[Two Leafy Stalks of Bamboo]

From the Getty Museum record

> Nearly two decades after he first captured the impressions of plants, William Henry Fox Talbot returned to this familiar subject matter, but in a very different way. The art that he invented is at once as ephemeral as it is permanent. We marvel at the idea that almost two centuries later we can see the people that Talbot saw or examine the leaves that he examined or view the very rays of sunlight that he viewed. The sunshine that made the pictures, however, could team up with rogue chemicals to destroy the images as well. > > Shortly after his illustrated treatise on photography, *The Pencil of Nature* began coming out in 1844, Talbot and others became aware that photographs made in silver were vulnerable to both chemicals and light. His dream of replacing conventional printing with light-made prints was punctured by the reality of their fading. By the end of the 1840s he had given up this function for his art. However, his experiments continued along a different path, and by 1852 he was finally able to combine the hand of nature with the time-proven permanence of printer’s ink. His photographic engraving process used light-sensitive chemicals to record images on copper plates, achieving the same fidelity to nature that was the strength and appeal of photography. The final works, though, were made in a printing press, using conventional inks that were based on nearly indestructible carbon. In this, Talbot had finally achieved his goal of using photography to let nature be the active guiding force of the illustrator. > > Larry Schaaf, *William Henry Fox Talbot*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 96. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.