How the Thresholds exhibition looked in virtual reality and right, Ewan Braithwaite William
Fox Talbot Pete James, former head of photography at the Library of Birmingham
Caption: William Henry
Fox Talbot's mousetrap camera, c.
Nguyen-duy's cyanotypes have many precedents, including scientific fluoroscopy and radiography, as well as more obviously the nineteenth-century botanical photograms of William Henry
Fox Talbot and the groundbreaking botanical cyanotypes of his student Anna Atkins.
Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry
Fox Talbot and the Early Photograph
The earliest historically, biologist Anna Atkins (1799-1871), worked with cyanotype, "photogenic drawings," with which she became acquainted through Henry
Fox Talbot. Also an acquaintance of Sir John Herschel, another early scientific photographer, Atkins made the first book of photographs.
Photographer William Henry
Fox Talbot was among the pioneers of this process.
Following an introduction tracing the history of this motif, photos include early ones by William Henry
Fox Talbot and Julia Cameron; those by Gertrude Kasebier, Fred Holland Day, and other members of the Photo-Secession; those by Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, and other street photographers; graphic examples by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand; photos by Gregory Crewdson and Shizuka Yokomizo; and abstract examples by Uta Barth and Yuki Onodera.
This effort found fulfillment in the efforts of English inventor William Henry
Fox Talbot, who spent the last 25 years of his life developing a photographic engraving system in which a metal plate could be imprinted with a photographic image--the system that came to dominate 20th-century publishing.
The opening lecture by Dr Michael Pritchard from the Royal Photographic Society showed how an inability to trace lines using the Victorian camera obscura led to William Henry
Fox Talbot, a Brit abroad on the shores of Lake Como, to invent modern photography and with it the familiar words 'photogenic' and 'photographic.'
Also included was a photoglyphic engraving made by William Henry
Fox Talbot in 1858 from an anonymous photograph of an architectural facade and Gerhard Richter's offset color photolithograph, Seestuck II (1970).
There is much to commend in the collection, which crosses a disparate range of geographies and histories--from the medium's nineteenth century gentleman inventor
Fox Talbot's 'Sun Pictures of Scotland', to the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's recent memories of Istanbul.