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engagement, such as, the use of the golden section, the
third to two thirds; that the tree should always be placed
at the left hand side, a third of the way into the picture,
and that the sun should be always behind and over the
left shoulder; that the horizon should be lower than the
middle and never higher.
Of course, artists were more knowledgeable than
Gilpin and were well versed, if not verbally articulate, in
the various histories of composition and its fundamental
importance in the creation of meaning. That book has
still to be written for it would need to trace the subject
back to at least the Greeks; to Aristotle’s Poetics, “If
any of the parts be either transposed or taken away,
the whole will be destroyed or changed”; back to the
importance the Renaissance attached to composito, to
the 17th century European Academies with their 5 ele-
ments: Invention, Proportion, Colour, Motion, Disposi-
tion. All knew that in order to convince the audience of
the reality depicted in the image, the truth of it, fi rstly
a process of observation of reality, of ‘nature,’ had to
take place, followed by an analysis, then a distillation,
then re-invention. All had to be put together within the
structures of composition; the classical Greeks called
it: synthesis, Plato’s ‘organic whole.’ Fox Talbot, in his
The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), the fi rst ever publica-
tion to include photographs, acknowledges this with
his ‘air of reality’:
“I have observed that family groups are especial favourites:
and the same fi ve or six individuals may be combined in
so many varying attitudes, as to give much interest and a
great air of reality to a series of such pictures.”It was inevitable therefore when the new toy ap-
peared, as is the case today, it would fi rstly be used to
imitate that which it sought to replace. Fox Talbot, it is
suspected, did want to make images ‘drawn by the sun,’
but he would have wanted them to be translated into
Picturesque images, of acceptable beauty, that accorded
with all the values of why, culturally, pictures were
wanted at that time. And, as can be seen in his publica-
tion, The Pencil of Nature, concerning his photograph
of ‘Articles of China,’ he marvels at the extraordinary
detail and accuracy but then he adds perceptively, “It
may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees.” This
explains much of the cultural revolution that would now
take place as a result of the invention of the photograph,
that is, by its own infl uence, by its very nature, unrelated
to the user or the users’ abilities.
In the Pencil of Nature Fox Talbot conducts a scien-
tifi c and aesthetic analysis of what his new invention,
his aid—for that must have been how he envisaged its
purpose originally, was for, could do, then he noticed
that it did not behave according to his preconceptions
and instead opened up a large new terrain, one without
answers attached. In spite of the Industrial Revolution
and all its progress in the mechanical fi eld, it was this
new invention of photography that ushered in our age of
technology. Talbot noticed it, but many photographers
never did and others only a long time later, in the next
century. For the most part his perceptive observations
went unnoticed. The audience remained simple mes-
merised.
Some photographers took the need to conform to the
accepted conventions of picture making much further
with compositions that imitated the ‘best in painting,’
from Renaissance triangles (originally used to produce
the hierarchy of kings or Madonna’s), to compositions
which turned everything into the centre of the image; to
be complete within the picture frame, that is: to create a
complete world within the two dimensional space that
had no references to anything outside it. In many cases
such images were arranged in accordance with the best
practice of Victorian painting. However an audience
cannot read Oscar Rejlander’s The Head of John the
Baptist in a Charger, c. 1857–58, as a severed head
simple because, unlike the painting, the over riding at-
tribute of the photograph is that it records, for better or
for worse, for real or fi ction, an actual moment in time.
When the photograph was used to imitate the conven-
tional compositions of painting, past and present, for
the most part, it actually failed to convince unlike the
paintings they imitated.
Even when photographers noticed that this new ma-
chine could interrupt actual time which they had never
been able to do before, for the most part it was just the
detail that mesmerised; the advocacy of the verisimili-
tude of the photograph by John Ruskin (1819–1900)
which legitimised the use of photographs as painting
aids by the new Pre-Raphaelite painters, of Holman
Hunt and Thomas Seddon, resulted in the painstaking
imitation of its ability to record detail but missed the
many characteristics of the new medium.
Fox Talbot observed fi rst hand the waywardness of
nature, that it went about its business completely outside
the concerns of man, that it did not seek perfection and
that it had no regard for human values. Put another way:
the camera gave credibility to Charles Darwin’s Origin
of the Species (1858). He also noticed that man simply
interrupts nature, that the photograph of the bridge tra-
versing the ravine, unlike all that history of painting such
subjects, looks and is profoundly man made and apart
from nature. He also noticed that for order in a picture to
exist, it must fi rst be placed there, created in front of the
lens by various means of controlling composition. He
further observed that the description of reality, instead
of being simply applied, could now be created solely
by his machine, and he touched upon the observation
that by recognising this new phenomenon, a different
world appeared.
As we have noted, the use of composition to create