Re: Nice Fox Talbot article

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From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/20/02-06:20:00 PM Z


This is a very good article. Is this show going to travel at all?

--shannon

----------
>From: Martin Reis <mreis@tafelmusik.org>
>To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
>Subject: Nice Fox Talbot article
>Date: Fri, Dec 20, 2002, 1:16 PM
>

> (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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