Product Description
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) is widely considered to be the father of modern photography, having developed the process by which photographic images could be reproduced. However, he has yet to be sufficiently appreciated as a photographer in his own right. Over the course of his photographic career, he has made more than 5,000 images that include fascinating pictures of his home, Lacock Abbey, portraits of family and friends, and still lifes of botanical specimens, cloth, and household objects. A key intellectual figure of the nineteenth century in science, mathematics, astronomy, politics, and archaeology, Talbot is arguably the most important figure in the invention of photography. His practice established many of the medium's most familiar genres. Talbot was devoted to the advancement of photography, publishing the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), which revealed the potential of the medium to a wider audience.



This new monograph features many of Talbot's best-known landscapes made around Lacock Abbey and some of the first negatives ever made. It also includes lesser-known and previously unpublished work that reveals the extraordinarily diverse scope of his work.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 as engaging today as they were nearly 200 years ago. ... Read more

Product Description
First Photographs is an extraordinary view into the origins of photography.This landmark monograph - the only book on Talbot to be authored by the Fox Talbot museum's curator - includes many never-before-published images of landscapes, architectural studies, and portraits from Talbot's personal archive and selections from his detailed research notebooks made during the 1830s and 1840s and currently housed at Lacock Abbey in Chippenham, England.A gentleman and an intellectual, Talbot was a great student of the Arts and Sciences and kept detailed notes of his activities and experiments.He discovered the negative/positive paper process which made multiple reproductions of a single image possible, and which distinguished it from its contemporary, the one-of-a-kind daguerreotype.Talbot first announced his invention to the public in 1839 in his paper "An Account Of The Art of Photogenic Drawing Or The Process By Which Natural Objects May Be Made To Delineate Themselves Without The Aid Of The Artist's Pencil."The work he did during this time established in principle and in practice the foundation of modern photography - the basis of the process that is still used today.In addition to Talbot's technological contributions, his photographs represent exceptional artistic achievement.First Photographs includes a significant text by the preeminent Talbot scholar today, Michael Gray, who provides a comprehensive essay, biography, and timeline of Talbot's eventful life and revolutionary work.Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, gives an in-depth analysis of the aesthetic and social significance of Talbot's first image, the "Oriel Window." Curator Carol McCusker considers how the Romantic Movement and the women of the Lacock household influenced Talbot's aesthetic choices.First Photographs and the accompanying exhibition provide a rare opportunity for contemporary audiences to experience these uncommon images and the personal, cultural, and scientific contexts in which they were made.William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a philosopher, classicist, Egyptologist, mathematician, philologist, transcriber and translator of Syrian and Chaladean cuneiform texts, physicist, and photographer.His first experiments in photography made use of the photogenic process; he then went on to develop the process of creating negatives that could be used to make positive reproductions. ... Read more

Product Description
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre may be the official father of photography, but William Henry Fox Talbot, Cambridge graduate, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and amateur archeologist, is the true father of modern photography. In 1840, Talbot invented the positive-negative process that permits endless reproductions, the same technique still used today. Traces of Light magnificently reproduces hundreds of his early photographic work, images that capture the shapes of fleeting, mysterious, everyday things such as flowers, leaves, feathers, and most especially lace. Also included are scholarly essays that explore Talbot's growth as an artist, his technical achievements, his near obsession with lace, and his relevance to the contemporary state of things. ... Read more

Product Description
Published to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Britain's celebrated inventor of photography, Specimens and Marvels illuminates the mid-nineteenth-century cultural environment in which Talbot's vision for photography emerged--a vision that would permanently alter how human beings view themselves and the world.

This unprecedented publication focuses on Talbot's ambitions for the mystical blend of science and art he termed "photogenic drawing" (later called "photography"), as outlined in his classic The Pencil of Nature.

In addition to some of the familiar icons from photography's beginnings, such as Talbot's cameraless photograms of plant forms and lace, many unseen and little-known experiments with calotypes will be featured in this invaluable new volume on the life and work of William Henry Fox Talbot.

