A new book examines the work of photography legend William Henry Fox Talbot. Amy Davies talks to the author Geoffrey Batchen to find out more
If you know even just a smattering of photographic history, you’ll be aware of William Henry Fox Talbot. Generally regarded as the inventor of photography – in British history at least – Fox Talbot was an interesting character. In this new book, compiled from extensive archive material held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, we learn that rather than it being a single act in a moment, photography was in fact a medium that Fox Talbot continued to reinvent throughout his life. The new book, Inventing Photography, takes a look at Talbot’s work, organising it by themes, rather than chronologically, to get a more holistic overview of his motivations – including the competing Daguerreotype process that came out of France at the same time.
To get a better insight into Fox Talbot’s life and work that went into the book, I asked the author, Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, to explain more.
AP: This is not your first book about Talbot – what about him do you find so interesting?
GB: William Henry Fox Talbot is England’s claimant to the invention of photography and he produced about 15,000 photographs during his career, inaugurating many of the photographic genres that we still practice to this day. He also had many other interests, from botany, mathematics, and the history of the English language to the translation of Assyrian cuneiform. So, there is lots to say about him and much that remains to be learned and understood. My own focus tends to be on the interpretation of Talbot’s pictures, a process that combines contextualisation and imagination. The aim is to reveal the relevance of Talbot’s photography to the present. I find this to be a very stimulating and challenging task.
AP: Why did you organise the pictures in the book by theme, rather than chronologically?
This book surveys the collection of 300 photographs by Talbot held by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Other books, including one of my own earlier efforts, provide a chronological overview of Talbot’s work as a photographer. I tried to do something different in this volume, clustering his images according to loose themes, and thereby allowing viewers to compare and contrast his various pictures. You can see how Talbot thinks through some of these themes, repeating certain pictorial conventions over and over again, or developing more sophisticated compositional devices as time went on and his confidence grew.
AP: Why do you think people continue to be fascinated with the
