The Camera’s Body; presence, absence and location

Catherine Rogers, April 2000¹

This paper focusses on the presence, absence and location of the human body in William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800-1877) photographs in his six part publication The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846). As the most desired subject of the camera, the human body posed a problem for both the photographer and viewer of the product of the process from its inception and throughout its early years. The place of the body was central in Talbot’s thought from the beginning and by following his exploration of the problems it posed within photography, the scale of his achievement in laying the foundations of modern photography can be fully appreciated. To do this, the significance of the body within The Pencil of Nature has to be understood Only when a close analysis of his photographic images is combined with an understanding of the progress in science at the time, can his development of a new view of imaging with its new visuality, which he saw coming from photography, be fully appreciated.

Talbot had envisaged the real possibility of photographing the human body as early as 1839, writing that:

Another purpose for which I think my method will be found very convenient, is the making of outline portraits, or silhouettes. These are now often traced by the hand from shadows projected by a candle. But the hand is liable to err from the true outline, and a very small deviation causes a notable diminution in the resemblance (Talbot 1839:202).²

This statement introduces two important and controversial features of the photographic process which Talbot was to pursue not as failings of the process, which had to be overcome, but as virtues for image making with photography. They were technology and its relationship to time. Talbot had noted the accuracy with which the technological photograph could delineate the world and its objects when compared to the inaccuracies of slow, hand rendering.

Talbot quickly came to recognize the social importance of the portrait, its desirability as an imaging form, and its great value to photography. Two years later he observed that:

One of the most important applications of the new process, and most likely to prove generally interesting, is, undoubtedly, the taking of portraits. I made a trial last October, and found that the experiment readily succeeded. Half a minute appeared to be sufficient in sunshine, and four or five minutes when a person was seated in the shade, but in the open air. After a few portraits had been made, enough to show that it could be done without difficulty, the experiments were adjourned to a more favourable season (Talbot 1841:89).³

In this statement, Talbot described the effects of light conditions and how time was a positive feature of realizing a photographic image. In an earlier scientific experiment made at the time of his first photographic experiments, Talbot had noted “the important idea” of coupling time and light, speculating “that time may be employed to measure the intensity of light” (Talbot’s italics) (Talbot 1834:329).⁴ It was the effects of time which he so effectively combined with light through the technology of the camera, which was such an effective tool for so many of Talbot’s photographic images in The Pencil, and, in particular, as I will show, for his representations of the human form.

Talbot was criticized for appearing to present only one photographic Plate, in The Pencil which represented the human body, and no portraits. But contrary to the continuing belief that Talbot did not confront the problem of photographically representing the human body in The Pencil, I shall argue that in fact he did – but in ways which could not easily be ‘seen’ or appreciated at that time. In other words, the visuality of his photographic images were literally invisible, and therefore unreadable even to most of his contemporaries. Talbot’s photographic work with the human body in The Pencil, like so many of his scientific experiments, took him to the margins of visibility and, at the same time, to the point at which science, art and technology came together to produce what we now recognize as a photograph. Central to the photographic process however, was the human body, something which Talbot approached with some hesitation, but also with extraordinary inventiveness.

Another important, but neglected aspect of Talbot’s invention in the context of the place and role of the body in photography and the photograph, is the importance of process and procedure, and within that, the critical part played by his own, or the photographer’s, body. The following optical experiment demonstrates that Talbot well understood how the human body itself was a critical factor in the process of scientific experiment, and thus was critical to outcome. The experiment also demonstrates the visual nature of science at the time, something which should not be overlooked.

I am happy to be able to bear testimony to the accuracy of his description of the phenomenon, having observed it myself with great attention in the summer of 1823 with a view to discovering its cause.⁵ The place of my observation was in the Val Levantine, at the foot of a cliff about a thousand feet high, whose summit was fringed with pine trees:- it was about the middle of the day, and the sun was very elevated. By approaching the cliff or retiring from it, I could make the summit conceal the sun’s disk or not at pleasure, so that I could observe the appearances which took place with great facility. I observed with a telescope of which Mr. Necker makes no mention; but I think it absolutely necessary, in order to see the full beauty of the phenomenon (Talbot 1833:452).⁶

Talbot’s short paper of 1833 titled “Remarks upon an optical phenomenon, seen in Switzerland” was part of the exciting new and growing new field of optics, and it reveals his wide-ranging interest in seeing and in the nature of light. The paper also highlights an important factor of instrumental use, a feature of science practice in the early nineteenth-century. In describing an observation made outside in the world rather than inside in a scientific laboratory, Talbot demonstrated the extent to which the observer, or the actions of the observer, were implicated in observation. In describing the emergence of the sun behind trees on a mountain, for example, he noted that the appearance, and disappearance, of this particular natural phenomena was dependent on the precise positioning of the eyes of the observer. This particular phenomena, which could be observed with unaided, binocular, eyes,⁷ was, as Talbot noted, much better observed instrumentally – with the aid of a monocular, telescope. Talbot’s concerns in this experiment were not simply with identifying new phenomena and the properties of the behavior of what was most probably diffracted light, but with the process of observation – with how phenomena was generated and seen.

