Modena celebrates the Englishman Talbot, inventor of photography on paper
Italy celebrates a giant of history, the English William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), the inventor of photography on paper, the man who allows us to live in the civilization of images. And that he had an extraordinary relationship with the beautiful country. “Photography is the art of fixing a shadow” he said: the Estensi Galleries will dedicate to him, from 12 September to 10 January 2021, the exhibition “The imprint of reality. William Henry Fox Talbot. At the origins of photography " . This is the first major Italian retrospective that documents the activity of this pioneer of photography, comparing his work with that of other photographers, artists, scientists, and documenting his links with Italy, in particular with Modena. Through over 100 works on display, including photogenic drawings, calotypes, daguerreotypes, engravings from daguerreotypes, contemporary photographs, the exhibition traces the experiences that led to the birth of this new form of representation of reality. The exhibition also offers the extraordinary autograph correspondence between William Henry Fox Talbot and the optician, mathematician, astronomer and natural scientist from Modena Giovanni Battista Amici (1786-1863), showing some scientific instruments that were the basis of the relationship between the two inventors . Talbot, in fact, had a relationship with the Modenese scientist, considered the most important Italian manufacturer of optical instruments of the nineteenth century, testified by a series of letters and some 'photographic evidence' preserved in the Estense Library, which the English inventor donated to Friends. The discovery of these materials, which took place in 1977, gave rise to an exhibition curated by Italo Zannier which was held at the Palazzo dei Musei in Modena. The materials on display come from important international and Italian institutions: from the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford (UK), which has lent precious calotypes (the first photographic images on paper) and cyanotypes (photographic prints characterized by blue color) from its very rich collection. , up to the National Library of Florence from where the booklet of “The Pencil of Nature” comes , the first book illustrated with photographs, donated by Talbot to the Grand Duke of Tuscany through Giovanni Battista Amici. The exhibition includes other important loans from the Central Institute for Graphics in Rome, the Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia, the Venice Biennale Archive, the Venice Foundation, the Brera Academy in Milan, the Centro Apice in Milan. , from the Ugo Mulas Archive, from the Piero Manzoni Foundation, as well as from the Estense Library, from the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Modena, from the city's university museums, from the Modena Visual Arts Foundation and from numerous collectors.
On display, the first very rare books illustrated with photographs, such as The Pencil of Nature published by Talbot in London in 1844, the very rare collection of impressions of English flora created by Anna Atkins in 1853, among the first women to try their hand at photographic art , and the pioneering editorial experiments illustrated with photographs of our architectural, archaeological and landscape assets, which also played an important role in the formation of national identity in the years of the unification of Italy. Throughout the exhibition, as a counterpoint, some shots of twentieth century and contemporary authors will be proposed, such as Paolo Gioli, Luigi Veronesi, Ugo Mulas, Claudio Abate, Man Ray, Karen Knorr, Gillian Wearing and Franco Vaccari, whose images have connections , both from a technical and formal point of view, with the photography of the origins.
“The exhibition – says Martina Bagnoli, director of the Estensi Galleries – highlights the close and profitable relationship between art and science in the first half of the 19th century, celebrating the discovery of the photographic negative. This was a fundamental discovery that made the photographic image reproducible, forever changing our relationship with images. For this reason the exhibition is an essential moment for all those who are interested in the history and evolution of our visual culture. The result of over two years of research, the exhibition stems from the study of the collections of the Estensi Galleries, focusing on an extraordinary moment in which the history of Modena intersects with that of the great European capitals. Through the exhibitions and the study of its collections, the museum participates in the development of visual culture in a critical and proactive way. The exhibition on Talbot makes us reflect on the concept of reproducibility of images, the desire to represent and represent oneself and the very close and essential relationship between image and memory ”.
On this occasion, Talbot's exhibition is in dialogue with Mario Cresci's solo exhibition entitled “The light, the trace, the form” , presented by the Modena Visual Arts Foundation on the same dates, at Palazzo Santa Margherita in Modena.
