The image is a detail from a salt print made from a calotype negative, early 1840s. Photographic History Collection, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, 3864.E. Schaaf 1262.
I love the clarity of daguerreotypes, but as far as photography is concerned they were an evolutionary dead end as they would not allow copies to be easily made. Fox Talbot’s invention changed that. The calotype process developed by Talbot produced negatives from which copies could readily be made. This negative based approach would rule photography for around 150 years (i.e. until the arrival of digital photography). Although he came up with his process before Daguerre, he didn’t make it generally known and with typical modesty he named his process ‘calotype’ rather than something like ‘talbotype’. Where Daguerre was a showman and entrepreneur, Talbot was a dedicated scientist. It’s wonderful to see that so much of his work remains. I found the blog to be particularly interesting.
There are very few arts, indeed very few human endeavours, so well documented as is William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of photography. Talbot (1800-1877) conceived of the art of photography in 1833, achieved his first images by 1834 and revealed the art to the public in 1839. By the time he ceased taking photographs in 1846, Talbot and his close associates had created more than 4500 distinct images. Miraculously, much of this prodigious output still survives. Collectively, they map out the technical and aesthetic progress of the new art from the first days of its infancy to the eve of its maturity. Equally, they dramatically document the emergence of Talbot himself as the first photographic artist. Trapped in silver are cities that have changed, people long since passed on, objects of virtue and those of everyday utility, timeless scenes of light and shade and much more.
Over a span of four decades, Professor Schaaf has examined more than 25,000 original Talbot negatives and prints in collections worldwide. The Catalogue Raisonné project seeks to make this corpus of material freely available to scholars and to the general public. The Catalogue will be the image-based cousin to The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, which has already mounted full searchable transcriptions of more than 10,000 Talbot letters online. Founded and directed by Schaaf, this resource is widely used in both academia and by the general public and is a highly successful completed project.
Viewed as physical artifacts, many of Talbot’s photographs are objects of beauty and mystery and promise. Each was made by hand on a sheet of paper, exposed to objects under sunlight or in improvised cameras. Negatives were the natural output of this process and many of them were printed, again on a hand-coated sheet of paper, producing a total known surviving output of more than 25,000 prints and negatives.
Much of Talbot’s research was done at his Wiltshire home of Lacock Abbey, itself a rich source of photographic subject matter. The productions at Lacock were often group efforts, usually defying attempts to assign specific authorship. While his wife Constance helped with some of the preparations, it was his formidable mother, Lady Elisabeth Feilding who was most outspoken about his choice of subjects and how to handle them. She also saw that his original photographs got a wide circulation in high society. Talbot’s valet, Nicolaas Henneman, became so involved in the new art that in 1843 he left service to set up the first comprehensive photographic operation, in the bustling railway and market town of Reading. By the mid-1840s, Talbot was collecting and purchasing negatives from his cousin Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot, his artist friend the Rev Calvert R Jones and his travelling friend, the Rev George Bridges. The work of Jones and Bridges has so often been confused with that of Talbot that it is necessary to incorporate these as well. The period covered by this catalogue is from the first successes in 1834 until the late 1840s. It will encompass work known to be by Talbot or photographs traditionally associated with him.