Henry fox talbot

William Henry Fox TALBOT - Asparagus Foliage, early 1840s.

William Henry Fox Talbot was credited as the British inventor of photography. In 1834 he discovered how to make and fix images through the action of light and chemistry on paper. These 'negatives' could be used to make multiple prints and this process revolutionised image making. His interests in photography went well beyond this initial discovery as he also pioneered photographically illustrated books and photomechanical reproduction methods, ushering in the 'age of the image'.

The Soliloquy of an open door

William Henry Fox Talbot invented photography to make up for his artistic bumbling. The idea came to him on his honeymoon, as he struggled to make simple landscape drawings. For half a decade, beginning in 1834, he struggled to "fix a shadow" with chemicals. By the time he succeeded, a French painter named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre had perfected an alternate technique. Talbot's blotchy paper prints never stood a chance against the silvery daguerreotype. The astronomer John Herschel…

An exceptional student first at Harrow and later at Cambridge, Talbot was a man of great learning and broad interests. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, chemistry, Egyptology, philology, and the classics were all within the scope of his investigative appetite

February 11 should be marked as Talbot Day.

Download free image of Leaf Study (1839-1840) photography in high resolution by William Henry Fox Talbot. about art, public domain, artworks, photography, and cc0 7729105

Max Campbell writes about the photography of William Henry Fox Talbot, a nineteenth-century classicist who invented the calotype.