From: Martin Reis (mreis@tafelmusik.org)
Date: 12/20/02-03:16:49 PM Z
(Some 'light' reading for the holidays)
December 20, 2002
When Light Was Captured
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Among the earliest photographs William Henry Fox Talbot made
was a picture of lace now in the Talbot show at the International Center
of Photography. Talbot placed the lace on a piece of paper he had
sensitized with silver alts, then put them both in the sun. After a few
minutes he removed the lace. The paper, reacting to the sunlight, retained
the impression of the fabric as a silhouette.
Amazing. The image today looks mysterious: a fine, flat,
abstract shape, irregular and ghostly. It takes a moment to recognize it.
Before that, we assume the intent is art, accustomed as we are to seeing
abstract images in museums that way, which was certainly not how Talbot
thought about the photograph.
We can only imagine the original magic of it. Vision became a
physical object fixed on paper; three dimensions became two not
through the intermediary of somebody wrestling with a pencil or brush but
directly through nature, and in more detail than anybody, or almost
anybody, could match by hand. The famous story is that Talbot, frustrated
at his own infelicitous attempts to sketch landscapes while at Lake Como
in Italy in 1833, determined to find another way "to cause these natural
images to imprint themselves durably."
So photography was born partly as a kind of convenience, a
labor-saving alternative to drawing, but also an impersonal machine,
dispassionate, unlike the human hand, except that it soon became obvious to
Talbot and every other thinking person that photography, like drawing,
was still inescapably a tool of human manipulation and individual
taste. Nothing can return us to the state of innocence before
photography was invented - invented twice, by Talbot and by Louis Jacques
Mandé Daguerre, separately, using different techniques. But this show, the
first thorough retrospective of Talbot in the United States, can remind us
how utterly the world was changed by their invention. Talbot, the
archetypal 19th-century polymath and inventor, came up with the
negative-positive process, the chemical and mechanical method that did for
visual images no less than what the printing press did for the written word.
As a result he reshaped how people saw their surroundings: photography
became, as a visual tool, the threshold between the past and modernity.
I stress what may already be obvious at the start because the
exhibition recapitulates basic photographic truths. These include the
simple pleasure of looking at a photograph. Organized by the Museum of
Photographic Arts in San Diego (with support from the Talbot Committee),
the show is installed here in galleries that include many of Talbot's
letters. (He wrote so much that it's almost possible to track what he did
every day of his adult life.) On the walls are what at a glance look like
brownish blotches, each a subtly different tint: photographs, windows onto
Talbot's universe, the slow world of landed, educated England in the early
19th century, both antique and Romantic.
Talbot photographed Byronic landscapes and also pensive men
sitting in plush armchairs gazing dreamily into the ether. The Rembrandtish
quality of his prints, softly accentuated by the texture of the paper,
enhanced the atmosphere of moody poetry. He contrived stagy scenes of
laborers, who posed holding saws and hammers or stood beside ladders,
pretending to work or do who knows what. Shadowy streets and university
buildings, empty (because the photographs required long exposures and so
couldn't capture people moving), look ghostly like ruins. Views of Paris
make the city seem stonily inert. We know these sorts of scenes from
snapshots by shutterbugs who probably never heard of Talbot. He brought
about a world now largely imagined through images people see through a
viewfinder, accumulate, hold in their hands.
The family portrait. The class photo. The news shot. The
passport picture. The view of Uncle Burt smiling before the Tower of
London. Photographs define the rituals of our lives; they make everyone a
potential artist and document reality, while also altering it, because
photographs have their own particular truth and integrity. Talbot's
photograph of lace, for example, recorded the existence of the fabric he
placed on the sheet of paper but is not a reproduction of it. The picture is
an image with properties specific to photography: flatness, tinting,
cropping. Photographs fragment and dislocate the world, and reduce
everything to the same scale, as Talbot recognized.
They also concentrate attention on what the eye might not
normally bother to notice, which, when set apart on a sheet of paper,
becomes strange, new and beautiful. Susan Sontag famously observed: "Nobody
exclaims: `Isn't that ugly! I must take a photograph of it.' Even if someone
did say that, all it would mean is, `I find that ugly thing . . .
beautiful.' "
Not incidentally, Talbot called his early photographs
calotypes, from "kalos," meaning beautiful.
Everything became potentially beautiful. Artists before
Talbot painted banal and mundane things and made them look beautiful. But
photography conveyed beauty differently.
Talbot made a beautiful photograph of books on shelves,
perhaps imitating a still life, perhaps suggesting photography's potential
as evidence, legal or otherwise, perhaps implying a self-portrait. Those are
Talbot's books, about subjects he studied, and include volumes with
articles he wrote in them. We're meant to read the titles on the spines. Do
they add up to a diary of a life?
The meaning is up to you. Talbot's genius was to raise the
different possibilities. He identified from the start, with what now
seems astonishing speed and clarity, photography's implications, which he
laid out in "The Pencil of Nature," the first book illustrated with
photographs.
One room of the show is devoted to prints from it. (The
quality of the prints throughout the exhibition varies disappointingly,
time often having taken its toll, but some are magnificent.) Talbot
photographed a Daumier lithograph to demonstrate photography's function as
a reproductive medium. He photographed a plaster bust of Patroclus. (He
bought the bust at a shop in London; the curators have included it in the
show.)
This proved a different point: not just that art can be
photographed and the photographs dispersed, but that lighting alters the
appearance of whatever is in a photograph, as every Hollywood star knows.
Talbot saw the future, in which photography would become an
industry. His panorama of the Reading Establishment shows the world's first
commercial photographic company to produce prints from calotype paper
negatives.
He and his associates pose to illustrate photography's
potential: a man sits for his portrait; a Velázquez engraving and a
maquette of Canova's "Three Graces" await photographers; technicians monitor
prints for "The Pencil of Nature." This is a picture of photographers
photographing themselves while preparing the first book of photographs about
photography.
Then Talbot stopped. By the mid-1840's, barely a decade after
he had started, he seems to have taken his last photographs. He
published papers about botany, mathematics and ancient Assyrian
inscriptions. When he died in 1877, at 77, he was remembered in the journal
Nature for deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions from Nineveh.
The word amateur derives from the word for love. Talbot, the
ultimate amateur, invented photography for the love of it, in a spirit
of curiosity, then he pursued other interests.
A strong-willed man with a big ego, who was adamantly
proprietary about his invention, he was only incidentally an artist. His
artistry seems more eloquent for being secondary and economical, a byproduct
of a sensitive mind.
Inventions age and are supplanted. Art is constant. Talbot's
technique is being replaced by digital technology, but his pictures remain
vivid and alluring. The art of his photographs is clearly in the
enduring freshness of their wonderment.
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