William Henry Talbot (1800 –1877)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 –1877)

He was a British scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure.

He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature, which was illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives, and made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.

WILLIAM  HENRY FOX TALBOT (1800-1877)

The first paper negative, the most popular photographic procedure up the appearance of digital photography in 1835

The Open Door, 1844

The origin of this photography was artistic incompetence. On his honeymoon in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to sketch the Italian countryside. He was assisted by a camera lucida, a device that projected the landscape onto a sheet of paper, but his untutored hand couldn’t follow the contours. So he conjured a means to record scenery chemically. He dubbed it “the art of photogenic drawing”, and in the 1840s popularised his invention with a book called The Pencil of Nature.