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[Arrangement of Six Leaves (Sunlight Test of Fixing)]

Creator

Photographer · 1800–1877

MakerArtist

In 1833, after failed attempts at drawing using the camera lucida, an optical tool, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote: "[H]ow charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!" Talbot, a scientist, mathematician, and author, is credited with being one of the inventors of photography. In mid-1834 he began to experimen

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Date: May 3, 1840
Medium: Photogenic drawing negative, iodide fixed
Culture: British
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

> Made just a day after his aesthetically powerful *Wall in Melon Ground, Lacock Abbey* (see [84.XM.260.6](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/38257/william-henry-fox-talbot-wall-in-melon-ground-lacock-abbey-british-may-2-1840/) and [84.XZ.574.104](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/63283/william-henry-fox-talbot-wall-in-melon-ground-lacock-abbey-british-may-2-1840/)), this piece represents a return to the experimental William Henry Fox Talbot. He dated the negative on the verso and inscribed it “W., long in Sun.” The series of experiments was recorded in his *Notebook P:* “Best paper for impressions of leaves, &c. Take W. paper wash it with weak Amm. Nitr. Silv. Dry it at ye [the] fire. Photograph the leaves for 3 minutes, then fix with iodine, & put in very hot water. The ground of these pictures remains black after very long exposure to sunshine.” The “W. paper” was Talbot’s Waterloo paper (a name he never used in public, but one that must have given him private satisfaction in his battle with Daguerre); the sensitizing chemical was the ammonio-nitrate of silver, an unstable compound exquisitely sensitive to light. It would tend to produce the blackness that he recorded in his notebook. With the combined effects of the “very long exposure to sunshine” he first gave the fixed negative and possible subsequent changes over time, this work serves as a reminder that these early photographs are active and changing objects. What we see today is not necessarily what Talbot and his peers had in front of them. > > Larry Schaaf, *William Henry Fox Talbot*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 34. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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