While the instruments of both the telescope and microscope made the invisible, visible, by magnifying unseen phenomena to the point of visibility, and frequently beyond that and into a new visuality, on the other hand, the photographic camera, a monocular instrument, re-presented what was already plainly visible to the naked eye. But it was not the portable camera obscura, which is generally regarded as the model for the photographic camera, which provided Talbot with creative, photographic outcomes seen in The Pencil. No amount of skill in drawing with either the camera obscura or the camera lucida could reveal, or even suggest the kinds of visual outcomes that Talbot was to achieve with the photographic camera. In other words Talbot developed the photographic camera as a new instrument with new uses for new outcomes.

In the first part of this paper I further discuss some of these factors which were important to Talbot’s invention and development of the photographic process with particular attention to the new emphasis on the human body; and in the second part I turn to some of Talbot’s photographic strategies for peopling and photographically imaging the pages of The Pencil.

Part A.

Because of the belief in the power of science⁸ to make visible the secrets of life itself, the first half of the nineteenth-century saw the development of extraordinary new sciences which took the body as the subject of experiment and investigation.⁹ With this view grew the horror of science run amok which was registered in Mary Shelley’s literary invention of the fictitious monster created by Dr Frankenstein in 1818. The product of powerful new electricity unleashed onto an unsuspecting world, Frankenstein’s monster was viewed as the outcome of undisciplined science, an image which was etched into the popular imagination. Because of the widespread fear that accompanied the introduction of invisible and powerful forces, science and its technologies were viewed as being out of control. The power of the invisible to form an image was something which Talbot, the scientist, regarded more positively.

The extraordinary new sciences which quite literally took the body as a new experimental and investigative terrain, included animal magnetism, spiritualism, phrenology, biology and anthropology. All acted on the human body, looked into it, felt it, observed and manipulated it. There was also a flood of literature about the body and laws of health, which reflected a growing concern with ill-health in the face of a rapidly expanding industrial world (Cooter 1979:75).¹⁰ The new interest in life, the body and its workings led many to speculate upon the origins and creation of life. Science was also finding curious new life forms in far distant lands, and the newly conceptualized body became problematic culturally. The new scientific inquiry explored new physical territories of other lands and the peoples there, looking for the origins of life. Scientists, electricians, doctors and other creative experimenters including writers all considered the rendering of existing and new life forms in new ways.

The nineteenth-century also saw an array of inventions which copied and enhanced the human organ of sight, as well as most other human organs. The mimicking of body parts was only partly focused on the production of instruments and objects which imitated the human senses. Many of these instruments were intended to surpass the ordinary capacity of the human sense organs and in doing so produce new knowledge. These instruments which revealed natural wonders, actually contained the phenomena, the witnessing of this phenomena therefore was a direct perceptual experience. A common witnessing of an otherwise invisible aspect of nature, could not be undertaken simultaneously by many observers with these instruments which extended the senses of the individual observer. With instruments such as the telescope, what the observer saw through the lens, had to be interpreted. That is, this very personal, individual, visual experience, had to be converted into language or drawing.

Observing instruments

From the seventeenth-century instruments which made possible experimental philosophy, or science, had started to appear. While instruments such as the telescope had existed before the seventeenth-century, it did not exist as a serious instrument of philosophical inquiry, but as one of the affective apparatus of what was called ‘natural magic’. The purpose of the instruments of ‘natural magic’ was to produce wondrous effects of nature, and to do this the natural magician sought to trick the senses of his audience by hiding the causes of the effects – that is, by concealing the instrument and how it worked (Hankins and Silverman 1995:4).¹¹

A change of attitude to apparatus occurred in the early seventeenth-century which saw a transformation in perceptions of the uses and purpose of existing objects such as the telescope. The microscope and the air pump were two new ‘philosophical’ instruments invented in order to discover nature’s secrets. Instruments in the tradition of ‘natural magic’ continued to be invented well into the nineteenth-century. For example Sir David Brewster’s (1781-1868) kaleidoscope, Charles Wheatstone’s (1802-1875) kaleidophone and Joseph Plateau’s (1801-1883) phenakistiscope, were some of a myriad of ‘philosophical toys’ invented in the first half of the nineteenth-century which explored and discovered aspects of vision. These instruments were often practical, and, importantly, they were image revealing.¹²

Around the beginning of the nineteenth-century instruments were invented which both detected and recorded their results. For most of these instruments, however, their recorded outcome did not take the same form as the object of the instrumental study. Experimental graphs, which appeared around the end of the eighteenth-century, were first used to denote sound for example. Thus, using analogy, a visual form was used to represent an aural experience. Graphs were used to represent other senses such as heat. The new recording instruments, invented within the contexts of new scientific studies such as temperature, acoustics and experimental physiology, suggested the association of instruments with language (see Hankins and Silverman 1995:8-10).

Amongst scientists in Talbot’s time, there were sharply contrasting views regarding the place of scientific instruments and apparatus, that is, of how instruments were handled by the scientist, their role and their value in accounts of scientific procedure. The elite Royal Society, based in the city of London, did not emphasize technical process and instrumentation in experiment or demonstration. Science, like art, was focussed on outcomes. This focus reflected a divide between perceptions of the technician and of technical apparatus, with knowledge and who produced it, and how, and how they defined each other. It is an attitude which has endured.

