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...1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of
the Lake Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s
Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take
them: but with the smallest possible amount of success.
Dismayed by the transitory nature of the ‘natural im-
ages’ he saw with the aid of the camera lucida and the
camera obscura, he claims to have considered ways of
rendering permanent the fl eeting scenes. On returning
to Lacock Abbey he began experimenting with pictures
made with light sensitive chemicals. In this account,
photography emerged from the gentlemanly aesthetic of
the picturesque (a proviso is that the landed class was not
somehow outside capitalist social relations). However,
there is a contradiction here because his fi rst public
showing of his photogenic drawings at the 1839 British
Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in
Birmingham was dominated by copies of lace, prints and
textiles. From the beginning, Talbot may have imagined
photography as a reproductive technology.
Talbot called the images he made from 1833 ‘photoge-
nic drawings.’ In 1835, he realised that the process could
be repeated, using this fi rst image as a “negative” for
generating a “positive” print. (The terms ‘negative’ and
‘positive’ where suggested by Sir John Herschel, who
is also usually credited with the term ‘photography’). At
this stage, Talbot’s negatives were insuffi ciently dense to
produce strong positives. In 1840 he discovered a second
process, which he called the calotype (from the Greek
word kalos for beautiful and useful). Also sometimes
called ‘Talbotypes’ in honour of their creator, calotypes
gave a latent image after a few seconds exposure, creat-
ing a negative strong enough to print from.
Photography in the 1840s was slow and required good
light. However, the main restrictions on its development
were legal rather than technical. In exchange for a pen-
sion from the French state, Daguerre allowed free use
of his process—except in the lucrative British market.
He sold the right to licence his process in England,
Wales and the colonies to the coal merchant Richard
Beard, who opened the fi rst commercial photographic
portrait establishment in Britain. Beard is sometimes
represented as a pioneer photographer, but he was a
proprietor and employed Jabez Hogg as his ‘operator.’
Professional licenses were expensive and Beard sold
very few. Antoine Claudet, a Frenchman based in Lon-
don, obtained a separate licence from Daguerre and also
opened a commercial studio. In 1841 Talbot sought and
was granted a patent on the calotype process, which he
further extended in 1843. The result was that licences
were required for paper photography too.
Nevertheless, during the 1840s the fi rst tentative
employments of photography began. Talbot had an eye
on the mass image market. In 1843 he founded an es-
tablishment in Reading, run by his manservant Nicholas
Henneman, to print negatives and produce books as well
as teach photography. In 1844 Talbot issued the fi rst
part of The Pencil of Nature; printed at Reading it was
arguably the fi rst photographically-illustrated book. Pro-
duced in six parts, between 1844 and 1846, the twenty-
four calotypes are a mix of picturesque views, botanical
specimens, facsimiles of documents, reproductions of art
works, and records of possessions. The Pencil of Nature
was probably a demonstration album anticipating uses
for the new process. In 1847, he opened the Sun Picture
Rooms in Regent Street, London to make portraits and
topographic and picturesque views. Talbot also entered
a venture to establish the French Société Calotype for
the commercial production of paper photographs; later,
in 1852, he patented photoglyphic engraving, a method
for producing photographic engravings on steel plates
(he had intended to establish a factory to manufacture
these images, until ill health intervened).
In the early years three groups were concerned with
photography. Firstly, there were a small number of
licensed commercial portraitists including Claudet..
Henry Collen obtained a licence from Talbot in 1841
to make calotype portraits, but had little commercial
success and folded in 1844; Claudet then took over
(he also proved unsuccessful). At Talbot’s instigation,
Henneman briefl y established a calotype studio in Lon-
don, before running the Sun Picture Rooms. Despite its
fragile character and the single image that resulted, the
daguerreotype was favoured for commercial portraiture,
partly because it proved practicable before Talbot’s pro-
cess, partly for its incredible detail. Portrait work rapidly
assumed a routine appearance, drawing on stock poses
and settings from conventional painting. There were
some exceptions to this rule, notably the partnership of
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, active in Ed-
inburgh between 1843 and 1848. Hill was commissioned
to create a large painting commemorating the founding
of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 and employed
Adamson to make photographic studies of the church-
men. The resulting photographs are less formal than
most contemporary portraits and the grain of calotype
adds to the chiaroscuro effects. Hill and Adamson also
made picturesque portraits of masons working on the
Walter Scott memorial, soldiers and Newhaven fi shing
workers. Hill intended to market albums of pictures, but
this came to little.
The second group were the men of science who were
interested in photography as a chemical phenomenon
and as a means to document nature. Talbot’s account
of photography posited images generated “without the
aid of the artist’s pencil.” This ‘objective’ vision sup-
posedly allowed things or phenomena to be recorded
without the subjective intervention of artists. In this way,
photography was signifi cant in bolstering the emerging
ideologies of science. This conception was extended by
Sir David Brewster and Robert Hunt, who developed