William Henry Fox Talbot

One of the inventors of photography was an English gentleman who in 1833 was joined by his wife Constance on their honeymoon excursion on what was known as the "Grand Tour" of the European continent. Talbot possessed a brilliant mind and was eternally curious about nearly everything from botany to optics to language. His education was a classical one that included Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.

On the banks of Lake Como, not far from Bellagio, Talbot endeavored to draw the magnificent scene of water and mountains: beautiful scenery in the splendid micro-climate near the Swiss Alps where palm trees and other tropical vegetation thrive. Sadly, drawing was not one of Talbot's many talents and he resorted at present to the Camera Lucida to aid him in the task.

Using the Camera Lucida

The device allowed the artist to view the scene in front of him at the same time as viewing the page on which the drawing would be created. All that was required was to trace the elements onto the page.

Diagram of Camera Lucida Optics

But this was only useful in the placement of the gross elements of the picture; shading, detail, lighting and dramatic effects were still required to be invented by the artist. These were the elements that were missing from Talbot's repertoire.

Talbot's View of the Scene at the Villa Melzi

Talbot's Drawing

As a result, Talbot achieved little more than a stick-figure representation of the landscape he was attempting to recreate. As he later described, "when the eye was removed from the prism – in which all had looked beautiful – I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold."

My View from the Villa Melzi in 1990

But the remarkable breakthough that Talbot experienced he jotted down in notes in his journal "...how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!" He also recorded some chemicals that he could try in this direction. When he returned to England, to his home at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, he began experimenting and by 1835 had created the first negative/positive images in a camera.

He felt there was more to perfect on the process, but got sidetracked into other creative tasks--like translating the Assyrian alphabet--and put his photographic experiments aside. His efforts were temporarily eclipsed by Louis Jacques Mandes Daguerre who announced his Daguerrotype process to the public in 1839. But it is Talbot's negative/positive process on which photography thrived until the recent emergence of the digital era.