First impressions from Jaanika

23 Feb 2018: We got a boost of energy in January when Jaanika Vider joined our staff. She had just come from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum whilst labouring on her PhD in the History of Anthropology. Her experience is practical as well as historical, for she is a keen amateur photographer and previously reorganized Larry Fink’s vintage prints …

The hands into which this beautiful and ill fated invention has fallen

16 Feb 2018: Last weekend, on 11 February, Henry Talbot would have celebrated his 218th birthday. And we shouldn’t forget that he shares that birthday not only with Thomas Edison but also the consummate experimenter, Mark Osterman, who fell somewhat short of Talbot’s number. Henry Talbot had an uneasy relationship with capitalism, being ensnared between an 18th c …

Miscellanea Photogenica, No. 8

9 Feb 2018: An occasional series of tasty morsels that cross my desk More on Talbot’s equipment Last week Roger Watson’s guest blog explored the cameras that Talbot used, the first blog in what I hope becomes a series on the physical underpinnings of Talbot’s photographs. In looking at some old snapshots that I had taken in the …

The Hunt for Talbot’s Cameras

2 Feb 2018: Wednesday brought us the 179th anniversary of Henry Talbot’s first paper on photography Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, read before the members of London’s Royal Society on 31 January 1839. The gods celebrated appropriately this week by producing the ‘Super Blood Moon’, an astronomical event that surely would have fascinated Henry. Today, …