Art Institute of Chicago

Two Plant Specimens

William Henry Fox Talbot

Date

1839

Medium

Photogenic drawing

Culture

England

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Contained within this haunting and poetic image is the seed of photography: the possibility of creating a negative from which an unlimited number of positives can be made. William Henry Fox Talbot produced this image by placing botanical specimens on sensitized paper and exposing them to light. He made this groundbreaking discovery after his 1833 honeymoon on the shores of Lake Como, in Lombardy, Italy. Frustrated by his inability to draw his Italian surroundings accurately, Talbot recalled the fleeting images of external objects that appeared within a camera lucida (an optical prism that creates a superimposed image on an artist’s drawing surface) and wondered how he could make them “imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper.” What resulted, two years later, were the first camera negatives. Unveiled in 1839 and called photogenic drawing, Talbot’s process was perfected two years later into the calotype (from the Greek word kalos , meaning “beautiful”). By the end of his life, Talbot—whose far-ranging interests included mathematics, botany, etymology, and ancient Assyria—had also discovered the basis of halftone printing, obtained twelve patents, and authored seven books, including one of the first photographically illustrated books, The Pencil of Nature (1844).

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