William Henry Fox Talbot, born February 11, 1800 in Melbury, Dorset, and died September 17, 1877 in Lacock, Wiltshire, was a British scientist who became one of the pioneers of photography. He was a mathematician, physicist and philologist; also interested in botany, philosophy and archaeology, he spoke several languages. Talbot became interested in images obtained with a camera obscura in 1833. He is the inventor of the calotype, or “talbotype”, which he patented in 1841. This photographic process made it possible to obtain multiple positive images on paper from a single paper negative.
Talbot carried out his research in parallel with Daguerre’s research. After the announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, he tried to have the precedence of his work recognized. He did not succeed, but his negative-positive process became the basis of modern silver photography. Talbot was the author of the first book illustrated with photographs, The Pencil of Nature, published in 1844.
William Henry Fox Talbot first photographic essays
In 1833, during a stay at Lake Como in Italy, Talbot tried to reproduce landscapes using a camera lucida, to draw sketches. But this technique involved drawing, which he did not like. He then sought to obtain durable images by another means and began his photographic experiments.
His first process was called “photogenic drawings” which he developed in 1839. It consisted of placing an object on a sheet of sensitized paper, then exposing it to light, before fixing the resulting image. The silhouette of the object – a tree leaf, a plant, a feather… – appeared in negative. The photosensitive support was made by wetting a sheet of paper in a solution of cooking salt, then silver nitrate. After exposure, the image was fixed with a potassium salt.
William Henry Fox Talbot continued his tests using the camera obscura. He used small cameras, called “mousetraps” by his family. In 1835, he obtained the first paper negative that has come down to us. This small negative image, 1 inch wide, shows a window, taken from inside Lacock Abbey, his Wiltshire home.
The invention of the calotype
In January 1839, the invention of the daguerreotype by Louis Daguerre, based on the work of Nicéphore Niépce, was publicly revealed in France. François Arago announced it to the Academy of Sciences on January 7. This new surprise surprised Talbot, who then sought to have the anteriority of his research recognized. He wrote to Arago and sent his photogenic drawings to the Royal Society in London. On January 31, 1839, he made a communication to the Royal Society on the subject (“Some account of the art of photogenic drawing, or the process by which natural objects may be made delineate themselves without the aid of the artists pencils”). But the daguerreotype was ready, was supported by the French government, and was available free of charge: this process was to become a worldwide standard for at least a decade.
During the years 1839-1841, Talbot improved his process. He reduced the exposure time by treating with gallic acid after exposure in the darkroom, which allowed the latent image to be developed. He resumed the soda hyposulfite photographic fixing technique he had learned from Sir John Herschel. Sodium hyposulphite, or sodium thiosulphate, has the property of dissolving silver salts. This product is still used today as a fixer in silver photography.
But above all, Talbot had the idea of using the paper negative as an object to be copied. The contact print from the paper negative made it possible to obtain a positive image in as many copies as desired. His process surpassed that of Daguerre, because each daguerreotype is unique and cannot be reproduced. In 1841, he patented his invention under the name of calotype (also called talbotype). In 1842, Talbot received the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society for his innovative work in the field of photography.
In 1844, William Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, the first illustrated book with photographs ever published. This book recounted his discoveries and included twenty-four off-text calotypes.
Talbot travelled to Belgium in October 1846. In Brussels and Liège he did not succeed in taking pictures, but in Mechelen he made about ten pictures which constitute the oldest set of photographic images of a Belgian city that has come down to us.
Talbot brought a fundamental advance to photography: the possibility to reproduce a positive image from a negative. However, the calotype did not meet with the success it deserved, because, on the one hand, it gave images of lower quality than the daguerreotype and, on the other hand, it was patented and subject to high user fees, which led to lawsuits and hindered its dissemination.
The Pencil of Nature
The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot, is an unfinished book of photographs published in six numbers between June 1844 and April 1846, and the “first photographically illustrated book to be published commercially ” or “the first book published in the illustrated photography trade.
The photographs and texts offered, with extraordinary prescience, a wide range of applications for this new medium, including the reproduction of rare prints and manuscripts, a portrait, architectural representations, botanical specimens, and artistic representations.
