Ladies and gentlemen. It's wonderful to welcome you this evening to the Public Library, to this fabulous event,
the college food lecture, and to hear Professor Larry Scharf, who I'm proud to say of this parish.
And it's wonderful to see so many friends in the audience.
I look forward to catching up with you all over drinks in bilateral hall after the lecture to which you are cordially invited.
No, we are not going to go back.
I am not going to introduce you, but I'm really just here to say thank you because Larry requires at least two more people to introduce.
And at this point, it's my great pleasure to introduce Jemmy Reed,
who's going to take the battle hymn and we'll gradually get to the library in a few minutes time.
Thank you. Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
First of all, I would like to add my welcome to Richard evidence on behalf of the Royal Photographic Society.
It's what I think will be a very special evening indeed. I would like to give all thanks to Richard and all his staff,
who have been wonderful to not only providing the venue but also for their great help in making the event happen.
It's has been a pleasure working with you all. This is the second Colin Ford lecture for the Royal Photographic Society Historical Group.
It is held every two years to honour Colin Ford, who has, as many of you know,
is a towering figure in photo history in Britain beyond what as possible?
Yes, yes, he saved the children albums and albums for the nation.
Later, he was director of the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television in Brexit.
And I am delighted that we can mount this event in his honour, our distinguished speaker, this evening.
Professor Larry Scharf, director of the William Henry Fox Talbot catalogue tonight and University of Oxford.
I will now ask Colin, please, to introduce Professor Sean.
I was asked as I was meeting, so many of my friends are the vote history and photo history world outside.
What gave me the idea for the coming forward lecture and how did it happen?
Well, I have to say deeply honoured and flattered as I am to be standing here introducing something called the Common Field Lecture.
It wasn't my idea, and it's not my money that pays for it.
So even if just occasionally I have not agreed with something with the Royal Photographic Society has done.
I'm hugely grateful, very, very grateful and honoured that they instituted this series of lectures.
And as you've already heard, this is the second of them.
A bit of a change because the first one was given by someone from New York, the curator of the Andre Kemp Test Collection, whom I've never met before.
So show me a real beginning.
I don't know because I haven't done all the research, but I wouldn't mind guessing that I've known Larry longer than anyone else in this room.
We met in the early 1970s when I first went to see the Wonderful Gowns Home Collection, University of Texas, where Larry was then teaching.
And I'm sure most of you know about how Genzyme built up this most extraordinary collection, and it did cross my mind as Martin walked into the room.
Supposing the V.A. had accepted the offer of the collection, which he made them all those decades ago, except they came with a helmet.
Well, I know why they didn't get you set up to accept it.
I think the history of collecting and museums of photography in this country would have been hugely different.
Anyway, I went through my 1974 diary last year, that's when I think it was, but it isn't.
And then I thought, he's a professor, he's a much better researcher than I am.
Larry will know exactly the date and hour of which we first met.
At least he will profess. But it was the early 1970s.
Didn't we meet first if we went home?
We went on to Eastman House for went on for that conference, he said.
It was my first visit there, too. Anyway, you haven't come to listen to me reporting on.
You've come to hear Larry, the most distinguished professor and photo historian.
There is anywhere, I think. And as most of you will know, he was responsible.
He's been working here in Oxford for a long time on the catalogue, raising a fox.
Tolbert and I know a tiny bit about catalogue raisonné having, I think, written the first one ever about the photographer.
But the Fox show, which is a much, much,
much bigger statement that Julia Margaret Cameron at least had a rather limited number of photographs and a limited life.
In a sense, fox to render a thousand words in one went down to twelve hundred here.
I know I ought to be able to quote the exact number, but you know, what's the exact number of Fox stalwarts?
Oh, the exact. I hope I never know exactly. The new one.
Just this week,
five new ones emerge that have the gold plated provenance and that they were simply the museum grounds and had not attached to the importance to them.
So number keeps growing, but I think. I can certainly do 10 times jurors and maybe 15.
