Talbot's natural magic

Abstract

We might begin with a passage from Talbot's first public utterance about his derivation of the process soon to be named ‘photography’. The date is 31 January 1839, the place is the Royal Society in London, and it is six days after Michael Faraday had communicated to the Royal Institution that the idea of making pictures with light had an English as well as a French origin. That evening Talbot read his paper Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, outlining the history of his involvement with experiments using nitrate of silver to make images on paper, the successes and failures of prior investigators, and the accuracy of the process for copying flat objects. In due course, in a section captioned ‘On the Art of Fixing a Shadow’, he asserts:

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