Page 12 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 12/146
“ I long to have a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases - but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing...the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say, what my brothers cry out against so vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever
produced.” (quoted in Susan Sontag: On Photography 1977)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography
It’s this ability - to possess a photographic record of a loved one - that satisfies the moment, and then acts as a kind of memento mori of the subject frozen for a fraction of a second at a precise mo- ment - preserved forever, as dissociated as a shadow - a constant reminder of ‘how young we were’ that also gives photographs their own melancholic twist.
William Henry Fox Talbot :The Pencil of Nature 1844. - the first book illustrated with photographs.
Of course, illustrated books had been around a long, long time: from Egyptian papyrus scrolls with their intricate marriage of heiroglyphs and illustrations, to beautiful, hand-scribed and illustrated Me- dieval illuminated manuscripts, through to the invention of print and the combination of wood-cuts and moveable metal typefaces in the 15th century, but here we have the latest 19th century imaging technology serving as ready-made image plates to be hand-glued into a litho or letterpress-printed book. Considering the importance photography was to assume, especially after the invention of the half-tone process (c1873), this is a significant publication, and it is entirely appropriate that the writer is really the inventor of modern photography. Talbot was anxious that his readers fully realised the significance of his invention - that you didn’t need to be an artist anymore to make realistic images, portraits and scenes from nature: “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.” (Talbot: The Pencil of Nature 1844). Nowadays, cameras are ubiquitous and we are so used to having this power in our pocket, that it is hard to understand the stupendous impact of photography - in both its early forms - on the psyche of the 1840s. It was the first of the modern new media, and it was coeval with the central me-
dium of recent times - the computer. Indeed Talbot and Babbage knew each other.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock-abbey-fox-talbot-museum-and-village/lists/the-fox-talbot-museum-at-lacock