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 …

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 …

Revelations & Representations

27 May 2016: “H. F. Talbot, photogr: 1839” How do you take something in a totally new visual medium and express it through an existing and familiar form of communication? This was the dilemma suddenly faced by journal editors in early 1839. Daguerre’s announcement surprised everyone but it would be some time before anyone in Britain had a …

Harold White – Photographer, Scholar, Collector, Restorer

20 May 2016: Harold White (1902-1983) was the foremost Talbot scholar of his generation and in many ways shaped subsequent research in this field. A highly accomplished professional photographer, his 1949 endorsement of the ‘Nebro’ tripod would have carried more than sixteen stones of weight with his colleagues and must have contributed to its sales. He was a …

The Mysterious Agency of Natural Chemistry

13 May 2016: Published in 1844, “Part of Queen’s College, Oxford” was the very first plate in the first number of The Pencil of Nature. The Spectator complimented the documentary power of photography, noting that the plate illustrated “the abraded surface of the stone front with a strikingly real effect.” The Literary Gazette echoed this thought: “the time-worn …