Page 51 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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William Henry Fox Talbot: The Pencil of Nature 1844
One of the earliest commercially published books that is illustrated with photographs - tipped-in photograms like the beautiful fern above - 24 images in all, including Talbot’s cameraless and in- camera photographs. This first printed book to be illustrated by photographs is a catalog of the uses of photography, and is also a promotion of Talbot’s own negative-positive process. So the book is illustrated with images showing how photography can reproduce art and important documents, record ancient architecture and building details, capture the fine detail of hand-made lace, everyday objects and people (etc). Each glued-in (tipped-in) plate is accompanied by a short text that describes the subject and the processes by which the image was produced - as a guide to potential users: “The chief object of the present work is to place on record some of the early beginnings of a new art, before the period, which we trust is approaching, of its being brought to maturity by the aid of British talent.” While it was nearly 40 years before the technology was invented that enabled the accurate reproduction of continuous-tone images alongside type (Meisenbach’s half-tone screen process 1882), it was this book that pointed the way.
Of course, illustrated books had been around a long, long time: from Egyptian scrolls with their intricate marriage of heiroglyphs and illustrations to Medieval 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, 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). Now, 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 medium of recent times - the computer. Indeed Talbot and Babbage knew each other.