Traces of Light: The Art and Experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot. . - Media - book review

Larry J. Schaaf, Mike Ware, Michael Gray, Geoffrey Batchen, Gerardo F. Kurtz and Russell Roberts Madrid, Spain: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2001

This book, titled Traces of Light: The Art and Experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot in its English translation, was published in conjunction with an exhibition oranized under the same title at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Presented within an institution devoted to contemporary relevance from the remarkable achievements of an artist cum scientist working in the nineteenth century. To this end, these inaugural traces of light were presented by the museum alongside exhibitions of photographs by Robert Frank and Andreas Gursky.

In this respect, both the exhibition and the book seem to offer different perspectives on the articulation of such "relevance." The exhibition appears focused on an attempt to align Talbot with a lineage of modern, and especially art, photography by tracing a line of successors to such eponymous figures as Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Struth. The book, on the other hand, seeks to examine such a tracing itself by examining Talbot's inquisitive oeuvre as a quest for photography's Identity, and in doing so attaches an ontological gravity to a medium that has perpetually been haunted by its own enlightened extinction.

Altogether six essays are featured in the book, with numerous, all beautifully reproduced, photographs made by Talbot. His breadth of subject matter and systematic approach to perfect both the photographic process and its applications are displayed here with many examples rarely, if ever, seen before by anyone but serious Talbot scholars taking the trip to Lacock Abbey. The selection of essays, all by notable experts, provides a prismatic, if not kaleidoscopic, view of Talbot's philosophical, scientific and artistic musings over the very conception of photography: Larry Schaaf follows the education of Talbot's artistic vision through his experimental photography; Michael Gray traces the genesis of the photographic idea through Talbot's own writings and nomenclature of the "photogenic;" Geoffrey Batchen looks at one of Talbot's most repeated subjects--photograms of lace--to weave a broader picture of the identity coming into view; and, lastly, Russell Roberts sums up all these efforts under the concept of the "marvelous" and offers a fresh classification of Talbot's work, particularly in reference to his The Pencil oil Nature (1843).

The result of all those gazes gathered here is a thoughtful interaction with the ambivalent "body" of photography, assembled through the forensic materials of Talbot's art and experiments. For this reason, it uncannily evokes the "latent image" phenomenon, which remains central to the silver-based photographic process. As prophetically expressed through Talbot's writing--"concealed at first, at last I appear"--this concept of latency coincides with the notion that photography has always been both an agent and an object of its own revelation. And, perhaps, in that fluid juncture, one might recall, like this book does, the magnitude of looking back and facing the vision that first developed photography and was troubled by its appearance. As Talbot himself noted in a passage intended for The Pencil oil Nature (that never appeared in the published version): "Many notions of ye present days are destined to sink into oblivion 8 perhaps some of ye oldest notions will come up again."

The Chronicles of Now: The Ways of the World in Pictures and (Some) Words by Anthony Haden-Guest. Allworth Press/224 pp./ $19.05 (sb).

The Desktop Photographer by Tim Daly. Watson-Guptill Publications/144 pp./$24.95 (sb).

The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24: Design/Culture/Identify: The Wolfsonian Collection edited by Joel M. Hoffman. MIT Press/283 pp./$25.00 (sb).

The Law (In Plain English) For Photographers by Leonard D. Duboff. Allworth Press/228 pp./$19.95 (sb).

COPYRIGHT 2002 Visual Studies Workshop
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