The curious case of the wandering shears

29 May 2015: One of the unexplained facets of Talbot’s work is the seeming contradiction between his clear reverence for ‘Nature’s drawing’ and the apparently arbitrary, indeed careless, manner in which he trimmed many of his prints and negatives. Talbot understood that all the variations in tone, splotches and other ‘imperfections’ in his photographs had solid roots in …

A broader view of Talbot

22 May 2015: The most detailed biography of Talbot remains the late H.J.P. ‘Doug’ Arnold’s 1977 William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of photography and man of science (London: Hutchinson Benham). Several aspects of Arnold’s varied career came to bear on this text. A graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, at various times Arnold was the Soviet Affairs Correspondent for …

A Brief History of the Project

15 May 2015: The idea of a full gathering together of the enormous corpus of photographs taken by William Henry Fox Talbot and his circle is the culmination of more than four decades of researching his holdings worldwide. At present, I know of more than 4500 distinct Talbot images and more than 25,000 surviving negatives and prints. This …

Project Press Release

8 May 2015: BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD NEWS RELEASE For immediate release Bodleian Libraries launch project to create online catalogue raisonné of Talbot’s photographs Oxford, 11 May 2015 – The Bodleian Libraries has launched an ambitious project to create a new web-based research tool that will allow scholars and members of the public to view and search …