Together with the new emphasis on human functioning and, with the body as new subject for scientific study, these points about scientific instruments and their use highlight contexts and aspects of Talbot’s own, very particular development of the photographic process as well as his visions for photography as a broad set of practices. Talbot’s invention was not simply a workable chemical and technological process which utilized neutral science and a neutral instrument. It is the success of the technology of the photographic process which has successfully reduced complex manipulative processes to apparently simple visible images, which misleadingly suggests that these outcomes are independent from the techniques and types of knowledges needed to produce them in the first place (Gooding 1998:303).¹³

Seeing science

First, a little more background to Talbot, science or natural philosophy, and the first half of the nineteenth-century is necessary. Talbot was a Cambridge educated landowner and polymath, and a member of the elite London scientific establishment. His scientific and intellectual pursuits were broad, while his studies had emphasized mathematics and geometry and an appreciation of the classics, he also researched optics, botany, chemistry, electricity and physics, for example. Other accomplishments ranged from his proficiency in ancient and modern languages, to literature, poetry, ancient and modern Western cultures, secret writing, codes and so on. Talbot’s optical experiments of the 1820s and 1830s show that he was a particularly fine scientific observer, a skill which should not be underestimated. Talbot’s exceptional analytical abilities can also be seen in these experiments. Apart from providing an insight into the new field of optics as it was developing in the first half of the nineteenth-century, Talbot’s varied optical experiments also demonstrate how science was practiced at the time – that almost anything was up for experimental consideration – that science was wide open. For cultured early Victorians, science was also a “ norm of truth” (Cannon 1978).¹⁴

In 1834 Talbot began his photographic experiments with the combinations and amalgamation of concepts, actions, observations, objects and facts in chemistry, optics, technology and philosophy, with which he developed the photographic process.¹⁵ Talbot publicly revealed his invention in 1839, at much the same time as Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre’s (1787-1851) very different process in France was also revealed.¹⁶ Talbot’s heavily patented photogenic drawing process was in fact very little known for some ten years, during the 1840s, compared to Daguerre’s very popular imaging form which was widely used to make portraits. In an effort to counter general ignorance about his negative/positive photographic process on paper¹⁷ and to demonstrate that its own potential was quite distinct from Daguerre’s daguerreotype process, Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, erratically in six parts from 1844-1846. The Pencil was illustrated by actual photographs, and not with engraved reproductions. It was not an instruction manual – Talbot did not detail his process, nor did he reveal his intentions for each photographic image in The Pencil. Only occasionally Talbot used words to explain an image, rather, his accompanying texts were mostly used to expand his conception of photography and to detail what could not, yet, be photographed.

The human figure was a subject many observers of the new art wanted to see pictured, and the lack of portraits in The Pencil was not in Talbot’s or photography’s favour. Talbot, however, peopled The Pencil in interesting ways, and in fact the pages are not entirely deserted of life. Talbot used the photograph in various ways to invoke human presence. His visible cast, however, consisted of two views of a Roman plaster copy of a Greek bust of the great hero Patroclus, a reduced-size copy of a French lithograph containing a crowd of over thirty rather grotesque faces, a copy of a German engraving with three figures in it including an angel, one Plate with three actual (unidentified), but presumably English men posed for the picture, and another fascinating and complex image of illusions which contains three people in different states of presence or absence.

Part B

This part considers some of Talbot’s novel picturing responses to imaging the human body with the photographic process in order to create new visual experiences. With his images in The Pencil, Talbot took up various strategies – which were frequently instrumentally derived, always carefully constructed and framed, used various intellectual sources including literary devices such as metaphor or analogy, drew on science and mathematics and also considered artistic sources – in order to people the pages, to suggest their presence by directly imaging them, and to suggest human presence through their ‘visible’ absence. He did this both in the images and through his texts. I will use as examples, images from The Pencil of Nature. It is important to remember that most of Talbot’s camera (and non-camera) images in The Pencil were carefully considered, often elaborate constructions and I have confined my discussion to concerns with the human body: the body as subject for the camera and its rendering as a photograph, the body of the camera itself, and the active body of the photographer.

1. Plate I. “Part of Queens College, Oxford” (two versions).

From the outset of The Pencil Talbot demonstrated not simply the visibility of the photograph but its visuality and its physicality. Talbot also established the contemplative intellectual possibilities of the photograph in Plate I, by illustrating geometry, the ancient study of spatial order, otherwise regarded as the abstract, metaphysical study of a timeless, universal order – something generally hidden from sensory perception. While not the subject of this essay, Talbot’s interest in geometry was explored and pictured in a number of the photographs in The Pencil, and it is an important feature of the only photograph to contain sharply rendered, and actual human figures, Plate XIV.

Talbot also used the photograph to suggest bodily perceptions other than sight, but using sight. He proposed the sense of touch through his rendering of the rough textured stone walls of the university, and commented that: “The building presents on its surface the most evident marks of the injuries of time and weather, in the abraded state of the stone…” (Talbot 1844: unpaginated). In another image taken of an Oxford University college (Plate XVIII), Talbot proposed further analogic perceptual possibilities of the photograph, by implying that the photographic image could invoke sound – and silence.

There were at least two versions of this first plate in Part 1 of The Pencil.¹⁸ One was clearly Talbot’s preferred image.¹⁹ It is a dynamic composition, a heady collision of order and chaos. On one hand the neat, ordered, perspectival rendering of the classical lines of the university building showed the camera’s ‘ability’ to obey the ‘natural’ rules of perspective, on the other hand, and on the other side of the image, several perspectives collide in a chaos of geometrical shapes, light and shade.

