Happy Birthday to The Pencil of Nature

24 Jun 2016: On this day, June 24th in 1844, William Henry Fox Talbot upended centuries of tradition in book illustration. In issuing the opening fascicle of The Pencil of Nature, he took the first faltering but bold steps towards forever changing the way that we would produce and view books. This pioneering publication more than anything else …

Welcome Brian Liddy

20 Jun 2016: I am delighted to announce that a week from today Brian Liddy will be joining our team as our first Research Assistant. Many of you will be familiar with Brian already from his two decades working with the collections at the National Media Museum in Bradford. Brian brings some unusual strengths to the project. While …

Sparks, Spinning Wheels & Whites of Egg

17 Jun 2016: Thirty nine years ago almost to the day, when I was teaching photojournalism and photohistory at The University of Texas at Austin I was joined by Roy Flukinger outside Richard Greffe’s house. We braced ourselves on Roy’s old brown Chevelle. The collective memories are now a bit hazy but on balance it seems that Mike …

The Peripatetic Shelves

10 Jun 2016: Published in the first number of The Pencil of Nature in June 1844, the third and fourth plates demonstrate the particular virtues of allowing Nature to handle the task of drawing. Articles of China and Articles of Glass brilliantly showcase the descriptive properties of photography. Talking about the china, Talbot speculated that “from the specimen …

The Puzzling Chess Players

3 Jun 2016: Some of the most widely-reproduced and universally admired ‘Talbot’ photographs are this brace of The Chess Players. The silver-haired scientific friend of Talbot, Antoine Claudet, faces off against a yet to be identified opponent (more on that person in a moment). The studio setting is simple, the lighting dramatic, the expressions believable and real. These …