William Henry Fox Talbot’s central dilemma as a photographer—how to fix images durably on paper—is also a dilemma for the curators who study and exhibit his work.
“Bust of Venus on a Round Tabletop,” early eighteen-forties. Calotype.
William Henry Fox Talbot, the British scientist and inventor, who was born in 1800, was a polymath, well-versed in subjects from botany to the classics, which he studied at Cambridge University. But it was his frustration with paper and pencil that led to his most lasting contributions, in the nascent medium of photography.
Talbot’s pioneering images—which the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library is currently in the process of digitizing—are a window into his obsessions, both alchemical and aesthetic. A bust of Patroclus speaks to Talbot’s classical interests, and also to his understanding that photographing white surfaces allowed for more manageable exposure times.
This dilemma of Talbot’s has become, in the century and a half since his death, a dilemma for the curators who study and exhibit his work. As Dan Leers, the curator of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition “William Henry Fox Talbot and the Promise of Photography,” explains, to display certain Talbot images would be to destroy them.
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