The book uses the calotype technique developed by William Henry Fox Talbot, and is therefore considered an important work in the history of photography. Written by Talbot and published by Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans (en) in London, the book details Talbot’s development of the calotype process and includes twenty-four calotypes, each glued by hand, illustrating some of the possible applications of this new technique. The twenty-four plates have been carefully selected to illustrate the many potential applications of photography. They include a variety of architectural studies, scenes, still lifes and close-ups, as well as facsimiles of prints, sketches and texts. Due to long exposure times, however, Talbot inserted only one human representation, The Ladder (Plate XIV). Talbot also sought to demonstrate the potential of photography as a new artistic medium with images such as The Open Door (Plate VI).
At the time the book was published, photography was still an unfamiliar concept to most people – Athenaeum magazine called Talbot’s work “a wonderful illustration of modern necromancy ” – and the book was the first opportunity for the general public to see what photographs looked like. Since many people were not yet familiar with this concept, Talbot felt obliged to insert the following note in his book: “The plates in this work are obtained by the sole action of light, without any help from the artist’s pencil, and are not, as some have imagined, engravings that would imitate it”.
Talbot further specifies that “the boards are executed with the utmost care, using only optical and chemical processes”.
The cover page of The Pencil of Nature is contrasted, which is characteristic of the Victorian era, with styles inspired by Baroque, Celtic and medieval elements. Its symmetrical design, letters and intricate carpet pages evoke the Book of Kells. The Pencil of Nature was published and sold section by section, without any obligation (as in many books of the time, buyers were supposed to bind it once all the fascicles had been published). Talbot had planned a large number of fascicles. However, the book was not a commercial success and he was forced to terminate the project after publishing only six fascicles.
Some forty complete or nearly complete copies have come down to us. The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the book as “the most important milestone in the art of the book since Gutenberg’s invention of the movable typeface.
The Open Door
The Open Door plate is one of the best known photographs in the book. It is one of the first examples of photography worked with the same sensitivity that a painter would bring to the framing and arrangement of the subject. The image went through several iterations before Talbot selected the one he would publish, after testing different levels of light, object placement and using chemical detergents to alter the layout and tone.
Photoengraving
Realizing that silver images would never be completely permanent, William Henry Fox Talbot worked to develop a system that would allow images to be printed on paper in a printing press. He filed a patent for a photographic engraving process in 1852, a process that he improved by another patent in 1858 (he called it “photoglyphic engraving”). These two processes are the ancestors of modern photoengraving.
Tributes
A museum, the Fox Talbot Museum, located in Lacock, Wiltshire, is dedicated to him. In 1976, the International Astronomical Union gave the name Talbot to a lunar crater in his honour. In 1996, William Henry Fox Talbot was one of the 26 photographers active in Belgium honoured at the FotoMuseum Antwerpen (Museum of Photography in Antwerp) during the exhibition Pioneers in Beeld.
The Pencil of Nature PDF, 1844
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-pdf.pdf
Curated videos on William Henry Fox Talbot
Henry Fox Talbot Notebooks
www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/pdf/ebljarticle142010.pdf
Articles about Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography, Edited by Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam.
Replacing History: William Henry Fox Talbot ‘In Camera’, Darran Green.
Vered Maimon: Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Early Photograph, Katharina Steidl.
Bibliography
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Batchen, Geoffrey. William Henry Fox Talbot. Phaidon, 2008.
Schaaf, Larry. Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography. Yale University Press, 1992.
Hannavy, John. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Routledge, 2008.
Buckland, Gail. Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. Ashmolean Museum, 1980.
Gernsheim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography: From Herschel to the Present. Thames & Hudson, 1982.
Greenough, Sarah, et al. Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection. National Gallery of Art, 2019.
Hill, Paul, ed. Approaching Photography. Little, Brown and Company, 1982.
King, John. Fox Talbot: An Illustrated Life of Willam Henry Fox Talbot, “Father of Modern Photography,” 1800-1877. Rizzoli, 1980.
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Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present. The Museum of Modern Art, 1982.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. Abbeville Press Publishers, 1984.
Schaaf, Larry, and Roger Taylor. Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007.
Schaaf, Larry. Sun Pictures: Catalogue 3: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Birth of Photography. Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, 2002.
Schaaf, Larry. The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot. Princeton University Press, 2000.
Schaaf, Larry, and Carol Jacobi. The Lost Album: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Birth of Photography. The Wilson Centre for Photography, 2019.
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Talbot, William Henry Fox. The Pencil of Nature. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844-46.
Daguerre won the battle because he offered his process for free