William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877) was a photography pioneer that not only invented the calotype process (a precursor to photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries) but made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. A member of Great Britain’s landed gentry, following the death of his father, was named the sole heir to the sprawling and somewhat ruinous estate known as Lacock Abbey which fifteenth century cloisters are the setting for the scenes depicted in these images. The portraits and the figure studies you see here became a viable subject for photography only after one of Talbot’s discoveries. In 1840 he found a way to chemically develop the latent image that had registered on a sheet of photo sensitized paper, during an exposure too brief to imprint itself visibly. With this new process, patented by its inventor as the calotype or talbotype, exposure times could be reduced from minutes to seconds.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:21:08 +0000
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