William Henry Fox Talbot - The Pioneer

I will always have great love and respect for Fox Talbot! He is considered one of the first ever photographers and one of the first people who discovered it. He is the inventor of the Calotype process, which is a process which bares the same principle as Photograms.... to expose a piece of photo - sensitive material to light and but objects in its way to create a opposite-shadow type thing.



(This image reminds me of an image which you uploaded Sean... the one of the tree!)


The idea of photography came to WH Fox Talbot whilst on holiday at Lake Como in Italy, using the camera obscura and camera lucida as aids to drawing. Beginning in 1834, Talbot experimented with a process which he called photogenic drawing, coating drawing paper with salt solution and after it had dried, adding a solution of silver nitrate. By placing a leaf, or fern, or a piece of lace, on the paper's surface and exposing it to the sun, he obtained an image.



In August 1835, Talbot made the earliest known surviving photographic negative using a camera, a small photogenic drawing of the latticed window in the south gallery of Lacock Abbey. This rare item is now in the collection of the Science Museum at the National Media Museum at Bradford.



When ever I think about Fox Talbot I think of a plantive, wholesome man who simply was keen on the flora of his time and who simply wanted to document. Like other pioneers of photography such as Muybridge, Talbot used Photography as a tool to show his interest and to communicate the beauty of the World he lived in.

The End