakfast still life', or ontbijt genre. Only one of his many still-life settings appeared in The Pencil. Plate XXIV 'A Fruit Piece', appears quite atypical. An arrangement of fruit in two baskets on the end of a table covered with a tartan cloth, it also has a strong resonance with several paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) containing similarly arranged baskets of fruit on a featureless background.²³ Most of the seventeenth-century Dutch, Spanish and Italian still-life compositions of flowers, fruit and vegetables—all, seemingly, the mundane assemblies of the ordinary objects of daily life—were also subtly rendered optically strange by the highly skilled painter. Talbot's Plate XXIV is also optically 'strange'—but for photographic reasons. It is a good example of his photographic experiments.

The objects in the photograph appear to have been chosen to cover the entire colour spectrum—from the dark background to the multi-coloured tartan cloth, to a white china basket, a woven leaf basket, and a range of coloured fruits from the green-yellow-orange-red end of the colour spectrum. One red (or possibly green) apple pictured in the right hand basket, appears almost black. 'A Fruit Piece' is a curious assembly of unblemished specimens of the marvelous technology of hothouse horticulture.²⁴ Arranged in two baskets on the tartan cloth which is carefully aligned to the table edge, the whole scene was photographed slightly oblique to the camera frame, from a standing height (which therefore looks down on the objects). Talbot’s fruits are a mixture of seasonal and out-of-season temperate and cool climate fruits (apples, pears, pomegranates and peaches) together with a tropical pineapple. As such, Plate XXIV images the success of the technological manipulation of nature, and the fact of its technological rendering as a photograph.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature of 'A Fruit Piece' is the tartan tablecloth. Tartan fabric is not usually associated with still-life settings, but this one also appears at the base of a large vase of arranged flowers in one other of Talbot’s still-life photographs. Like the pineapple, tartan had become popular in both England and Scotland. Although Talbot himself never says as much, it is of experimental interest because all the tartan colours could not be reproduced tonally equivalent in a photograph. Talbot would have noted this marked discrepancy between what he saw with his eyes and the tartan's rendering as a photograph. Because Talbot's light-sensitive silver-salt mixture was more sensitive to the ultra violet or blue end of the light spectrum than to the red end of the spectrum the tones have been turned upside down—blues being rendered very light, and reds very dark or black. It is practically impossible to identify this tartan from studying the photograph.

Talbot was a very able scientific observer in optical matters, with a strong interest in how things looked, and in using appearance, for example, colour, in order to deduce outcomes.²⁵ Talbot was used to encountering unexplained and sometimes unexplainable visual phenomena produced by the microscope, for example. He enjoyed the challenge of, quite literally, throwing light on new phenomena, and, as he was always curious about how things appeared—whether naturally occurring or the product of action through experiment—he did not appear to hesitate in the face of unexpected effects including colour and even beauty. In nearly every one of his optical experiments, Talbot remarks on beauty, pretty effects and on specific colours—both as an aesthetic appreciation as well as for their potential meaning. Colour in particular was an essential research factor for Talbot, and frequently the basis and reason for scientific action and interpretation.

Lace and photography without a camera

Talbot regarded the photograph as an entirely new visual experience, one quite without history. As the inventor and patent holder he had a vested interest in his process. He had to find words and the means for interpreting and explaining the images and articulate his concept for this wholly new image experience. He had to convince both his underwhelmed, ignorant, but educated colleagues, some of whom were quite familiar with unusual experimental visual phenomena, as well as the general public. However, because there was a recognizable, describable image on paper, one that in some sense resembled a drawing on paper, many thought that a photograph was related to art and painting. Painting also used the world around as its subject, but the painter can selectively depict and invent from the world. On the other hand, apart from the photographer's careful framing of the scene, the photograph depicts and pictures absolutely everything before the camera. Talbot considered photographic appearance, with its precise detailing of the world around and its unique utilization of the sun's rays to actually create the image, as an entirely new form of picturing, one quite different to painting and printmaking.

