Fox Talbot Essay

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Fox Talbot had great difficulty with drawing which frustrated him. He struggled to produce detailed sketches using a camera lucida, which was a device similar to the camera obscura that let the artist trace the image directly onto paper. This method often left drawings having very distinct outlines, hence not creating a realistic drawing. Figure 3, is Fox Talbot’s attempt at using the camera lucida with ‘ineffective hand renderings such as this one prompted him to conceive a method of photography’, (Marien, 2002, p. 8). Photography was potentially an artistic outlet for those who wished to be creative and share their visions with the world but unfortunately lacked the talent as he did in drawing. This chapter will analyse aspects of the history of painting, how the principles of representation developed by painters influenced photography and how photographers constructed and composed an image and chose subject matter. When we initially think back to the invention of …show more content…

The book includes text explaining his photographic process and also twenty-four mounted photographs. With these photographs, he thought he was just mimicking or mirroring the beauty of nature. In a section of Fox Talbot on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tlbt/hd_tlbt.htm), it outlines Fox Talbots writings in his notebooks; ‘“how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves and durably and remain fixed on the paper”. “And why it should not be possible?”. As Talbot jotted down thoughts about experiments he could conduct at home to see if Nature, through the action of light on material substances, might be brought to draw her own picture’. According to Ian Jeffery in his book Photography: A Concise History, ‘Camera images were called ‘sun pictures’ and said to be ‘impressed by nature’s hand’ (Jeffery, 1981, p.

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