In drawing and painting in the nineteenth-century, a fundamental requirement was the rendering of parallel lines on the vertical plane. However, this view does not occur ‘naturally’, having been derived from ancient geometry and the development of geometrical perspective into artistic convention, which became naturalized into seeing and perceiving. But where perfectly parallel lines on a vertical plane were desired for the rendering of architectural forms, lines on the horizontal plane were supposed to recede. When one looks up, from the ground, to view a tall building, the walls are seen to ‘naturally’ recede to an invisible point. Artistic convention ‘saw’ otherwise, and perspectival systems were employed to render vertical wall edges parallel, no matter how high. Talbot showed that it was possible to comply with this convention with the camera. For Plate I (version 1, just as he did for Plate II) Talbot pointed the camera straight ahead to picture the building on the left, which enabling him to render the vertical walls parallel. To achieve this Talbot physically transported his photographic equipment up flights of stairs two stories up into a building which was located directly across from the laneway.²⁰

While the first version of Plate I illustrated ‘correct’ perspective very well, the second, and later version, however, shows receding walls, the result of tilting the camera upwards. Both the published versions of this Plate appear to have been taken from the same vantage point but with one other important difference: different lenses were used for each image. Talbot used a ‘large’ or telephoto lens for the first version of the image, and a ‘normal’ lens, with the camera tilted upwards, was used for the second version. The result was that the two versions show two very different pictures: where the first presents a confronting and exciting composition of partially seen objects, the second image which includes all of the facade of the building on the left, is more reflective of the descriptive title. A comparison of these two images then, shows how the physical position of the photographer and camera was critical to image appearance, and that the choice of camera lens was significant to the outcome.

His perspectival accomplishments notwithstanding, Talbot’s image is quite deserted. The laneway in the centre of the image is empty of people. Talbot noted beside another image taken in Oxford, Plate XVII “Gate of Christchurch”, that:

Those who have visited Oxford and Cambridge in vacation time in the summer must have been struck with the silence and tranquillity which pervade those venerable abodes of learning…. In other towns you hear at all times the busy hum of passing crowds, intent on traffic or on pleasure – but Oxford in the summer season seems the dwelling of the Genius of Repose.

Talbot suggested here the mnemonic possibilities of the photograph. By invoking other perceptual senses through sight, in this instance, hearing, he suggested the possibility of human presence – in its absence. While Talbot pictured a part of Oxford at a time when few people would be there, as he pointedly suggested, the length of his exposure which would have been many minutes as it was a large camera-negative, may well have rendered the streets people-less.

2. Plate II “View of the Boulevards at Paris”

Unlike the little sunlit laneway Talbot pictured in Oxford in Plate I, the laneways and little streets off the broad boulevards in the huge city of Paris, were tiny, dark, damp, smoky, overcrowded and cholera ridden (Berman 1988:158).²¹ Neither Talbot’s nor Daguerre’s process could have satisfactorily or easily make photographs in such dimly lit, cramped places – had either desired to do so (Rice 1997:8).²² Exposures would have been impossibly long in the absence of sunlight.

Plate II does not show the viewer all that Talbot saw as he stood high at the window to take this image. Talbot’s exposure would have stretched into many minutes given his camera size, and would almost certainly have rendered the wide street people-less. Like London, Paris by the 1840s was considered overcrowded and suffering from a population explosion which was at crisis level. Talbot’s image, however, portrayed something quite different – a kind of utopia with its long, wide, empty street in a major city! Talbot’s commentary mixed image with reality. His text shows that he liked how Paris looked as a photograph, he also described his perceptions at the time – things and feelings not pictured – the sensations of heat and dust present that afternoon. Talbot is almost poetic:

The sun is just quitting the range of buildings adorned with columns: its facade is already in the shade, but a single shutter standing open projects far enough forward to catch a gleam of sunshine. The weather is hot and dusty, and they have just been watering the road…By the roadside a row of cittadines and cabriolets are waiting, and a single carriage stands in the distance a long way on the right.

With words and with his image, Talbot suggested that the Paris boulevard was empty of people when it was not.

3. Plate V “Bust of Patroclus” & Plate XVII “Bust of Patroclus”

Lens technology, the light spectrum, light-sensitive silver-based chemistry, motion and time were the main problems for photographers attempting to render the human body in the 1840s. To partly counter perceptions of these problems and still suggest the possibility of photographic portraiture, Talbot photographed a plaster bust of Patroclus twice in The Pencil. The white bust, a Roman copy of a Greek bust, was a more straightforward subject for the camera and the chemistry to deal with than a living, breathing, human. Even with calotype (negative) exposures being as a low as seconds in full sunlight (depending on the camera size – an important factor), and not much longer than several minutes in open shade, as Talbot noted in 1841, the human head was still liable to move over the duration of the exposure, and bodily movement was particularly noticeable in close-up. A sharply rendered portrait of a human could not be made at such close camera range to the subject (the feature of this image), as the slightest bodily twitch would register as a blur on the print. A white plaster bust, pictured against a dark, featureless background was also ideal for rendering a correct-looking monochrome portrait since the original subject was already in monochrome. The colourless bust then, was an excellent vehicle for showing the infinite possibilities for lighting the human head, without also recording problems created by human subjects such as blur created by subject movement over the exposure time.

