the pencil of nature

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the FIRST photographically illustrated book to be commercially published.

  • Published in 6 installments between 1844 and 1846!
  • Written by William Henry Fox Talbot and published in London. 
  • The book went through the details of Talbot’s calotype process and included 24 prints hand pasted.

The book had no binding and was sold in separate installments. Purchasers were expected to bind it themselves once all installments had been released. Talbot had planned for many more releases but the book was not a commercial success and had to be discontinued after completing only 6. 

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“A painter's eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable. A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across his path, a time-withered oak, or a moss-covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings, and picturesque imaginings.”

—William Henry Fox Talbot, from The Pencil of Nature

“People think photography is banal. But photography is not banal. It is still an amazing thing, isn’t it? I got terribly interested in Henry Fox Talbot and the early photographers in England and I pursued them … All those early images – they’re pretty fugitive, they’re going a bit funny at the edges but they are the first moments when reality could be somehow stopped and held. He called it ‘the pencil of nature’, this process he’d invented. It’s a beautiful idea – ‘the pencil of nature’ – sort of nature’s way of recording reality rather than via somebody’s mind and hand. The pencil of nature – photography. I started to want in a sense not only to assume the manner of a photographer of 1840 but also to get something of the quality of the prints. I love the granular texture of the calotypes. That was Henry Fox Talbot’s thing – using paper as a negative so that when you contact-print it you get the texture of the paper itself slightly distressing the image. It is not like clear film and clear emulsions that we have now. That blurred, fuzzy, textured image I tried to get that in these charcoal drawings” William Delafield Cook”

—Interview with the author [Deborah Hart], William Delafield Cook video, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1987.
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