The Development of Photography - Part 2



William Henry Fox Talbot conducted research of his own simultaneous to the time Louis Jacques Daguerre was conducting his. Talbot’s process that he invented formed the basis for both photography and photographic printing plates.  His motivation to take up this field of research was his lack of drawing skills and his inability to record beautiful landscapes. His experimentation in 1835 started with the treating of paper with silver compounds, such as silver nitrates, because he knew it was light-sensitive.

His initial method underwent the following steps:
  • The paper was left to float in a weak brine solution.
  • It was given a chance to dry,
  • The paper was then treated with a strong solution of silver nitrate. This formed an insoluble light-sensitive silver-chloride compound in the paper.
  • Exposure followed
  • The paper was washed with a salt solution or potassium iodide to fix the image and make the unexposed silver compound areas insensitive to light.

These images, created without a camera, were dubbed photogenic drawings that are called photograms in modern times. 20th century artists often used this method.
Talbot started to place his treated paper in his camera obscura to expose the paper in 1835 and so produce minute photographic images. These images were mirror negative images of nature.


William Henry Fox Talbot, Photogenic
Drawing, c.1839. The Botanical Specimen was sandwiched
between a piece of glass and sensitized
paper and then exposed to sunlight. 


Sudden uproar over daguerreotypes motivated Talbot to present his work to the Royal Society on 31 January 1839. His report was titled “Some account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” which translated to layman’s terms were "The process by which Natural Objects may be made to trace themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil."

The news about Talbot and Daguerre’s research fell onto Sir John Herschel’s ears and so he moved to improve on some weaknesses he noticed in the processes. To duplicate Talbot's results, he used sodium thiosulfate to fix the images by halting the action of light. He was the first to use this substance.  He shared his knowledge with Talbot on the 1st of February 1839. As a result both Daguerre and Talbot adopted Herschel’s way of fixing images. In the same month Talbot solved the problem of reversed images. He did this by contact printing his reverse image to another sheet of his sensitized paper in sunlight. It was Herschel who dubbed the reverse image a negativeand the contact print a positive.  He later dubbed Talbot’s work as photography(From the Greek photos and graphos, meaning “light drawing”), a term that was adopted worldwide.



In 1840 Talbot developed a process called calotype (from the Greek kalos typos, meaning “beautiful impression”). This process allowed Talbot to increased the light sensitivity of the paper, expose a latent image and then develop it after it was removed from the camera. Calotype only produced negative images though. To make a positive calotype one had to tightly sandwich a sheet of sensitized paper underneath a negative calotype and place them in sunlight. The fibres on the negative print were slightly diffused by the harsh rays of the bright sun. This resulted in the positive image being slightly blurred.
In 1844 Talbot started publishing his series of books called The Pencil of Nature. Each book featured 24 photographs mounted into it by hand. The first issue was completely illustrated by photographs alone.




Title page for The Pencil Of Nature, 1844.
This design demonstrates the eclectic
confusion of the Victorian era.
 Medieval letterforms, baroque plant
designs, and Celtic interlaces
are combined into a dense
symmetrical design


William Henry Fox Talbot, Photogram,
c. 1839. This botanical specimen
was featured in The Pencil
Of Nature as Plate VII. This is also
 an example of a positive calotype.



The Pencil of Nature was pivotal in the history of books. The daguerreotypes’ clarity was superior to that of the calotypes.  Although the calotypes were blurred, their softness had character, and a textural quality similar to a charcoal drawing.  But because a calotype negative could be used for reproduction, Talbot’s invention altered the course of both photography and later graphic design. But the initial stages of producing daguerreotypes stayed dominant.

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