Many observers of the new art considered that the photographic representation of humans was a quite unsatisfactory visual experience. The optical researcher, Sir David Brewster (1781-1812), was convinced that the optics of the oversized camera lens was responsible for producing “monstrous representations of humanity” (Hankins and Silverman 1995:158).²³ Chemistry was perceived as another problem. The female visage fared particularly badly as a photographic image, according to Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, who, in 1857, described the problem as “mechanical”. She commented that:

If a cheek be very brilliant in colour, it is as often as not represented by a dark stain. If the eye be blue, it turns out as colourless as water; if the hair be golden or red, it looks as if it had been dyed, if very glossy it is cut up into lines of light as big as ropes. This is what a fair young girl has to expect from the tender mercies of photography (Trachtenberg 1980:61).²⁴

Lady Eastlake thought that photography was in fact made for men: “…the male and the older head, having less to lose, has less to fear. Strong light and shade will portray character, though they mar beauty” (Trachtenberg 1980:61). Similarly, The Crayon maintained that the female visage fared very badly in a photograph: “Ladies are generally indifferent subjects for the photograph, owing to the delicate texture of their skin and its coloring” (Hankins and Silverman 1995:165). Yet both Talbot’s and Daguerre’s light sensitive silver solution responded to the light waves exactly as transmitted. Pictures of flesh highlighted the problem of the emulsion being sensitive to the ultra violet and blue end of the spectrum while at the same time hardly registering the other end, the red end of the spectrum.²⁵

Antoine Claudet (1797-1867)²⁶ had made a demonstration of the photographic peculiarities of the actinic spectrum for all to see, and the experiment was anonymously reported in 1847 (Brewster 1847).²⁷ Claudet produced a daguerreotype of a painting of an absurdly coloured female head with red eyes, blue lips and a face in various shades of indigo, violet and yellow. Yet its tones were perfectly rendered as a (monochrome) daguerreotype. Another, correctly coloured painting produced a photographic image “as ridiculous in appearance as the party-coloured” painting (Brewster 1947:494). Both photographic chemistry and the camera were seen as having failed. Both however obeyed the laws of nature rather than aesthetic convention.

In two other Plates in The Pencil, Talbot suggested the possibilities for the enlargement and the reduction of the human body with photography, for not only picturing the body in any size, but for locating and containing the human body virtually anywhere within the frame, and therefore, virtually anywhere in the world. Both these Plates were copies of existing prints. Plate XI “Copy of a Lithographic Print” was of a print depicting over thirty rather grotesque faces, impossibly crowded together in the frame. The image acts to populate The Pencil, but an important feature of the original is that the faces were not drawn in correct perspective, and the unreal space is impossibly flattened. The print showed that drawing did not always follow the conventions of ‘correct’ perspective which was being strongly advocated to Talbot for structuring photographs. The Pencil shows that Talbot did not perceive that ‘correct perspective’ was essential to the photograph. Another strange perspective appears in Plate XXIII “Hagar in the Desert” which depicts a hovering angel – something which photography was not, ordinarily, able to picture. There were at least two variants of this Plate which also pictured a woman, and, depending on the version, a baby – also a subject which was virtually impossible to render photographically at that time unless asleep, or dead.

5. Plate XIV “The Ladder”

“The Ladder” is one of two Plates in The Pencil which directly rendered people. The human subjects featured were carefully posed for the camera, and apart from one slightly blurred face at the top, they are sharply defined as a photograph. Plate XIV displays some quite unique visual and optical features. The image is derived from geometry, and the three men stand at the points of a triangle: one faces the camera, another is side-on, the third stands with his back to the camera. Talbot’s commentary does not mention this, but notes instead that:

Portraits of living persons…form one of the most attractive subjects for photography…Groups of figures take no longer time to obtain than single figures…since the Camera depicts them all at once, however numerous they may be…

Gernsheim, who declared this image a “first-rate composition” found the comment “quaintly” expressed (Gernsheim 1982:199).²⁸ Talbot, however, was pointing out a critical difference between two rendering and representing processes, that is, between painting and the photograph. Like Talbot himself, purchasers of The Pencil would have been familiar with the conventions of painting, but unlike Talbot who had experimented extensively, they were quite unfamiliar with photographic representation, despite having observed daguerreotype portraits. As a matter of course, the painter of the Picturesque would elect to include, exclude or rearrange any objects in the compositional frame, as part of the creative act which was ‘naturalized’ into understandings of ‘truth to nature’ in painting at the time – for both the painter and the observer. The mediating camera, however, ‘saw’ and recorded absolutely everything within the scope of the lens, and all was rendered, as a negative, on the paper. The photographer could not add or subtract things or conditions in his (positive) photograph in the same way that a painter could select and invent on canvas. Photographic control, largely exercised through the technology of the camera as Talbot demonstrated, was quite different to the kind of picturing controls available to, and exercised by the painter.

In his text to Plate XIV, Talbot went on to note the difficulty of picturing crowds of people, suggesting that they would have to be “trained by a little practice to maintain an absolute immobility”. He had assumed the necessity of the body’s stillness in an image, and anticipated the desire for the moment of the future, that is for an instantaneous rendering of the still body as subject. Thus, in order to mimic what the photograph suggested, something desired but not yet possible, human subjects would have to behave like plaster busts and buildings. Neither the slow moments on moments of Talbot’s process, nor the minuscule fraction of a second of the twenty-first century represents ‘real’, seen or recognizable time.