From the commencement of his experiments in 1834, Talbot determined that there were many ways to make a photograph—both with and without a camera. A daguerreotype photograph, however, could only be realized through using a camera. In that sense, the daguerreotype process was not unlike digital photography today which is also camera dependent. Talbot's camera-less photographs were just as complex and challenging for viewers as his camera-made ones. In a camera-less image an object laid directly onto sensitized paper and exposed to sunlight may reveal previously unseen parts of the object, just as a microscope can show details which otherwise cannot be seen with the naked eye. A photograph, then, was not a fixed visual experience and could take on a variety of different appearances. The camera-less photograph was yet another new way to see the world—a vision previously unimagined. An image created by a camera employs reflected light, Talbot's 'superposition' or camera-less image, was created directly by the object itself, and utilized light directly to both delineate and penetrate the object.²⁶ His interest in lace illustrates this point. Talbot wrote:

To give an idea of the degree of accuracy with which some objects can be imitated by this process, I need only mention one instance. Upon one occasion, having made an image of a piece of lace of an elaborate pattern, I showed it to some persons at the distance of a few feet, with the inquiry, whether it was a good representation? when the reply was, "That they were not so easily deceived, for that it was evidently no picture, but the piece of lace itself."²⁷

From the beginning lace was a much used object for Talbot 's photographic experiments. Versions were exhibited in his first public exhibition of photographs at the Royal Society in London in January, 1839. Talbot's image of a piece of lace, Plate XX in part 5 of The Pencil of Nature, published in December, 1845, was a curious image, conceptually, because there was no extra positive image needed to clearly present a photograph of a piece of white lace. Each copy of Plate XX is, in fact, an originally made, negative image. The lace was simply placed onto the sensitized paper and exposed to sunlight to form a white silhouette of the white lace on the sheet. Had Talbot proceeded in his usual manner and used this image as a negative and made a further (positive) image he would have had a photograph of a piece of black lace—which it wasn't.

The lace pictured in The Pencil is not cut into a neat square, nor was it placed in the centre of the paper to create an aesthetic, framed picture (although Talbot experimented with many differently cut pieces). Instead the lace piece appears longer than the paper and is surrounded by space on three sides. It has two wrinkles, and the top right hand corner is turned over, forming a machine-like, matrix pattern. These 'blemishes' in what, ideally, would be a flat and perfect piece of lace, might appear careless on the part of the printer who had to place the lace for each image, but the folds serve important illustrative purposes for Talbot.²⁸ The folds of lace form patterns, and the white becomes denser and whiter at the intersections of overlaid threads, the 45 degree angle corner folded on the right resembles a magnified image of the pattern of dots of a mechanically printed image. Talbot's 1858 patent for 'Photoglyphic engraving' may explain why Talbot continually returned to images of lace, creating various patterns with it.²⁹

Another interesting feature of Talbot's selection of lace as an image in The Pencil, is its association with feminine activities, although collecting and pressing botanical specimens was also popular with women from the mid seventeenth-century (and, in the early nineteenth-century, with men as well) and Talbot had already included an image of a leaf, presented as a camera-less image, in The Pencil. Much like a flower press—with which Talbot would have been thoroughly familiar from his botanical studies—the lace was placed directly onto the paper and 'then covered with a glass, which is pressed down tight upon it by means of screws.'³⁰ Depending on the length of time that both object and paper are exposed to the sun the sun's rays will first delineate the object's edges, making a silhouette, and with longer exposure, light will pass through the object, as determined by its density. Thus, in a leaf, veins and defects will be rendered in some detail, but not exactly as the eye might see it—if the eye sees all these features at all. In the case of the lace, after first delineating the fine threaded lattice areas, light will begin to penetrate the thicker embroidered parts of the flower pattern. In this instance the piece of lace itself functioned as the negative.

