William Henry Fox Talbot by Geoffrey Batchen
For one of the guys who invented photography, William Henry Fox Talbot is only represented in my library by way of one object. It is a portfolio of a dozen loose gravure plates which was published by Electra Editrice in 1980 and frankly, my Talbot portfolio has been viewed many fewer times than the Edweard Muybridge or Lewis Caroll editions that I own from the same series. With the rapid advances to the medium it is often hard to look back and get excited by an image of a wall that has barely registered onto paper or a piece of lace that was laid directly onto some light sensitive paper but a recent book from Geoffrey Batchen on Talbot and his practice energizes these early stepping stones of image making.
The invention of photography is shared by several from Johann Heinrich Schulze, who as far back as the 1720s discovered that silver nitrate darkened with exposure to light, to Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphry Davy who in the early 19th century were making photograms but weren't able to arrest the development process. Joseph Nicéphore Niepce made the first known photograph in 1826 at the same time that Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot were working out their own photo processes. Daguerre's announcement of his method of making a positive image on a silver plate took a bit of the wind out of Talbot's sails as Talbot had worked on his experiments in silence years many years before any public awareness of his advances.
What puts Talbot ahead of the others for me is his patented process that allowed photographic illustrations to be included in books. His Pencil of Nature (1844-46), a description of his process illustrated with 24 original prints is considered to be the first photo book.
Batchen's book William Henry Fox Talbot published by Phaidon is a fine tribute to this early pioneer.
With the possibilities open in those early years, Talbot shows himself to be truly curious to a wide variety of descriptions; from portraits to still lifes and from photomicrographs of crystals and plants, to pictures that foreshadow photography's ability to still motion. One interesting example is his "A Cascade of Spruce Needles" (1839). Essentially a contact image of spruce needles but their arrangement implies a pattern of falling needles.
In the 1830s, Talbot would leave home-made cameras lying around his estate during the long periods required to make even the thinnest of exposures; his wife
William Henry Fox Talbot as a book is a nearly perfect package for these great specimens. The paper is beautiful, the printing is extremely well done, and the final touches of the cover tip-on image and clean design add a modern elegance. The most enjoyable trait is Batchen's caption paragraphs that accompany each image.
Talbot deserves to be noticed especially by book-lovers. He invented the form. If you can't have the Pencil of Nature then this may be the next best thing.
Book Available Here (William Henry Fox Talbot)