Plate XIV demonstrates the inclusive, egalitarian nature of photography. The three participants are men of different social classes. The two men in shirtsleeves are workers. Both stand a little awkwardly, each with a hand on the ladder. A coat which presumably belonged to one, lies in a heap on the ground beside the wall, yet one of the workers holds the top hat of the third man who is dressed in his frock coat, and has his back to the camera. Clearly of another class, this man stands confidently, legs apart and firmly planted on the ground. Talbot, no doubt also in a coat and perhaps a top hat, together with his camera were located some five metres away, probably on a ladder and a couple of metres from the ground. For the duration of the photograph, all four men were briefly, physically united in a geometrical arrangement, for the long moments of the slow combination of technology and science. Three men visibly united forever in the photograph.

For Talbot’s experimental work with photography, the world was his studio.²⁹ All of his pictures made for The Pencil were made outside in sunshine and shade. Outside in the vast, rapidly expanding world, nature was uncontrollable, transitory, unpredictable. Yet, in theory, and as Talbot demonstrated in The Pencil, virtually anything was photographable under the sun. Outside the camera could exist anywhere and in multiple relationships with its subjects and with the photographer, and the subject and its lighting could be endlessly manipulated for new outcomes. The human figure arranged as subject for a portrait in the daguerreotype studio, on the other hand, was closely boundaried, the relationship of camera to subject and camera to photographer having been largely established almost from the beginning. The daguerreotype portrait photographer generally worked with the camera in a fixed position in the studio: at standing height for easy operation, and located to carefully frame the subject with a small amount of background. Importantly, the outcome of a studio daguerreotype could be guaranteed because the procedure was largely unvarying and established for its reliability of outcome for both photographer and the subject.

7. Plate XV “Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire”

In contrast to Talbot’s camera-viewing points in Plates I, II and in XIV none of which were from standing height on the ground, in Plate XV which is a view of his family house at Lacock, in rural Wiltshire, Talbot’s camera was set firmly on a tripod at a convenient height – that is, at about eye level. At this height, it was easy for Talbot to make focussing and framing adjustments to the camera, although he could not actually look through the back of the camera directly at the scene in front of him.³⁰ In order to frame, and then check the progress of exposure of his image, Talbot’s wooden box-camera had a small hole, stopped by a cork, in the front, top right-hand corner. This small hole enabled him to briefly look from the position of subject, at the subject contained in the camera without fogging the light-sensitive paper in the back. To do this, however, Talbot had to briefly place himself in the composition, intervening between camera and subject, yet he did not directly appear in any of his pictures, that is, he is not recognizably present.

In order to make his exposures, Talbot simply had to remove the lens cap for a period of time, and he was not obliged to stay by, or connected to the camera during the exposure. It is clear from The Pencil that Talbot did not assume that all photographs ‘naturally’ emanated from an eye-view point, that is, from a position of a man standing on the ground and who viewed the world and its image through the camera at that height – which he was not able to do anyway. That is, Talbot did not infer a simple direct relationship between himself as viewer and the instrument as the transparent copier of what he saw. The blurred bushes on either side of the water in Plate XV show a peculiar kind of ‘photographic seeing’, which was the registration of motion over time. Talbot explored time and its visual possibilities in the photograph again in Plate XVIII, but in this Plate he used human figures.

6. Plate XVIII “Gate of Christchurch”

There are three mysterious human figures in this Plate – a woman and two men – yet because of their ghostly existence in the picture, observers are often ambivalent about their presence or absence. Talbot himself made no mention of them in his texts or notes, and commentators have tended to assume that he failed to see them, or at best, has simply ignored them. But Plate XVIII is an image rich with illusions. Not only is there the illusion of people present and at the same time absent, Talbot has also pictured an architecture which manipulated space and its perception, as well, he introduced more architectural illusions of his own through careful placement of the camera.

Commentators generally acknowledge the presence of two ghostly figures on the right hand side in the shadows of Pembroke College. Almost opposite the couple, on the left, is a third figure – a man who was standing on the corner, at the end of a wall.³¹ The two ghostly figures on the right hand side appear to be those of a man in dark clothes and hat and a woman in a white dress wearing large bonnet or carrying a parasol. Their blurred forms are the result of them having moved throughout the duration of the camera exposure. On the other hand the figure on the left, who also moved during the exposure, appears quite differently in the image. This man, dressed in frock-coat and top-hat, was present for only about half the exposure. He stood perfectly still for the time he was there, and like the gentleman in Plate XIV, with his legs apart, but he moved away altogether and was therefore not present for half of the exposure. As a result his body was made transparent, unlike the solidity of the two blurred figures who were actually present throughout.

The rendering of the three figures represents two quite unique, camera renderings of people. These renderings were also two quite unique ways in which photography could render movement and time, something Talbot also rendered in Plate XV. Movement was not and could not be represented in this way in painting – the unassisted eye simply could not perceive motion in the same way as an instrumentally produced photograph. Painting has always tended to render absolute stillness in a portrait, something which had nothing to do with the lengths of time required to paint a portrait in slow-drying oil paint. Viewers of the new photograph, too, presumed that the subject should aspire to absolute stillness – for absolute clarity. In Plate XVIII Talbot questioned this convention, just as he questioned other artistic conventions such as perspective which was being advocated for photographic appearance. Talbot demonstrated that appearance was not fixed and nor was its perception.

