“You press the button…we do the rest.”
- Ad slogan for Kodak, 1888
Like everyone, I take my snapshots for granted.
Press the button, watch the screen, store the image. Then, of course, open in Photoshop, retouch, and print or send.
It does not take much effort to get visual mementos of my life with phone, tablet, camera. It all seems automatic, evident, obvious and my faith in it all working is secure. But that is only because I am at the far end of the long evolution of photographic technology. At the other end sits someone like William Fox Talbot who lived and worked back when having faith in a new technology really meant something.
Talbot was born in 1800 to an upper class family. Even before entering Cambridge, he embarked on a course of self-study in mathematics, astronomy, botany, and chemistry as well as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French. He did so well on his own that, at the age of 20, he won a prize for translating Macbeth into Greek. Two years later he published a paper on mathematics that earned him membership in the Royal Astronomical Society. Before he turned 25 he had done original research in astronomy at the Paris Observatory, and in optics, electricity, oceanography and the chemistry of color.
Blessed with a long life – he lived to be 87 – Talbot eventually published more than 50 papers and books in the fields of science and math, including award-winning research in the optics of crystals and in integral calculus. He did all this while somehow finding time to serve as a Liberal member of Parliament. And this does not even hint at his significant discoveries and papers in the areas of etymology and folklore, or his renowned work as one of the leading experts on Assyrian hieroglyphics. At the age of 58 he was elected vice president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Yet the most astonishing thing about this scientist/mathematician/linguist/ politician is that he is virtually unknown outside of England for any of these achievements. They were all overshadowed by what we now consider to be his greatest discovery...the invention of photography.
It was while sketching at Lake Como in 1833, that Fox Talbot first wondered if there was a way to make the transitory images of a camera obscura imprint themselves on paper. The camera obscura was a device that reflected images from the world into a surface so they could be traced. Talbot had no real drawing ability and it was his frustration with rendering the beauty of nature that marked the beginning of his photographic quest.
In the summer of 1835, he embarked on an exhaustive series of experiments that lead to what he called Photogenic Drawing, a means of fixing images on paper that is the basis of modern photographic method. Although others were working on similar ideas, it was Talbot who came up with the idea of printing positive images from a negative, a technique that eventually displaced the one-shot method created by others. He also invented a way to develop the latent images on the paper, which he called the Calotype, from the Greek word for beautiful. This technique shortened exposures from over an hour to a few minutes.
Images in his 1844 book The Pencil of Nature are among the finest photographs in the history of the art. Along the way he managed to outline the process of halftone printing, which marks the start of modern visual communications, and to discover a means of drawing on a darkened sheet of glass with a needle and imprinting this image on prepared paper. "I think it may prove very useful," he wrote, "to persons who wish to circulate a few copies among their friends of anything which they have written." It should not surprise us that Talbot foreshadowed the role of photocopying a century early.
Talbot's inventive genius did not extend to marketing and was overshadowed by Louis Daguerre's incessant self-promotion. Talbot spent his later years in a quagmire of legal suits over the matter.
Talbot was a genius, of course, but he was also a product of the Victorian Age, in which boundless energy, multiple talents, unbridled curiosity and concentration, and thorough knowledge of the natural world were everyday expectations of the upperclass into which he had the good sense to be born.
But like many of his fellow Victorians, he also had an uncompromising belief that the world could be made better through technology. This was the spirit of his age of exploration and discovery, a time during when it was right and proper to probe the unknown, to extend boundaries, to suffer hardships for the sake of a new discovery. A time of faith in the future, in technology itself and how it would improve the world.
I imagine Talbot sitting in his studio in the dark, fiddling with some new chemical, coughing on the fumes, watching the developing bucket, waiting for an image to emerge from nowhere, knowing that it will, that it must. And thanks to his faith at the start, I too have it all the way down at this end and I trust my memories to an invisible little chip of silicon I have never seen.
It is a faith we all share, not in this or that device perhaps but in the whole enterprise, the whole new world, the evolving Gizmos. This faith is constantly tested to be sure, but as man of the cloth will tell you, that is the only kind worth having.
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