Talbot's Negative

The very practical and revolutionary idea of Talbot's infinitely reproducible 'negative' photograph was the basis of The Pencil of Nature, and the defining feature of his invention of photography. The first 'negative' was small very dark image made in 1835 through the central oriel window in Lacock Abbey which faced south and directly into the sun. The diagonal matrix pattern of the lead dividers on the window (much like the lace pattern) could readily be discerned by Talbot who even counted each pane in the resulting 'positive' image. As crude as his 'negative' based, mass production methods appear to have been for the production of so many copies of a publication with original photographic pictures, using a reproducible 'negative' to make every image was, nevertheless, a ground-breaking concept.

The idea for Talbot's 'negative' had its origins in earlier optical experiments, for example, his observations of the relative transparencies of various substances such as mica and 'spar' (not always the object of his investigations but documented nevertheless), and his c. 1834/5 imitations of etchings made by smearing glass with a resin and turpentine solution, blackened with smoke and scratched with a needle. A kind of cliché verre process, the glass was then placed on 'prepared paper' (Talbot doesn't say how the paper was 'prepared' but presumably it was his 'photogenic drawing' solution).³¹ While a unique negative has to be translated into a positive, or correct-reading, photograph, the daguerreotype, on the other hand, had no negative as it was a single image on a metal plate and it cannot be reproduced from itself. Interpretation was and is a vital part of the process of making a photograph from a 'negative' because photography is not simply a chemical formula, but a series of physical, intellectual and emotional decisions and actions which take place over a period of time. The photograph is always more than the thing itself because it is also the product of human and technological translations, each decision made for many different reasons.

3

Through the photograph Talbot experimented with rendering the space of the world—and its objects—on paper. That is, he was continually observing how the three-dimensional world looked when translated, by photographic means, into a flat, two-dimensional image. It was a vexed and complex question of how the camera and photographic chemistry transcribed the known world, rendering it flat and monochrome, and how viewers received and made meaning from this rendering. The individual viewer has to translate this image so that it makes sense—personally. A painting, which was not an accurate copy of the world and which was bound by sets of (changing) rules, was better understood, visually, than the 'truthful' undiscriminating photograph, which was, in fact, entirely naturally created. While appearing more direct and 'honest,' the photograph is conceptually complex. It incorporates the inter-relationships of the sun, optical apparatus (the camera), the photographer who manipulates the camera, the actual rendering of the scene on paper, and the reception of that image—a set of relationships little considered today because we are so surrounded with photographic images that its meaning-making processes have all but disappeared.

Over one hundred and seventy years after the 1839 announcement of the invention of photography, we are now in a new world of 'negative'-less, camera-driven, digital photography which combines the new—light with pixels—together with a nineteenth-century mass-production printing process—printed inks on paper. It is now a strange kind of historical reversal—the product of digital translating technologies requires no reproducible, physical, 'negative'—just as the unique daguerreotype did not. Contemporary digital cameras, however, are entirely dependent on electrical power supply, whereas film based photography is not essentially dependent on a power supply (that is, not all film cameras need batteries and will operate without one). A digital photographic image is made using an array of light sensitive sensors which capture the image focused by the lens, it is further mediated by a collection of invisible translating and transposing pixel technologies. The image itself is finally realized using digital software and hardware, by the application of inks (or dyes) to paper. An exposure made on photographic film is the action of light on visible, physical particles of silver, and the final image is also the result of light acting on silver particles and dyes, on paper. But digital photography is much more complex, far more commodified and potentially more expensive than 'negative' film photography. While extending aspects of Talbot's photographic ideas by appearing to produce a direct positive image and thereby eliminating the negative, for example, digital technologies have also limited and regulated the possibilities envisioned by Talbot, in other ways. There is now far less opportunity for accident and discovery.

