'First Photographs: William Henry Talbot and the Birth of Photography'
Excerpts from a review of an exhibition held at the Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego, April - June 2003
By Christopher Knight, L A Times, April 5, 2003
Talbot is the man who set certain basic terms by which
photography operated for almost the last 150 years. He invented
the photographic negative, the process by which light creates a
negative image on a piece of chemically treated paper, which can
then be reproduced -- once or in great quantity -- in a positive
form.
"First Photographs: William Henry Fox Talbot and the
Birth of Photography" was organized by MOPA director Arthur
Ollman and curator Carol McCusker in conjunction with Michael
Gray, curator of the Fox Talbot Museum at the photographer's
ancestral home, Lacock Abbey in Chippenham, England. Amazingly,
it is the only American show ever organized to chronicle Talbot's
pioneering achievement.
The neck-and-neck competition
between Englishmen and Frenchmen in the 1830s to establish a
photographic process is well known and much studied. But,
especially compared with Daguerre, one can only speculate on why
Talbot has been so egregiously under-recognized by museum
exhibitions.
[The most] illuminating explanations for art history's tendency to favor Daguerre over Talbot in the story of photography turn on significant cultural differences. Daguerre was a painter and scenic artist for the theater when he developed his hugely popular photographic process. Talbot, by contrast, was a scientist, mathematician, linguist and classical scholar. Indeed, not only wasn't he an artist, his very frustration with his own inability to draw first got him thinking about a mechanical method for fixing images. France, not England, was the artistic epicenter of 19th century Europe.
And Daguerre was bourgeois, engaged in the lively commercial life of the day, while Talbot was Oxford-educated, patrician and aloof in a stratified society. Post-revolutionary Paris was politically volatile, and well on its way to becoming an intellectually rough-and-tumble center of avant-garde activity. Victorian London preoccupied itself with conscientious managerial pursuits at home and imperialist expansion abroad.
Some of that conscientiousness -- and even the imperialism -- can be seen in Talbot's
photographs. Many are like inventories. There are
photographs of shelves lined with light-reflective silverware and tables set
out with accouterments for tea. Family members and visitors to
Lacock Abbey are recorded, not to mention various nooks and
crannies of the estate, inside and out. He photographed at his
alma mater, and during trips to France. He took pictures of
plaster versions of favorite sculptures, pieces of lace and
leaves of plants. He photographed book pages, and he published
the first photo book [called The Pencil of Nature] . [Right: The Bridge of Sighs in Venice]
Rarely artful, these forthright recordings of worldly things
both large and small show the world coming
slowly but
relentlessly under the dominion of the camera, rather as Delhi,
Bombay and Calcutta came under the sovereignty of Queen Victoria,
empress of India. When he made his panorama of cameramen at work,
the modern global ubiquity of photographs was presaged.
If Talbot's dreamy, atmospheric photos aren't aesthetically
challenging or even especially pleasing, the way a crisp,
glamorous, silvery daguerreotype so often is, there's no
discounting the revolution Talbot's brilliant innovation
launched. Until the recent rise of digital imagery, which doesn't
even need the light of the world to fabricate a picture, making
positive prints from negatives was the photographic standard. [Left: The Open Door]
Talbot's first negative, the guileless one of crystalline
windowpanes in his sitting room, is tiny, barely an inch or so
big. That he took a picture of light streaming through
transparent glass is poetic enough, reverberating as it does
against photography's very method of capturing illumination
through a lens. But squint at the little digital facsimile in the
show, and its parallel rows of fuzzy black rectangles seem
strangely familiar. They resemble nothing so much as a forensic
chart analyzing markers of modern culture's DNA.
Series: Temples・寺; Dreamscapes・夢; Seascapes・海; Furusato ・ ふるさと; Pathways・道; Mongolia・ﾓﾝｺﾞﾙ; Acts & Scenes・町; Unseen ・ 見残す
Original photogravure etchings by Peter Miller seen at this site are available by clicking the order button on any full-screen image page, or from these fine print dealers:
Baltimore: Conrad R Graeber Fine Art, Box 264, Riderwood, Md, U.S.A., tel +1-410-377-6713
San Francisco: Japonesque, 824 Montgomery Street, SF, Ca, U.S.A., tel +1-415 391-8860
Netherlands: Eric van den Ing, Saru Gallery, tel: +31(0)6-2246-4074.
Moscow: Lumiere Brothers Center, 119072, Red October, Bolotnaya emb 3 b. 1, Moscow, Russia, 119072), tel +7-968-451-4019
Vladivostok: Arka Gallery, 5 Svetlanskaya St, Vladivostok, Russia, tel +7-4232-410-526
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