Conclusion

Talbot’s treatment of the human form in The Pencil shows just some of the ways in which the publication can be viewed as a unique and telling document. Talbot’s apparent ‘failure’ to picture the human form in conventional or artistic ways such as in a portrait, or in a recognizably artistic figure composition, indicates that Talbot had other picturing objectives for photography and for The Pencil. His uses of the process of the medium show that he was actively searching for new ways and means for rendering or picturing ‘reality’ and in doing this Talbot sought to find new rationale for constructing a human subject. The images of humans show that, contrary to long held beliefs, or myths, Talbot was in fact not primarily looking to painting as the model for photographic appearance, as is generally supposed. The images show that Talbot was prepared to take picturing risks with what he clearly regarded as an entirely new visualizing medium.

The human form was the most desired subject for the camera and it was the most difficult subject to represent. Perhaps the mysterious, half visible man who stood for a time on the corner in Plate XVIII was Talbot himself – the figure is certainly not recognizably anyone in particular. While time acted to render objects and people unfamiliarly, photographic chemistry also rendered the human face strangely and in a way which did not correspond with how the eye saw delicate English flesh. Perhaps the frock-coated gentleman standing with his back to the camera in Plate XIV “The Ladder” had blue eyes. Blue eyes were rendered toneless or white in a photograph, and for many years it was the fate of all blue-eyed subjects of the camera to appear virtually eye-less. The problem of rendering blue eyes is obviated when they can’t be seen at all!

Yet the human body remains a critical factor within the entire photographic process. Humans could be easily taught how to make photographs and how to behave for the camera. The camera and the process also defined a new, photographic, behaviour, something now perceived as normal behaviour. Both camera and process could also define new aesthetic conventions which required the application of a series of bodily disciplines. While photographic technology could not make an instant image of a human, and render the body still, and unmoving, it was the possibility of the still human figure which was present from the outset. Talbot proposed that humans should behave in a way which would suggest what the technology could not yet do. Machinery or technology was already regulating and disciplining bodies.

In the 1840s, the sitter for a photographic portrait presented to the camera a face set for its recording over long minutes. The long moment of the mid nineteenth-century which built time onto time, was perhaps no more satisfactory than the contemporary moment which is so fast, so short, or so small, that it really cannot be contemplated and fully prepared for. While the long exposures of Talbot’s time could result in a blurred image, producing a form quite unrecognizable to the naked eye, the contemporary moment also renders the human form unrecognizable, also never seen by the unassisted eye. Thus, both the early and the modern photographic renderings are unexperienced time.

But it was Talbot’s unique uses of the process and particularly of the photographic camera itself which provides the viewer of The Pencil with some extraordinary visual, photographic experiences. Talbot’s camera actions also acted to design the camera as a new functioning object – that is, through repeated use, he explored the reaches of the camera and the camera lens. The camera then determined what could be done and what could be thought. Plates I, II, XIV and XVIII, for example, made public some novel visualizing discoveries made with the camera and chemistry. That some of Talbot’s unique photographic observations were not seen – either then or now – and were not taken up as serious picturing possibilities raises some interesting questions about the process, revelation and interpretation of discovery and invention. What criteria were, and are, used for assessing new, unfamiliar and novel photographic images? Talbot’s photographs were both experiment and its solution. He did not explain every image and his intentions for each because the evidence lay, quite visibly within the photograph itself. This raises another question: is it necessary for a visual or perceptual experience to be interpreted in language before it can be ‘seen’ to exist?

Talbot found ways of solving the practical problem of chemistry and optics by reframing them conceptually so that he could answer the problem differently. That is, Talbot did not always answer a chemistry problem through chemistry in The Pencil. For all these reasons, understandings of his place in photography based on artistic conventions and the aesthetics of the Picturesque or the Romantic movement are also wrongly slanted. Talbot’s photographs in The Pencil used the extraordinarily productive methods and outcomes of experimental science – broad sets of practices which were both conceptual and practical, as well as visual – in order to explore a new domain. But this was in order not to simply reveal the truth of the world, or use apparatus to make phenomena more than just the visible manifestations of a ‘natural’ process, but to make nature visual. This visuality was mediated by bodily perception and an embodied conception.

Catherine Rogers

April 2000

Notes

I would like to acknowledge and thank Julie Marcus for her generous assistance with the development of this essay. I would also like to thank Valerie Odewahn. The basis of this essay lies in my thesis study of W.H.F. Talbot’s photographs in The Pencil of Nature (Jan 2000).

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Talbot, H. F. (1839). Some account of the art of photogenic drawing. The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, XIV, 196-208.

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Talbot, H. F. (1841). Two letters on calotype photogenic drawing. The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, XIX, 88-92.

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Talbot, H. F. (1834). Experiments on light. London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science III, 5, Nov., 321-334.

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Reported by Professor Necker, of Switzerland, in 1832, the phenomenon occurred when the sun rose from behind distant trees, and it could be seen by an observer standing on the summit of another mountain. Talbot and Necker were in fact describing diffracted light.

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Talbot, H. F. (1833). Remarks upon an optical phenomenon, seen in Switzerland. London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. III. 3, June, 452.

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Talbot did not mention whether he used both eyes, fully open, or squinting, or simply one eye, to view the phenomena described.

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The usage of the word ‘science’ instead of ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘natural science’, was only beginning to take hold in England from the 1830s (Cannon 1978:2).

