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TALBOT, WILLIAM HENRY FOX
required some previous drawing skill on the part of the
amateur artist.
It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me...
how charming it would be if it were possible to cause
these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and
remain fi xed on the paper!Talbot’s fi rst experiments, beginning in the spring of
1834, involved coating common writing paper with
silver nitrate both alone and in combination with sodium
chloride. Too slow for use in a camera obscura, his fi rst
images were sunprints created by placing botanical
specimens onto the sensitive paper and exposing it to
the sun. The greater challenge he faced was that once
the paper had been made sensitive to light and an im-
age was formed, it was necessary to somehow halt this
sensitivity so that the image would remain. Although
creating paper sensitive to light was straightforward, and
was known to have been achieved as early as 1800 by
Thomas Wedgwood, the inability to halt the sensitivity
meant that images would continue to print out until the
paper was black.
In examining early prints, Talbot noticed that some
areas appeared morelight sensitive than others. He at-
tributed this to varying proportions of sodium chloride
to silver nitrate. Further experiments showed that less
sodium chloride made the paper more sensitive to light.
He reasoned from this that if a light coating of sodium
chloride made sensitive paper, it could then be desen-
sitised or stabilised by soaking the fi nished print in a
bath of saturated sodium chloride.
Sciagraphs or Photogenic Drawings
To make the paper sensitive enough to be used in the
camera obscura, he found that multiple coatings of
silver nitrate and sodium chloride would increase the
sensitivity to an extent that exposures could be made
in one of several small, crude box cameras fi tted with
microscope eyepiece lenses that were made for Talbot
and his experiments. Exposures were long as he was
still relying on the action of light alone to bring out
the image. He had not yet discovered the latent image.
He began writing up his results in late 1838 for
presentation to the Royal Society. However, in January
1839 word came from Paris that a Frenchman named
Louis Daguerre had also created a photographic process,
although no details were published on the actual process
itself. Fearing that his labour in developing this process
might be in vain should Daguerre’s process turn out to be
identical to his, Talbot pulled together the samples that
he had made previously and on 24th January, Michael
Faraday exhibited them at the Royal Institution. On the
31st of January, Talbot’s paper ‘On the Art of Photogenic
Drawing’ was read to the Royal Society in London. He
then revealed the full working method of the process in a
letter read to the Royal Society on the 21st of February.
When Daguerre’s process was disclosed in August of
1839, it revealed that there was no overlap between the
two processes. The strong support for Daguerre by the
government of France and the French scientifi c commu-
nity, combined with the fact that the daguerreotype was
made to be used in a camera, meant that Talbot’s process
was obscured in the press and public discourse.Talbot, William Henry Fox.
The Open Door.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gilman Collection,
Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen
and Robert Rosenkranz Gift,
2005 (2005.100.498) Image
© The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.