Art Institute of Chicago

Copy of a Large Italian Print, Reduced in the Camera

William Henry Fox Talbot

Date

c. 1840

Medium

Salted paper print

Culture

England

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, developed a negative-positive process that permitted the reproduction and dissemination of images with relative ease. In The Pencil of Nature —one of the first commercially produced, photographically illustrated books—Talbot noted an advantage of the new art form beyond mere duplication: “it enables us at pleasure to alter the scale, and to make the copies as much larger or smaller than the originals as we may desire. . . . Yet preserving all the proportions of the original.” Here Talbot reduced an 1829 engraving by Luigi Rossini of a Roman arch to approximately 15 percent of its original size. Even on a smaller scale, Talbot’s image retains the delicate lines and detail of the engraving.

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