William Henry Fox Talbot
A beautiful monograph on the work of the inventor of modern photography.
Geoffrey Batchen
- The father of modern photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), developed the process by which photographic images could be reproduced creating beautiful and fascinating pictures of his home Lacock Abbey, portraits of his family and still-lifes of plant life, cloth and household objects
- This is the best introductory monograph to Fox Talbot’s work, with an accessible and wide-ranging selection of 55 images presented chronologically to document the development of his photography
- Includes both iconic images such as his landscapes made around Lacock Abbey, and lesser-known, but no less interesting, work that reveals the wide range of Fox Talbot’s oeuvre, which established the photographic genres that remain integral to the medium today
- Features a number of images from Fox Talbot’s publications which include The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), the first photographically illustrated book, and Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845) – both produced in an attempt to introduce photography to a wider audience
- The engaging introductory essay is written by an expert on the history of photography and a commentary accompanies each image in the elegant design offering further information on Fox Talbot's photography and the scientific process behind the making of the negatives
- The perfect book for the many photography enthusiasts and students interested in the work of this pioneer of nineteenth-century art and science
Hardback
216 x 270 mm, 8 1/2 x 10 5/8 in
128 pp
56 colour illustrations
ISBN 9780714841984
0714841986
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.
Geoffrey Batchen is a prolific author, curator and editor and a specialist in the theory and history of photography. He has written a number of books including a detailed analysis of photography’s emergence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997)and a collection of essays on photography and electronic culture, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001). His book Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance accompanied an exhibition of vernacular photographs that he curated for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2004, and which travelled on to Iceland, England and the United States. He teaches the history of photography at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, having previous taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of California, San Diego.