Henry Fox Talbot changed the way the world remembers itself.
Before photography, faces, places, documents and moments survived through memory, drawing, painting, engraving or written description. Talbot helped create something far more powerful: a method by which light itself could leave evidence behind.
Born into privilege at Lacock Abbey, William Henry Fox Talbot was a scholar, mathematician, inventor and difficult pioneer. He was not the only inventor of photography, and he was not the most theatrical. Louis Daguerre dazzled the world with the daguerreotype. Talbot's achievement was quieter but more far-reaching. His negative-positive process pointed towards the future of reproducible images, photographic books, archives, family albums, scientific records and the modern image world.
This book follows Talbot from Lacock Abbey to the birth of photography, the rivalry with Daguerre, the invention of the calotype, the publication of The Pencil of Nature, the battles over patents and ownership, and the long argument over his place in history.
Clear, direct and readable, Henry Fox Talbot is the story of a Victorian power player whose influence did not come from Parliament, empire or industry, but from changing how memory could be captured, copied and shared.
Part of the Victorian Power Players series.
