William Henry Fox Talbot was on his honeymoon at Lake Como in northern Italy in 1833. He was trying to sketch the beautiful lake and the surrounding scenery but was becoming increasingly frustrated with his lack of drawing skills. He used a camera lucida and a camera obscura, two devices that use lenses to project an image onto a piece of paper to aid in drawing, but he didn’t find either one very satisfactory.
In a sale celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sotheby's photography auctions, a set of nearly 200 early photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot quadrupled its pre-auction high estimate and achieved a new auction record for the artist: $1,956,000.
A rare collection of some of the world's earliest photographs is coming up for sale. Sotheby’s will be selling nearly 200 photos by 19th-century photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot at auction in New York next month.
The world's first major photography exhibition was held back in 1839 when British scientist and photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot held a show to unveil his photo prints to the public. Fast forward nearly 180 years, and now an artist has created Talbot's first photo show as an immersive virtual reality experience.
Here's a video you need to watch if you enjoy seeing and learning about photography history. The folks over at Objectivity recently paid a visit to The Royal Society, where they were shown a set of priceless items from photography history.
In addition to a set of super expensive early photos from the 1850s, they were also shown one of the earliest descriptions of photography: a 1839 paper by William Henry Fox Talbot titled: "Some Account on the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or: the Process By Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Deliniate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist's Pencil."
Here's a little photographic history lesson to get your Thursday morning started off right. Did you know that the woman many sources believe was the first female photographer was an English botanist by the name of Anna Atkins?
Atkins repurposed the cyanotype process (discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842) from a way of making photocopies of notes and diagrams (i.e. blueprints) to a way of making photograms of plants.
The origin of photography was artistic incompetence. On his honeymoon in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to sketch the Italian countryside. He was assisted by a camera lucida, a device that projected the landscape onto a sheet of paper, but his untutored hand couldn’t follow the contours. So he conjured a means to record scenery chemically. He dubbed it “the art of photogenic drawing”, and in the 1840s popularized his invention with a book called The Pencil of Nature.