Starting in 1852 Talbot sought to merge photography and the familiar printer’s ink. His Dandelion Seeds was photographed onto a printing plate with all the truthfulness of nature (Fig. 13). This plate was then used in the time-proven way to put printer’s ink on paper. The example shown, executed using his first “photographic engraving” process, is beautiful in spite of lacking the full tonality in the denser areas of the seeds. In 1858 he introduced a second process, termed “photoglyphic engraving”, which used the concept of the halftone dot to overcome this. Although it was not brought to commercial perfection in his lifetime, Talbot’s work was the basis of photogravure, and thus the inventor of photography was also the inventor of a way to permanently intertwine that art with the art of the book. Until the digital age, it was through printer’s ink that we saw the majority of our photographs.
Talbot could have been speaking about the British Library’s holdings when he delighted in the fact that “sometimes inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls… sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen, and upon it—unconsciously recorded—the hour of the day at which the view was taken.”5 An 1845 reviewer of Talbot’s Pencil of Nature observed that “photography has already enabled us to hand down to future ages a picture of the sunshine of yesterday.”6 The sunshine of the first century and a half of photography was broadly, effectively, democratically preserved, largely unseen, hidden in the bookshelves of the British Library. In the digital world, where will we find its successors a century and a half from now? How will we remember the small but critically important elements of today?
1 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, no. 3 (London, May 1845), text for Pl. XIII, Queen’s College, Oxford, Entrance Gateway.
2 The catalogue of the exhibition is by John Falconer and Louise Hide, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs (British Library, London, 2009). All the illustrations here are drawn from the catalogue.
3 Julia Van Haaften, From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography from the New York Public Library (Thames and Hudson, New York, 1982).
4 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1908), p. 12.
5 Talbot, Pencil of Nature, no. 3, text for Pl. XIII.
6 Athenaeum, no. 904 (February 22, 1845), p. 202.
LARRY J. SCHAAF is a photohistorian and consultant, based in Baltimore, and the author of numerous books. He is the editor of the online Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot: www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk.
Gemellion, Artist unknown, Limoges, France, 13th century Champlevé Enamel on Copper, 8 7/8” diameter Collection of The Walters’ Art
» View All