DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Pencil of Nature" by William Henry Fox Talbot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

First Photographs is an eyewitness to the origins of modern photography. This book - the only monograph on Talbot to be supported by the curator of the Fox Talbot Museum - includes many never-before-published images of landscapes, architectural studies, and portraiture from Talbot's personal archive and selections from his detailed research notebooks made during the 1830s and 1840s, currently housed at the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey in Chippenham, England. In addition to his technological contributions, Talbot's own photographs represent exceptional and prescient artistic achievement. Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, contributes an innovative analysis of both the aesthetic and social significance of Talbot's first photographic image, the "Oriel Window," through a remarkable evocation of Talbot's late-life reflection one sunny afternoon beneath his window in Lacock Abbey. Curator Carol McCusker considers how the women of the Lacock household influenced Talbot's aesthetic choices. First Photographs also includes a biography and timeline of Talbot's eventful life and revolutionary work by the preeminent Talbot scholar Michael Gray.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age--a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies. Drawing on Talbot's fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, including historians of science, art, and photography, broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This publication serves as a primer on the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, a true interdisciplinary innovator who drew on his knowledge of art, botany, chemistry and optics to become one of the inventors of photography in 1839. Talbot?s 'photogenic drawings' (photograms), calotypes and salted paper prints are some of the first-ever examples of images captured on paper.0This book brings together more than 30 photographs by Talbot that demonstrate his wide-ranging interests, including nature, still-life, portraiture, architecture and landscape. Some of these images are previously unpublished. Through thematic groupings elucidated by noted Talbot scholar Larry Schaaf, the book reveals the photographer's early striving to test the boundaries of his medium at a historic moment when art and science intersected. With its luminous reproductions of Talbot's fragile works, this publication demonstrates that, in its earliest days, photography required a form of magic-making and innovation that continues to inspire people today.00Exhibition: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, United States (18.11.2017 - 11.02.2018).

The father of modern photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) developed the process by which photographic images could be reproduced, but he has yet to be sufficiently appreciated as a photographer in his own right. Over his photographic career he made more than 5,000 images which included fascinating pictures of his home Lacock Abbey, portraits of his family and friends, and still-lifes of botanical specimens, cloth and household objects. A key intellectual figure of the nineteenth century working in science, mathematics, astronomy, politics and archaeology, he is arguably the most important figure in the invention of photography. His practice established many of the medium's most familiar genres and he was devoted to the the advancement of photography, publishing the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, in 1844-46 to reveal the potential of the medium to a wider audience. This monograph features many of Talbot's best-known landscapes made around Lacock Abbey and some of the first negatives of the ever made, but it also includes lesser-known and previously unpublished work that reveals the extraordinary diverse scope of his work. His photographs reflect and embody the social and cultural issues of the time, but they are also fascinating, often beautiful, images that are still engaging today.

"This book brings together for the first time high-quality reproductions representing the full sweep of Talbot's work. These beautiful images are not only records of scientific triumphs but also the evidence of the first steps in shaping a totally new type of vision. Talbot became the first artist to be trained by the very art that he had invented." "Drawn from public and private collections throughout the world, the one hundred color plates are reproduced in the actual size of the originals and in all the subtle hues that comprised Talbot's early work. While a number of Talbot's most famous images are included, many of the photographs are little known and are reproduced in this volume for the first time. They range from Talbot's Lilliputian pre-1839 negatives (made in "mouse trap" cameras) through botanical photograms to mid-1840s calotypes that demonstrate a sure command of the new art. Each plate is discussed in detail, drawing on important new research the author has conducted in preparation for a catalogue raisonne of Talbot's life's work in photography."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Focuses on Talbot's ambitions for the mystical blend of science and art ... as outlined in his classic volume 'The pencil of nature'"--Bk. jacket.

Schaaf, an independent photohistorian and research professor at the University of Glasgow and the director of the Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project, discusses approximately fifty of Talbot's images in the collection of the Getty Museum."--BOOK JACKET.

Photography emerged in 1839 in two forms simultaneously. In France, Louis Daguerre produced photographs on silvered sheets of copper, while in Great Britain, William Henry Fox Talbot put forward a method of capturing an image on ordinary writing paper treated with chemicals. Talbot’s invention, a paper negative from which any number of positive prints could be made, became the progenitor of virtually all photography carried out before the digital age. Talbot named his perfected invention "calotype," a term based on the Greek word for beauty. Calotypes were characterized by a capacity for subtle tonal distinctions, massing of light and shadow, and softness of detail. In the 1840s, amateur photographers in Britain responded with enthusiasm to the challenges posed by the new medium. Their subjects were wide-ranging, including landscapes and nature studies, architecture, and portraits. Glass-negative photography, which appeared in 1851, was based on the same principles as the paper negative but yielded a sharper picture, and quickly gained popularity. Despite the rise of glass negatives in commercial photography, many gentlemen of leisure and learning continued to use paper negatives into the 1850s and 1860s. These amateurs did not seek the widespread distribution and international reputation pursued by their commercial counterparts, nearly all of whom favored glass negatives. As a result, many of these calotype works were produced in a small number of prints for friends and fellow photographers or for a family album. This richly illustrated, landmark publication tells the first full history of the calotype, embedding it in the context of Britain’s changing fortunes, intricate class structure, ever-growing industrialization, and the new spirit under Queen Victoria. Of the 118 early photographs presented here in meticulously printed plates, many have never before been published or exhibited.

Focusing on early nineteenth-century England?and on the works and texts of the inventor of paper photography, William Henry Fox Talbot?Singular Images, Failed Copies historicizes the conceptualization of photography in that era as part of a major historical change. Treating photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation but also as an epistemology, Vered Maimon challenges today’s prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, she points to material, formal, and conceptual differences between those two types of images by considering the philosophical and aesthetic premises linked with early photography. Through this analysis she argues that the emphasis in Talbot’s accounts on the removal of the “artist’s hand” in favor of “the pencil of nature” did not mark a shift from manual to “mechanical” and more accurate or “objective” systems of representation. In Singular Images, Failed Copies, Maimon shows that the perception of the photographic image in the 1830s and 1840s was in fact symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological framework that had informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought for two centuries.