The Magazine Antiques

By Larry J. Schaaf  |  

When photography was first announced to the public in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1781–1851) took the limelight. Daguerre’s process produced a singular photograph on a silvered sheet of copper, breathtaking in its detail and seductive in its beauty. But in the larger mainstream of communication, it was a dead end. Talbot’s productions on paper seemed coarse and cumbersome by comparison. Yet paper has traditionally been the basis of many reproductive arts and is especially the province of books, allowing Talbot’s approach into existing pathways. The Library of the British Museum (as it was then) was not the logical repository of works of art, a function served by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert). Some photographs came in through the British Museum’s prints and drawings collection, others as part of donations of private libraries, but the truly stupendous numbers of photographs were collected contemporaneously as illustrations in books and portfolios. Since photomechanical processes were not perfected for most of the nineteenth century, many of these illustrations were original photographic prints. In many ways, we are fortunate that collections such as that of the British Library exist. They are fundamentally different from museum curated photographic collections though each has its strengths. Without this “accidental” collecting, many splendid images would either have been considered insignificant, or would not have fit the aesthetic of the moment and would have been lost to us.

The British Library is not the first library to declare itself a collector of photographs—the Bibliothèque nationale de France has had a curator of photography for years—but the sheer size and comprehensive nature of its collection makes it one of the most significant. A close model is the New York Public Library. When Julia Van Haaften was appointed that institution’s first curator of photographs in 1980, she drew on traditional librarian’s skills and intuition, seeking out keywords in the catalogues and mining likely sections of classification. The result was her 1982 exhibition and book, From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography, a surprisingly broad assemblage of significant art photographs from an unexpected source.3 In London that same year, the enormous photographic holdings of the India Office Library were transferred to the British Library, at once adding a defined collection of photographs. Momentum built over the years, as John Falconer, once with the India Office, was given a temporary appointment as curator of photographs, a position happily now made permanent. This recognition has allowed connoisseurship to join serendipity in building the collection. In 2006 the descendants of William Henry Fox Talbot generously donated the extensive photographic and manuscript collection that had been preserved at their ancestral home of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire (it was reportedly the largest single donation to the library ever given in any field). This established the British Library as a premier center of research for the earliest days of photography. Then, in 2009, the gift of the archive of the British branch of the Eastman Kodak Company added a commercial record through the end of the nineteenth century, providing a neat bookend to Talbot’s record of invention.

Today, a Talbot calotype negative on paper such as his stately Oak Tree in Winter (Figs. 3a, 3b) encourages a modernistic sense of abstraction and the visceral thrill of seeing the actual sheet of paper that faced the sunlight more than a century and a half ago. In the 1840s, however, the negative was more often regarded as a needless complication, introducing an unintelligible first stage that had to be “corrected” by printing on a second sheet of paper. But in publishing, that negative could serve the same function as type or printing plates to produce multiple identical copies. Talbot had always been interested in book production, particularly in botanical plates, and saw in his invention a more truthful and affordable alternative to lithography. In 1844 he commenced publication of his book, The Pencil of Nature, with each part illustrated with several original photographic prints. The Library of the British Museum received this book, not their earliest photographs nor their first photographic acquisition, but the first time that photographs rode in on the Trojan horse of the book.

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