Summer Pleasures: Good Day Sunshine – No. 2

29 Jul 2016: Guest post by Brian Liddy In the first part of this ‘Good Day Sunshine’ series, a simple photogram represented the capture of the shadow of a leaf, although, counterintuitively, the ‘shadow’ came out light against a dark background. The sunlight reaching the sensitized paper surrounding the leaf darkened it, whereas the leaf shielded the paper …

Summer Pleasures: Sir David at Lacock

22 Jul 2016: The month of June 1842 had been a busy one for Talbot. Suffering from one of his recurring bouts of ill health, he was just winding up an extended trip to Germany and France, where happily he found that contact with scientific colleagues combined with mountain air did him a world of good (in spite …

Summer Pleasures: Good Day Sunshine – No. 1

15 Jul 2016: Today starts a new tradition, our first guest blog. Over the coming months there will be periodic contributions by outside authors. Appropriately our first guest blog is by Brian Liddy, our new Research Assistant. Brian worked extensively with the Talbot collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, for more than two decades; inevitably, some of …

Summer Pleasures: The Aesthetics of Conflict

8 Jul 2016: In spite of the cannons, the spectre of war is pleasantly remote from our thinking as we peruse this bucolic photograph. The scene is facing the great naval base at Devonport, outside Plymouth. Henry’s wife Constance was one of the women here – the other two were the maiden MacDonald sisters, but the conformity of …

Summer Pleasures: Beeches for Beaches

1 Jul 2016: Out of respect for your seasonal beach reading hopes, we return to the ‘Summer Pleasures’ format pioneered last year, where briefer little musings will generally contemplate a single image. Please feel free to suggest one of your favourite Talbot photographs for this series. Alive with the sparkle of leaves and filled with a sense of …