The Pencil of Nature


Book Description

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Pencil of Nature" by William Henry Fox Talbot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.




William Henry Fox Talbot


Book Description

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age--a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies. Drawing on Talbot's fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, including historians of science, art, and photography, broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art




William Henry Fox Talbot and the Promise of Photography


Book Description

This publication serves as a primer on the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, a true interdisciplinary innovator who drew on his knowledge of art, botany, chemistry and optics to become one of the inventors of photography in 1839. Talbot?s 'photogenic drawings' (photograms), calotypes and salted paper prints are some of the first-ever examples of images captured on paper.0This book brings together more than 30 photographs by Talbot that demonstrate his wide-ranging interests, including nature, still-life, portraiture, architecture and landscape. Some of these images are previously unpublished. Through thematic groupings elucidated by noted Talbot scholar Larry Schaaf, the book reveals the photographer's early striving to test the boundaries of his medium at a historic moment when art and science intersected. With its luminous reproductions of Talbot's fragile works, this publication demonstrates that, in its earliest days, photography required a form of magic-making and innovation that continues to inspire people today.00Exhibition: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, United States (18.11.2017 - 11.02.2018).




Fox Talbot


Book Description

A monograph on Fox Talbot, universally recognised as the father of modern photography.




William Henry Fox Talbot


Book Description

The father of modern photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) developed the process by which photographic images could be reproduced, but he has yet to be sufficiently appreciated as a photographer in his own right. Over his photographic career he made more than 5,000 images which included fascinating pictures of his home Lacock Abbey, portraits of his family and friends, and still-lifes of botanical specimens, cloth and household objects. A key intellectual figure of the nineteenth century working in science, mathematics, astronomy, politics and archaeology, he is arguably the most important figure in the invention of photography. His practice established many of the medium's most familiar genres and he was devoted to the the advancement of photography, publishing the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, in 1844-46 to reveal the potential of the medium to a wider audience. This monograph features many of Talbot's best-known landscapes made around Lacock Abbey and some of the first negatives of the ever made, but it also includes lesser-known and previously unpublished work that reveals the extraordinary diverse scope of his work. His photographs reflect and embody the social and cultural issues of the time, but they are also fascinating, often beautiful, images that are still engaging today.




William Henry Fox Talbot


Book Description

Schaaf, an independent photohistorian and research professor at the University of Glasgow and the director of the Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project, discusses approximately fifty of Talbot's images in the collection of the Getty Museum."--BOOK JACKET.




Out of the Shadows


Book Description

This book chronicles for the first time in a detailed fashion the critical days of the invention and development of photography. In particular it explores the relationship between two Englishmen who played a key role in photography's early years; the preeminent scientist Sir John Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot, the artist and scientist who had invented his own photographic process years before Louis Daguerre announced his discovery in Paris in 1839. Drawing on hundreds of Herschel's and Talbot's letters, notebooks, and diaries, Larry J. Schaaf tells the story of the evolution of photography as expressed through their words, and in the process he sheds light on some questions over which others have puzzled. Given that the camera and the necessary chemistry had coexisted for years, why rather than how was photography invented? Why did Talbot keep his own photographic process secret until Daguerre's announcement? Why did Herschel make such fundamental contributions to the process of photography, yet take very few pictures himself? Who or what provided the visual training that allowed Talbot to grow into the first photographic artist? Schaaf skillfully describes the complexities of the events, the personalities and interests of the participants, the often vital role played by trivial circumstances, and the chaotic nature of the progress of photography. He narrates the rivalry between Talbot and Daguerre, showing how it mirrored the differences between France and Great Britain in their support of science and art. Enhanced by more than 100 reproductions in color and in duotone of some of the earliest photographs ever made, this book vividly re-creates both the invention of an art and the art of invention.




William Henry Fox Talbot


Book Description

Contains much material that is either currently unavailable in print, or previously unpublished, and explores new angles of interpretation, in particular the influences of Talbot's closest circle of friends, and whether photography ever achieved the ambitions that he set out for it. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Science Museum, London, in spring 2016, this catalogue features 100 high-quality reproductions of Talbot's work. Through two introductory essays, the book examines how Talbot's invention of photography in the 1830s, evolved to establish the artistic, scientific and industrial possibilities for photography. As a radically new way of seeing, Talbot set out how the medium of photography had the ability to open up the visual world to a different kind of scrutiny, as well as to reaffirm what was considered to be 'real'. Such experiments make Talbot's practice and thinking all the more complex and lasting but also provocative as he sits between ambitions of art and science through photography, and economic gain. The book furthermore discusses the relationships between a network of photographers who gravitated towards Talbot's process but each of whom took photography into different territory. Assessing their artistic contribution and social legacy, it reflects on how enthusiasm for photography was initially limited to a small close-knit, elite group of people. William Henry Fox Talbot is a testament to Talbot's magical and industrial visions for his invention, that range from the delicate capture of natural specimens to more staged and functional ambitions for photography as means of mass production. It will be of interest to the art enthusiast and general historian of nineteenth-century innovation, as well as to all those curious to learn more about this pioneer of photography.




Cameraless Photography


Book Description

This volume is a remarkable historical survey of photographic images created without a camera. Cameraless Photography presents a concise historical overview of photographic images created independently of a camera. It surveys the corresponding techniques—including photograms, chemigrams, luminograms, dye destruction prints, and more—used to create those images. The book features one hundred key images from more than one hundred and seventy years of history, ranging from the earliest experiments in chemical photography, such as those by Anna Atkins in the nineteenth century, through seminal avant-garde photograms of modernists such as Man Ray in the 1920s and 1930s to the latest digital processes by Susan Derges. Visually compelling, Cameraless Photography is an outstanding introduction to the significant cameraless processes used throughout the history of photography and the cameraless work of some of photography’s greatest names.




The Art-Union


Book Description