Medieval Views – The Middle Ages through the Lenses of 19th Century Photographers (original) (raw)
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William Henry Fox Talbot is now primarily remembered as the pioneer of photography. This was reinforced by the disposition of his papers, notably the separation of photographs and the few notebooks which document his photographic innovations from the rest of his archive mostly concerned with other scholarly activities beyond photography. Talbot’s interest was vast, ranging across the natural sciences, classical scholarship and Assyriology. The aim of this article is to explore his interest beyond photography by examining his scholarly notebooks that have been donated to the British Library by the family of Talbot’s descendents in 2006 as part of a larger archive. Using examples from various of Talbot’s notebooks, the article furthermore explores his way of taking notes in the context of more general nineteenth-century notetaking practices and investigates the relationship between notetaking and photography as two different and yet comparable methods of recording. Ultimately, the article claims that studying the notebooks and future access to the collection will foster research that gives a better account of Talbot as a creative individual, taking the idea of the intellectual mindset into account.
D. Gavagnin Talbot The Pencil of Nature. The Controversial Nature of Photography
Talbot: The Pencil of Nature. The Controversial Nature of Photography, 2023
This essay first briefly retraces the stages through which William Henry Fox Talbot arrived at the invention of the calotype and the publication of his first photographic book The Pencil of Nature. It then proposes an analysis of The Pencil of Nature from a semiotic point of view, focusing on the sign complexity of the text (understood as photographs and comments written together) and on its possible combinations of meaning in light of Talbot's evident skeptical and ironic attitude towards photography intended as a document. Talbot's historicist and sentimental vision, of post-romantic origin, is the key that explains this attitude, which throws photography into empty, silent fields of meaning, incapable, on its own, of providing the observer with some glimmer of truth. For Talbot the photographic image does not correspond to the world, it is neither an icon nor an index of it, but must be contextualized and validated through the exercise of a varied and memorial personal culture to obtain, however, still an uncertain truth.
caa.reviews, 2017
In Singular Images, Failed Copies, Vered Maimon investigates William Henry Fox Talbot and his connection with early photography. After H. J. P. Arnold's, Gail Buckland's, and Larry Schaaf's monographic works and studies on Talbot-first published in the 1970s and making essential original sources accessible-a renewed interest in Talbot and early photography has occurred. On the one hand, this could be linked to Schaaf's online research project on Talbot's correspondence (http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk) or more recently his work on a catalogue raisonné. Also, there are newly acquired Talbot records such as photographs, notebooks, and ephemera purchased in 2006 by the British Library, as well as Talbot's personal archive acquired by the Bodleian Library in 2014. On the other hand, the presumed rediscovery of a "first" photograph in 2008 and its attribution to Thomas Wedgwood once again raises important questions concerning the "beginning" or "origin" of photography. Criticism therefore challenges not only the birth of photography in 1839 and the definition of photography as such, but also narratives concerning photo-historiographical writing. Consequently, contexts, places, and actors that have been included or left out of photography history are being reconsidered through a meta-historical analysis (see Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, eds.,
The chorographic tradition and seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Scottish antiquaries
Journal of Art Historiography
Abstract: The early modern phenomenon of British Antiquarianism can be traced to the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical chorographic tradition. While the term 'chorography'eventually fell out of use, its influence can still be seen in the works of later antiquaries and more current approaches to land and particular places. This paper provides a brief introduction to the history and main concerns of chorography, identifies the continuity of chorographic thinking in the works of the Scottish antiquaries Sir Robert Sibbald and ...
Replacing History: William Henry Fox Talbot 'In Camera'
Introduction In 1802 Humphry Davy published an editorial on the early 'photographic' experiments of his friend, Thomas Wedgwood. This first disclosure of photography, though embryonic, and incomplete, presented the first published concept of photography, the 'first object' of which was to copy the images formed by means of a camera obscura. This proved impractically slow with the optics and light sensitive materials prepared at that time, however, a process of 'photographic' contact-copying was introduced, although attempts to preserve the images from further change upon exposure to light proved unsuccessful. In 1839, W.H.F. Talbot, pioneer of photography, upon learning of the invention of Daguerre, was finally motivated to publish his experiments with 'Photogenic Drawing', which had lain fallow since his first phase of work in 1834 and 1835. Talbot had employed the identical photo-chemistries as used by Wedgwood and Davy-silver nitrate and silver chloride; and also tried silver iodide, first synthesised by Davy. Talbot followed up all the applications of photography previously mentioned by Davy in 1802, such as contact copying leaves, paintings on glass, and copying the images of the solar microscope. Talbot also succeeded with copying the images of the camera obscura, and copying engravings, both of which Davy had mentioned had not been so successful. Talbot did make a few additional suggestions, such as making silhouette portraits, copying manuscripts, and a variation of copying paintings on glass, which was 'photogenic engraving' or cliché-verre, which could also be adapted to the photographic printing of words as well as drawings. The critical point upon which Talbot concentrated his first efforts, was to discover a chemical method to preserve or 'fix' the images from further light action. This had been the point of failure at which Davy had ended his report, almost begging for others to take up where he had left off, indicating that the subject was ripe for further research. Despite the chemical and technical similarities between Talbot's procedures and those of Wedgwood and Davy, Talbot often asserted that he had commenced his own experiments in complete ignorance of their former researches. But Talbot also vaguely admitted that some time after he had invented the same process and solved the fixing problem that had defeated Davy, he had met with a 'few notices,' that confirmed the identical process had been proposed and attempted before. He was also led to the first volume of the Journals of the Royal Institution, in which Davy's editorial on Wedgwood's invention was originally published. While historians of photography have often cited the first experiments undertaken by Wedgwood and Davy, they are usually dismissed as failures, and their abortive attempts seen as fruitless and sterile, because they had no influence on the the subsequent evolution of photography, in particular Talbot's contribution, which finally made paper photography practical, and his negative/positive process was the founding principle upon which modern photography depended right up to the digital age. This study takes an alternative view of Talbot's history, which is that the experiments reported in 1802, and those of Talbot in 1834 and 1835, are far from being independent of each other, as Talbot often claimed, that the former research directly informed the thinking and experiments undertaken by the latter experimenter, that the successes and failures reported in 1802, sometimes guided and sometimes misguided Talbot's thinking and course of research. These notes and queries look at a piece of literature which is the prime candidate for what may well have been Talbot's source for the idea of photography, and identifies this text as most likely to have been one of the 'few notices' he vaguely admitted to having met with some time during the course of his early research in the period 1834-6. This text could have provided Talbot with sufficient information to get him started on the road to photography, but it could not have given him all the answers, such as how to record a photographic image in the camera obscura, or how to fix images, therefore Talbot still had to tackle these problems on his own. Davy's 1802 report, in suggesting the marriage of silver salts to the idea of photography, may well have indicated to Talbot the direction to go, and which did indeed, lead the way to modern photography.