Talbot himself did not venture to establish a fixed way of looking at and portraying his subjects with the camera, or even without it. Instead he attempted to present the process of translating the world with photography as open-ended, implying that the photograph had unlimited visual rendering possibilities, and that its applications were similarly open to interpretation. The photograph, and photography, is so ubiquitous, so utterly familiar, that the idea of being confronted with an entirely unfamiliar image which appears to be an exact copy of the surrounding world, as happened in 1839, is a challenging one for us to contemplate today.

Catherine Rogers

November 2011

Notes

1. Talbot's notebooks are now in The British Library undergoing cataloguing.

   For an overview of the notebook holding, see Brusius, M. (2010) Beyond photography: An introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot's notebooks in the British Library, online: eBLJ 2010, Article 14, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/pdf/ebljarticle142010.pdf

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2. For example, apart from Latin, German, French and Hebrew and other modern languages including Hindu, Farsi and Celtic, Talbot could read and translate Ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Assyrian cuneiform. After The Pencil Talbot published English Etymologies in 1847, and in 1854 privately published Notes on Assyrian Inscriptions.

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3. Michael Gray notes that nothing has been found in letters or notebooks backing up Talbot's claim that it was his inability to draw which lead to his experiments in 'drawing with light'. Talbot's 'discovery account', which can be found at the beginning of Part 1 of The Pencil of Nature published in 1844 has been accepted, uncritically, by many photographic historians. The camera lucida is a difficult instrument to use, but Talbot was a skilled user and interpreter of many other optical instruments.

   Gray, M., (2001). Towards photography, in Huellas de Luz. El Arts y los Experimentos de William Henry Fox Talbot, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and National Museum of Photography Film and Television, p. 347

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4. Talbot's early notebooks, for example, show his thinking around the subject of light, and photographically related phenomena such as luminescence, phosphorescence, glow worms, fireflies, invisible writing, the sun and many related topics–from the early 1820s.

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5. From his notebooks, letters and published papers it is clear that he worked on many things at once, frequently returning to earlier ideas and experiments, as well as extending on the thoughts and experiments of others. In the spirit of open science practice, others contributed to Talbot's invention. Most notably Sir John Herschel, whose three papers of 1819 outlining his experiments with hyposulphurous acids (sodium hyposulphite) and its action on silver salts meant that the problem of 'fixing' the photographic image and making it impermeable to light was solved.

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6. Brewster was an influential natural scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and writer. He also had particular interests in the eye, optics, colour and light. An admirer of Newton's theory, Brewster proposed that white light was made up of only three colours–red, yellow and blue. He was not a supporter of the wave theory of light, unlike Sir John Herschel who was the primary mover of that theory. Talbot also supported it. Brewster was reputedly a difficult man to get on with, however he and Talbot were friends and correspondents from the early 1830s, having common scientific interests.

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7. Claudet was a banker and businessman who opened a photographic studio in 1841 becoming one of only two operators of the daguerreotype process in England.

   Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789-1851) announced his invention of the daguerreotype photograph in France in January 1839, pushing Talbot to also announce his photographic invention–a little prematurely. It was revealed later that year, that apart from the same employment of light-sensitive silver salts, there was little else in common between the two processes and their outcomes. Talbot's invention of the photographic negative, on paper, using a very simple process, appeared crude when compared to Daguerre's unique, beautiful and very fine image on a metal plate. Daguerre's process, however, was lengthy, complex, used at least three specially made apparatus including a specially adapted camera, and required the development of new manual skills in order to produce one single image. Talbot's concept of a (paper) negative meant that many exact, positive, copies could be made from it.

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8. Brewster, D. (1847). (Anonymously published.) Photography. North British Review, 7, 465-504

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9. The Marquis of Northampton, Earl (Spencer) Compton, was President of the Royal Society 1838-1848, resigning because he opposed the Society's growing professionalization.

