Photograph by: William Henry Fox Talbot Image Source: Metropolitan Museum courtesy the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936
Did you know that William Henry Fox Talbot had a great love for botany? It was his interest in the subject that perhaps led to the invention of the calotype process. Talbot’s first photographs or “photogenic drawings”, as he liked to call them, were made without the use of a camera. It was the result of a breakthrough that he had in 1833, while on his honeymoon on the shores of Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy, during an unsuccessful attempt at sketching the scenery in front of him with the help of a camera lucida. “For when the eye was removed from the prism—in which all had looked beautiful—I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold,” he had written a year later in the introduction of his book The Pencil of Nature (1844). He sought out a way to create a permanent print, and what better subject than plant specimens. Talbot used writing paper that was lightly coated with salt which was then brushed with a solution of silver nitrate. This solution gave his prints a distinctive lilac colour, at least in his early work, owing to the use of common salt to stabilise the photographic print after exposure.
The description of the image above on the Metropolitan Museum’s website reads, “Here, a piece of slightly translucent seaweed was laid directly onto a sheet of photosensitised paper, blocking the rays of the sun from the portion it covered and leaving a light impression of its form. Plants were often the subject of Talbot’s early photographs, for he was a serious amateur botanist and envisioned the accurate recording of specimens as an important application of his invention. The “Album di disegni fotogenici,” in which this print appears, contains thirty-six images sent by Talbot to the Italian botanist Antonio Bertoloni in 1839-40. It was the first important photographic work purchased by the Metropolitan Museum.”
This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Better Photography.