Art
Fox Talbot
John McEwen
Perhaps the most important visual exhibition in London at the moment is of W. H. Fox Talbot's calotype photographs at the Science Museum (till 13 November). Up until quite recently Fox Talbot was considered to be only one of several photographic pioneers who followed hot on the heels of Daguerre, but now with the development of 650 previously unprinted negatives, a concerted attempt is being made by the Museum in collaboration with Kodak, to instate him as the true and British father of photography as we know it today. Daguerre's daguerreotype was a direct positive process, the photograph appearing as a unique image on a metal plate. Talbot's Calotype (Gr. kalos = beautiful) process (patented 1839) was a negative-positive one, a single negative on sensitised paper affording unlimited positive prints to be , developed from it.
Although in its initial stages this resulted in a much less clear image than that achieved by the daguerreotype, it soon supplanted it as the more efficient method and the one which fathered all future developments in photographic technique. Fox Talbot himself made further contributions. Stylistically he introduced the panoramic shot and the clOse-up; he made the first longfocus lens; his photomicrographic experiments were the first to use polarised light, and proposed the copying of documents by reductions; photoglyphy, the last of his photographic inventions, proved to be the foundation of photogravure printing. And all this was achieved in something he only dabbled in as a hobby. In his own day he was more respected as a linguist and mathematician, a brilliant Oxford scholar elected a Member of the Astronomical Society at the age of twenty-two, a Fellow of the Royal Society at thirty-one, famous for various etymological works and for his addition to the science of spectography of Talbot's Law and Talbot's Disc. He was also a considerable landowner and a Whig MP in the Reform Parliament of 1832. Where's your middle-aged Peter Jay the noo?
Fox Talbot's interest in photography derived from his efforts as an amateur artist. As was the fashion at that time (it had not and has not altered. much) he saw verisimilitude as the highest attainment of art and Nature as the fount of all knowledge. Like many before him — Vermeer, Canaletto, Bellotto, Reynolds, the English watercolourists and every amateur topographer going 7 he used the camera obscura and the camera lucida as an aid to accurate drawing. These instruments registered an image from which true tracings could be made, in much the same way as realist artists today achieve similar feats of accuracy by projecting a slide onto their canvas and painting over the image. In this lie the seeds of the eternally unresolvable debate of whether photography can truly be called an art. Fox Talbot, you will notice, has his work in the collection of the Science Museum, yet oddly enough it is largely because his images have been considered artistically inferior that his technical feats have been underestimated. And today the significance of his technical achievement is being reassessed because of a growing admiration for his photographs.
The dichotomy of its function is perhaps the most bewildering aspect of photography, but Why people still get steamed up about its definition is a mystery. After all, what does it matter? The last hundred and fifty years have clearly demonstrated that, mechanical medium or not, some people have created more compelling images with it than others.
Fox Talbot is one of them. He had a clear field but with his all-embracing interest he made the most of it. Nothing was unworthy of a photograph and some of his finest images are of trees (one of elms reflected in a pool pre-dating a similar but more famous view of Atget by fifty years) and haystacks. But it must be said that he was aided by the intrinsic qualities of the calotype print. The Sunday Telegraph got four of today's leading contemporary photographers to use a reconstructed calotype camera to make a duplicate print of a subject down at Fox Talbot's home of Lacock Abbey. The results are in the exhibition, and in every case the calotype image is of more interest than its infinitely more detailed coloar counterpart: a cypress tree becomes a black foreboding mass; the back of a naked girl is richly offset against the gloom of the ground; the skull in a memento mori still-life catches the light and thus heightens the ephemeral symbolism of the flowers. These accidental overtones are lost in the overall and clinical detail of their contemporary equivalents. But this does not detract from Fox Talbot's achievement, an achievement this timely and painstaking exhibition does much to enhance.
An open submission of 3,000 photographs by 300 photographers has resulted in the work of twenty-three of them making up the last of this year's Serpentine Summer Shows (till 11 September). Aaron Scharf, who is our leading authority on art/photographic matters, has made the selection on. the basis that the best photograph heightens the ordinary. More photographers these days has not meant better photographs, and heightening the ordinary (close-ups of sand (a dozen here at least), graffiti, the decline of the inner city) has been done to death. It must be hoped that this dull and mostly documentary selection is the result of the peculiarity of Dr Scharfs premises rather than an equal paucity of imagination among the other 277 entrants. Paul Joyce is the only exception. His Welsh landscapes stood out.
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