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10. Brewster 1847: 494

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11. Brewster 1847:494

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12. Brewster 1847:493

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13. Brewster 1847:494

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14. Brewster 1847:493

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15. Talbot's friends (and his mother) often referred to his process as a Talbotype. Talbot, however, referred to his prints as 'photogenic drawings.' After his development of the much faster 'calotype' (a latent image process) in 1841, he made all his negatives using this, and his prints by 'photogenic drawing' (sciagraphy, was the term Talbot used initially). Photogenic drawing, a print-out process, is now often referred to as a salt print, or salted paper print, and, although descriptive, it is not an authentic term. The 'daguerreotype' was named after L J M Daguerre even though he had built on the earlier photographic experiments (called 'héliographie') by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833).

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16. Brewster 1847:494

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17. These problems were the same for the daguerreotype.

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18. Talbot's note to Plate V, 'Bust of Patroclus', Part 1, The Pencil of Nature.

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19. Published in part 3, May, 1845.

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20. Notes to Plate XIV, 'The Ladder', in The Pencil of Nature, Part 3, May 1845

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21. Special thanks to the office of Hans P. Kraus Jr. for permission to reproduce these images from the facsimile edition of The Pencil of Nature. This very fine, limited edition facsimile faithfully, and very beautifully, reproduces each part of Talbot's publication. Also thanks to Larry J. Schaaf for so much pioneering research on Talbot.

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22. Schaaf, L. J. (1989). H. Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, anniversary facsimile. Introductory volume: historical sketch, notes on the plates, census. New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Inc., p. 51

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23. Caravaggio's 'Fruit piece', 'Basket of fruit' or 'Fruit basket' is variously dated from 1596-1602.

    See also, Rogers, C., (2008), The first Still Life photographs, unpublished paper.

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24. Growing exotic fruit like pineapples in hothouses became popular among the upper classes from the end of the eighteenth-century.

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25. For example, Talbot, H. F. (1826). Some experiments on coloured flames. Edinburgh Journal of Science, V, 77-81 (p.81); Talbot, H. F. (1833). Remarks on chemical changes of colour. London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, III. 3, May, 359-360 (p.359)

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26. This kind of camera-less means for making a photographic image is now called a photogram. Talbot's original concept of laying an object directly onto light-sensitive paper was revived around 1918 initially by Christian Schad, a Dada artist (he called his images Schadographs), also by Man Ray (Rayographs). Laszlo Moholy Nagy and Lucia Moholy named the process 'photogram' around 1923.

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27. Talbot, H. F. (1839). Some account of the art of photogenic drawing, or the process by which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil. Proceedings of the Royal Society, IV, p 196-211, (p.199)

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28. Nicolaas Henneman, who set up the Reading Establishment especially to print all of Talbot's images for The Pencil, was the first to mass produce photographs.

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29. 'Photoglyphic engraving' was a method for reproducing photographic images in ink, an idea Talbot had already considered by 1838 before he was rushed to declare his hand with the chemical photograph. Having abandoned chemical, wet, photography by the end of the 1840s Talbot started work on a method for reproducing photographs using ink on paper using metal plates. Talbot employed the light-sensitive properties of bichromated gelatine (which contained no silver) following experiments by Mungo Ponton (1802-1880) in the 1830s. This invention is an extension of photography as it employs the sun's rays in a way similar to the photograph, but in this instance to harden exposed gelatine, to form dots for a method of halftone pattern. Talbot determined that ink on paper, produced by a mechanical screen pattern, was more consistent and stable than wet chemicals. In keeping with Talbot's keen foresight on so many aspects of his invention, contemporary digital printing of photographs is now exactly that–ink on paper.

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30. Talbot's use of a glass press is an example of one field of study directly influencing another, i.e. the methods of a botanist were incorporated into photographic practice. Clamping the object (or negative) tightly so that it is in direct contact with the light sensitive paper ensures that the object is cleanly and clearly imaged with no soft edges or out-of-focus parts.

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31. Talbot, H. F. (1839). Note respecting a new kind of sensitive paper. Proceedings of the Royal Society, IV, p. 134

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