The Origin of Captured Images

Specimens and Marvels: The Work of W H F Talbot

National Museum of Photography, Bradford, until 9 July  

William Henry Fox Talbot is widely regarded as the founder of modern photography. He is credited with the discovery of the use of “negatives” and “positives” in photographic processing and produced the first camera negative in 1835, a picture of a lattice window at Lacock Abbey. This exhibition at the National Museum of Photography in Bradford displays some of the earliest photographs in the national collection and celebrates the bicentenary of the birth of the genius who made photography possible.

Talbot was a true Victorian polymath, who became a fellow of the Royal Society aged 32 for his contribution to mathematics. He was an accomplished classical scholar with a wide range of interests, from Hebrew and Greek to Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions and astronomy. He even contributed ideas for the development of internal combustion engines in the 1840s and found time to enter politics, becoming a Whig MP in 1832.

The idea of photography came to him while on honeymoon at Lake Como in Italy in 1833. In his book Pencil of Nature he writes how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably on paper.

He gradually lost interest in politics and immersed himself in photographic research, producing the first camera negative in 1835 with his camera obscura. His early “photogenic drawings,” as he called them, were of leaves and copies of sketches and engravings. Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, and Sir Humphry Davy were also working on photography, but it was Talbot who eventually invented the photographic process, weeks after the Frenchman Daguerre announced his version in 1839. Talbot used light on sensitised paper for his image and fixed this with common salt. Over the years, refinements in techniques continued. A photographic society was founded in 1853, and Talbot twice declined the offer of its presidency.

Towards the end of his life he became a recluse. Little would he have imagined that, 18 years after his death, Roentgen in 1895 would make another momentous leap in imaging research with his discovery of x rays, which enabled internal pictures of the human body to be captured. However, the medical application of photography might not have been possible without Talbot's pioneering work.

Figure.

The lattice window in the south gallery, Lacock Abbey, August 1835