FIRST PHOTOGRAPHS: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Birth of Photography

While the invention of photography can be attributed to more than one person, British polymath William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) is credited with inventing the negative/positive paper process that remains the basis for non-digital photography. Furthermore, his actual shots remain stunning. Gray (director of the Fox Talbot Museum at the Talbot's former Lacock Abbey home in Chippenham, England), along with Ollman and McCusker of San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts, have grouped these early photos by subject matter: sections include "The Domestic World of Lacock Abbey" and "Men of Science and the Reading Establishment." Essays by all three editors, a chronology and a biography give a sense of how they happened. McCusker, in her revealing introductory essay, labels Talbot a "Recorder and Romantic."In Talbot's work—portraits of fruit sellers, ladies in multiple soft layers, chinaware, a haunting kitchen windowsill—she finds that any stereotypical associations or clichés "are confounded by [Talbot's] immersion in and preoccupation with perception, and the Romantic's pursuit of subjective expression." Large, grainy, red-, yellow- or blue-hued images transform a formal silver service (part of the "Breakfast Table" photos), while various shots of mysterious Parisian boulevards, eerie images of delicate lace and leaves of mimosa and fennel bring to mind the intense poetry of Baudelaire or (for the nature shots) Gerard Manley Hopkins. Portraits of local men and farm workers are startlingly unaffected and well composed. Printed on a beautiful, pale yellow stock, Talbot's photographs feel neither modern or archaic, but timeless. While there are plenty of other collections of his work, this one perhaps best captures the spirit with which he made it. (Feb.)