Cannon, S. F. (1978). Science in culture: the early Victorian period. New York: Dawson & Science History Publications

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Other science studies which related to human conduct or human relations were developing at the time, such as “political economy”, and were included in what was called at Cambridge, the “moral sciences” (Cannon 1978:20).

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Cooter, R. (1979). The power of the body: the early nineteenth-century. In B. Barnes & S. Shapin (Eds.). Natural order; h55istoric studies of scientific culture. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

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Hankins, T. L. & Silverman R. J. (1995). Instruments and the imagination. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Talbot also invented optical devices, including one which explored stroboscopic seeing. Talbot and Plateau are both credited with having provided the basis for one of the first lawful relationships in visual science, which identified how intermittent stimulation could be controlled using a stroboscopic disc (Talbot 1834:327-334).

Talbot, H. F. (1834). Experiments on light. London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science III, 5, Nov., 321-334.

See Wade, N. J. (1998). A natural history of vision. Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press. p 190-192.

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Gooding, D. (1998). Picturing experimental practice. Interdisciplinary Studies, 3, 298-324.

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Cannon, S. F. (1978). Science in culture: the early Victorian period. New York: Dawson & Science History Publications.

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Talbot’s own discovery account, at the beginning of Part 1 of The Pencil of Nature, nominates 1834.

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The great experimenter and scientific demonstrator, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) first announced the facts of Talbot’s invention to the Royal Institution (Gill 1967). The R.I., however, was hardly a public institution, although Faraday’s Friday night lectures were popularly attended, and in this instance were illustrated with actual photographs. Details of Talbot’s invention were subsequently recorded in the scientific and cultural journals.

Gill, A. T. (1967). Faraday and photography. Proceedings of the Royal Institution. 42, 54-67.

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The calotype or Talbotype was developed by Talbot as a negative process in 1840. Talbot continued to use his photogenic drawing paper to make positive images.

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Part 1 was the most sought after part of The Pencil. It contained Talbot’s own history of his discovery and invention, as well as seven photographs. 286 copies of part 1 were produced (Arnold 1977:157).

Arnold, H. J. P. (1977). William Henry Fox Talbot: pioneer of photography and man of science. London: Hutchinson Benham.

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The image used by Schaaf in his 1989 facsimile of The Pencil is the most dynamic of the two versions known to have been used. Newhall’s 1968/9 ‘facsimile’ of The Pencil used another, which Schaaf describes as a later version (Schaaf 1989) This later version , in my opinion, was made by Talbot’s assistant Nicholaas Henneman. Plate XXII is generally attributed to Henneman (Schaaf 1989:62). The second version of Plate I does not have the exciting picturing qualities of the first version, and it resembles, ‘aesthetically’, Plate XXII which is also a ‘descriptive’ image of its subject, and also taken with a similar length, ‘normal’ lens, a lens not much used much by Talbot in The Pencil.

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.

Newhall, B. (1968/9). The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot. New York: da Capo Press.

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This location perhaps suggested Talbot’s rather unusual framing of an image which is effectively split into two, vertically, and although the eye is drawn to the centre of the image by the beautifully rendered receding lines of the building, the lane which is in the centre of the image goes nowhere and ends in blackness and nothing.

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See Berman, M. (1988). All that is solid melts into air. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Rice, S. (1997). Parisian Views. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Also Rice, S. (1991). Parisian views. In D. P. Younger (Ed.). Multiple views; Logan Grant essays on photography 1983-89. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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Hankins, T. L. & Silverman R. J. (1995). Instruments and the imagination. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Eastlake, E. (1857) Photography, London Quarterly Review, 101, in Trachtenberg, A. (Ed.) (1980). Classic essays in photography, New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books.

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In an account published in the journals of the Royal Institution in 1802, and written by Humphry Davy, Thomas Wedgwood had observed that: “light transmitted through different coloured glasses acts upon it with different degrees of intensity. Thus it is found that red rays, or the common sunbeams passed through red glass, have very little action upon it: Yellow and green are more efficacious, but blue and violet light produce the most decided and powerful effects” (Litchfield 1973:188). This effect had been observed at an earlier time by Scheele and had been confirmed by Senebier who, like others, had made tests on ‘silver muriate’. It was a about this time that William Herschel’s discovery of infrared was being experimented with (Litchfield 1973:190).

Litchfield, R. B. (1973). Tom Wedgwood the first photographer. New York: Arno Press.

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Claudet invented the focometer in order to counter the problem of focusing different length light rays at a distance of less than 40 feet. The lens focus distance could then be calculated.

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

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Gernsheim, H. (1982). The origins of photography. London: Thames & Hudson.

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I have use the word experiment deliberately, but not to suggest that the outcomes were inconclusive or tentative. The Pencil shows that Talbot clearly sought to create new visual experiences with the camera. His images were experiments in seeing and perceiving, and at the same time they were propositions – that is, Talbot was proposing quite new imaging or picturing outcomes – by using the tools of photography. As I have suggested, historians such as Gernsheim have failed to see this, and like many other historians, he assumed that Talbot’s intentions either should have been, or were intended to replicate artistic conventions of the day – with the camera.

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At this distance of infinity, focus calculations were not necessary, however, one important feature of this image is its depth of field, that is, its apparent sharp focus right through the image.

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The wall has since been removed and a large tree has grown up, making this view impossible to see now.

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