Lively and insightful texts offer new critical perspectives on Talbot's significance in the history of image-making, the illustrated book, and the history of ideas. The book is published in association with the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television (NMPFT), in Bradford, England, home of the largest collection of Talbot material in the world.
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Customer Reviews (1)

A Splendid Achievement (ASA)
you may think this a fusty tome abrim with wizened snaps of dead old salts but you would miss the point for the point is one essay that shines and shines by one Russell Roberts, he of the Shining Path Tendency of photographic enamorature, he who blazes and has always blazed a singular track of obstreperous preposterous and bifocular intrepitude through the carelessly lobbed jeers of lesser men and women, barbing and bobbing through catcalls brickbats and old hats the air thick with huzzas and the cadenced grumple of an introitus by the Dulwich Male Voice Choirpiquanting as we all salute the dear old Queen on her 88th but we really do insist that she should be in this book talk about a world record she will bury the lotCharles Philip Harry you name it she will go on an on and on and on just like dear old Russell or as we call him behind his big broad back Rascal Roberts don't ask... ... Read more

Product Description
Fox Talbot is universally recognised as the father of modern photography.His 'calotype' or 'Talbotype' process was the first working photographic process to use the now familiar format of negatives and positives.He was an ambitious man but his interests spread far beyond the confines of photography and it was as a mathematician that he was awarded first Membership and then Fellowship of the Royal Society before the age of thirty-three.He was an accomplished astronomer, a keen archaeologists and a fluent master of Greek and Hebrew.He patented pioneering ideas for internal combustion engines and as early as 1840 and through his life was at the forefront of progressive scientific thinking in England. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

100 quality plates from the father of modern photography
This book is a very large weighty tome, measuring 28cm x 32cm x 4cm. It has 21 pages of text discussing Fox Talbot's work and the photographic process. The remaining few hundred pages are devoted to high quality plates of 100 of his images and a page of text detailing the background to each of these images. Sometimes this text uses rather flowery arty language and certainly not in the style of the dry highly scientifically orientated writings of Talbot at the time. Plus there's no detailed 'Talbot life story' as such, but then much of that is available on the web, e.g. www.foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk. However on the web there are precious few of his photographs on view because of the very high copyright charges for reproduction, hence the attraction of this book.

My only disappointment is that only one solar microscope image is shown - a slice of horse chestnut (I am a microscopist by trade), the remaining 'scientific' images being termed `contact prints' of things like leaves and flowers (e.g. Vines, Honeysuckle, pine needles, orchids) - although I am advised by Talbot authorities that these were most probably taken using the solar microscope as well. Many images are people-less and static e.g. Lacock Abbey windows, lace, breakfast table, Library books, articles of glass, Milliner's Window, Hungerford bridge, The Royal Pavilion, Trinity Church and various woodland scenes. There are about 15 plates with people who stayed still long enough to be recorded in the image, such as: the footman, a group taking tea, the ladder, his daughter, Lady Feilding reclining, Charles Porter drinking tea. These photographs are nothing like as impressive as late Victorian photo images, such as city and dockland scenes, but they are fascinating from a historical perspective. These Talbot images date from 1835 to 1845, and naturally some show serious fading (they don't appear to be retouched at all - a good thing). Also included is a painted B&W silhouette portrait of Talbot as a boy [age 7] that contrasts very well with his later photographic images.

In fact Englishmen Thomas Wedgewood took the first photographs before 1802, but unfortunately couldn't devise a way to fix the image, so the photographs slowly faded from view after they were taken and are now lost (but some of Wedgewood's images may have survived to the 1860's). Although Frenchman Daguerre published first in 1839 with his mercury photographic process, Fox Talbot developed the modern 'negative' process, so that many prints could be taken from one image. So a very interesting book of the art (and science) of the father of modern photography, but perhaps it can be rather expensive (reflecting its high quality production). Three stars for value, four stars for content.

Fantastic
It is incredible.I am viewing people so far back in time that I am enchanted.I am viewing a fashionable Paris Blvd in the 1940's and am in a position to compare Zola's naturalism in my mind to the truth.

I am thrilled with my purchase.

Schaaf's Fox Talbot
Larry Schaaf has put together an absolute benchmark of a book. To all of you who sat in the "college survey of art history," saw the2" by 2" Fox Talbot image "The Soliloquy of the Broom"and wondered what the fuss was about; see this book.To all of youphotographers who secretly wonder if photography is really art; see thisbook.One hundred images are reproduced with (no kidding) breathtakingquality and nuance. Each image is accompanied by a very readable account ofhow the image was produced and enough descriptive detail about the originalimage to satisfy an archeologist.

If you are a photo researcher orarchivist; read Schaaf's notes on "The photographic artifact ashistorical map" (p. 22). It is clear, it is complete, it isdefinitive.I wish all histories and text books could read like this. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1847Original Publisher: J. MurraySubjects: English languageLanguage Arts ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing’s Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more