This publication serves as a primer on the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, a true interdisciplinary innovator who drew on his knowledge of art, botany, chemistry and optics to become one of the inventors of photography in 1839. Talbot?s 'photogenic drawings' (photograms), calotypes and salted paper prints are some of the first-ever examples of images captured on paper.0This book brings together more than 30 photographs by Talbot that demonstrate his wide-ranging interests, including nature, still-life, portraiture, architecture and landscape. Some of these images are previously unpublished. Through thematic groupings elucidated by noted Talbot scholar Larry Schaaf, the book reveals the photographer's early striving to test the boundaries of his medium at a historic moment when art and science intersected. With its luminous reproductions of Talbot's fragile works, this publication demonstrates that, in its earliest days, photography required a form of magic-making and innovation that continues to inspire people today.00Exhibition: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, United States (18.11.2017 - 11.02.2018).

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Pencil of Nature" by William Henry Fox Talbot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

First Photographs is an eyewitness to the origins of modern photography. This book - the only monograph on Talbot to be supported by the curator of the Fox Talbot Museum - includes many never-before-published images of landscapes, architectural studies, and portraiture from Talbot's personal archive and selections from his detailed research notebooks made during the 1830s and 1840s, currently housed at the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey in Chippenham, England. In addition to his technological contributions, Talbot's own photographs represent exceptional and prescient artistic achievement. Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, contributes an innovative analysis of both the aesthetic and social significance of Talbot's first photographic image, the "Oriel Window," through a remarkable evocation of Talbot's late-life reflection one sunny afternoon beneath his window in Lacock Abbey. Curator Carol McCusker considers how the women of the Lacock household influenced Talbot's aesthetic choices. First Photographs also includes a biography and timeline of Talbot's eventful life and revolutionary work by the preeminent Talbot scholar Michael Gray.

As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age--a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies. Drawing on Talbot's fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines, including historians of science, art, and photography, broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.