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), was born in Melbury, Dorset, the only child of William Davenport Talbot (1764–1800), an army officer of Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, and Elisabeth Teresa (1773–1846), eldest daughter of Henry Thomas Fox-Strangways, 2nd Earl of Ilchester (1747–1802). Although his official surname is Fox Talbot, he almost always signed himself Henry F. Talbot or HF Talbot. The intuition that turned Talbot's studies towards photography came in October 1833, on the Italian shores of Lake Como, when he found himself in the frustrating position of not being able to draw the landscape. As he stated in the introduction to his 1844 The Pencil of Nature :
“One of the first days of October 1833, on the enchanting shores of Lake Como, in Italy, I enjoyed taking sketches with Wollaston's Camera Lucida; or, rather, I tried to take them, but with the most modest results possible. In fact, when the eye moved away from the prism – in which everything appeared beautiful – I discovered that the unfaithful pencil had left on the paper only traces that made us sad to look at them. After several unsuccessful attempts, I put the instrument aside and came to the conclusion that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing, which I unfortunately did not possess. I then thought of trying again a method that I had tried many years before. This method consisted of taking a Camera Obscura and projecting the image of the objects onto a piece of transparent glossy paper, spread over a glass plate placed in the focus of the instrument. On this paper the objects can be seen clearly, and can be traced in pencil with a certain precision, although not without spending time and effort. […] This, therefore, was the method that I proposed to try again, using – as in the past – to trace with the pencil the contours of the scenario depicted on the paper. And this led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the representations produced by the painting of nature, which the camera's lens projects onto the paper in its fire: fairy representations, creations of a moment, destined just as quickly to vanish. It was among these thoughts that an idea occurred to me … how fascinating it would be if it were possible to make these natural images imprint themselves in a lasting way, and remain fixed on the paper! And why shouldn't that be possible? I wondered ".
Thus was born the concept of photography. Talbot lacked the tools to experiment on the journey and, on his return to England, was immediately reabsorbed by parliamentary duties. Sometime later, in the spring of 1834, he began to make his dream a reality. By coating ordinary writing paper with alternating washes of table salt and silver nitrate, he was able to incorporate the light-sensitive silver chloride into the paper fibers. The paper thus prepared, placed in the sun, under an opaque object such as a leaf, blackens where it is not protected from the light, thus producing a white silhouette of the object that was placed on it. Talbot called these early proofs "sciagraphs" , drawings of shadows. He continued his research in Geneva during the autumn, where he managed to stabilize his images against the further action of light by washing them with a solution of potassium iodide. Encouraged by the summer light, in 1835, Talbot worked to increase the sensitivity of his cards in order to use them inside a camera obscura, the prototype of the camera. The exposure times were so long that Talbot scattered his small and still crude wooden cameras all over Lacock's garden, leaving them even for hours (leading Constance to baptize them "mouse traps"). He also realized that the images produced, both those by contact and those made with the Camera, could be printed on sensitive paper, inverting the tones and allowing the production of multiple positive prints from a negative (the positive / negative names were coined in followed by Herschel). This shows that the fundamental concepts of photography were already all within Talbot's reach, just two years after his initial frustration on Lake Como.
At the end of 1835, although he had already achieved good results, his experiments were known only to his family, because he wanted to further improve the procedure before publishing it. During the next three years, he was fully engaged in other optics studies and in the perfecting of his mathematical works. In November 1838 Talbot finally returned to his photographic experiments and began drafting a document in view of the presentation of the proceedings to the Royal Society, from which in the same year he had received the Royal Medal for Studies in Mathematics. By early 1839 he had published nearly thirty scientific articles and two books, and two more would follow within the year. The news of January 7, 1839 that in Paris Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) had captured the images of the camera obscura, came like a bolt from the blue for Talbot. Without knowing the details (which were later disclosed), Talbot was faced with the possibility of having lost his discovery if Daguerre's method proved identical to his own. Due to the dull, faint winter light it was impossible for Talbot to show his process. In a frantic quest to prove that his method was predecessor, Michael Faraday helped him on January 25, showing the Royal Institution some of Talbot's photographic evidence from 1835 that had been well preserved. On January 31, Talbot read the famous speech "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing " to the Royal Society which was later published in the Literary Gazette on February 2. This document, although hastily written, was far-reaching, gave the process a new name, photogenic design, and explored many of the future implications of the new art. Three weeks later, Talbot detailed his method before the Royal Society.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/rubriche/modena-celebra-linglese-talbot-inventore-della-fotografia-su-carta/ on Sat, 12 Sep 2020 04:24:00 +0000.