Well, you are 10 times as good at the time. I know that, Larry. But again, the story is similar in a way and I will stop going on.
But when the question is in which actually published it, I'm ready to give them off it.
Come on. When we started, we'd found 800 images. By the end of the evening, we found twelve hundred and about six weeks before it was published,
the marketing department on Case changed the name from the collected photographs of James Cameron to the complete photographs,
so I said it will never be complete. That is a huge error.
We'll find 50 within six months. Well, it was took slightly longer than six months, but yes, there are more than 50.
Anyway, Larry, as you know, was due to give his final lecture at the end of the end of this years of working on the catalogue raisonné here and.
Suddenly had a stroke. And didn't give the lecture, but it wasn't your fault.
All right. Well, most things are my fault. I know that. But it seemed to me when I was asked who should give the second lecture?
Because though it isn't my idea and so on while I'm around, I'm lucky enough to be asked who should give the lecture to some.
But surely, if Larry is well enough to give the lecture,
could there be anything better that we could do than invite him back to Oxford to give that missing lecture?
He's got better enough to do it, I'm delighted to say. And yes, we all owe a huge.
Congratulations to him for being here, Elizabeth, for helping him to be here and to Richard,
for actually sponsoring the whole thing and arranging it all and giving us this wonderful lecture theatre and so on.
So as I said, I'll stop right reporting know you haven't come to listen to me at all.
Whatever it says up there, my name is almost, Oh, my name is better than this.
Nevertheless, it's Professor Larry Scharf that you've come to here.
Ladies and gentlemen, Larry.
When I was first invited to the Colin Ford lecture, I thought it was a Colin Ford lecture, I didn't realise I'd be expected to give it myself,
and I think I've asked them to turn the lights down so that it won't interfere with your napping.
You certainly won't need any notes. The first talk I gave in here years ago and Richard can probably say exactly what it was.
Everybody came in with construction booties and we had to send people across the street to the pub because the loos weren't active yet.
If you choose to leave early, you won't be able to use that excuse tonight, so you'll have to come up with something new.
The catalogue raisonné here is an online resource I'm envious of Colin having a printed catalogue raisonné,
but with a very large number of images that we're dealing with and the constantly shifting landscape in online
publication is the way to go and certainly in terms of adding new information as it's discovered and as it interacts,
I'm a bit of a fossil myself. I prefer traditional ways of research and reading, but is simply overwhelming.
Talbot studies started in earnest with his granddaughter, Matilda Talbot, who was surprised to inherit Lake Kabhie.
She moved down from her native Scotland and changed her surname to top it and during the 1930s was
a big promoter of her grandfather's work when he was really very barely known back during the war.
Harold White came as a photographer to the scene to photograph an English village, getting along just jolly well.
Thank you! And he fell in love, I think, with Talbot, but possibly with Matilda.
But he and his family started visiting then every summer, and it's because of Harold White that you see this three young conservators in here.
I apologise that you see this towering stack of letters, and you can maybe see his cigarette hanging out to indicate that he's a professional scholar.
And he organised with Matilda's help all of the letters and photographs that he could find at that time in Laycock Abbey.
Those of you who've been to Laycock or perhaps have seen the Harry Potter movie.
It's a great rambling place, and we're honoured to have Roger Watson, the curator of the Fox Museum.
But it's the same evening and they're still discovering things.
Roger, you came up with something.
What about a week or so ago that Lucy emerged from a shoe box somewhere in the attic and don't really know the details?
Software changes are required? Your I.T. department, did you see that notice?
Oh, I just got a notice of software requirements. Are you changing?
I hope they don't mean my head. That's what.
I was introduced to computers during a failed stint as an electrical engineering student at the University of Illinois in champagne.
The iliac computer was the first transistor sized computer to be on a university campus,
substantially less powerful than that mobile phone that you have in your pocket.
I know you have one, but marvellous at the time.
Of course, a lot of the work was manual.
It required extensive cooling and wouldn't have been practical for this project, but did plant in me a sense of what one might do with such a machine.
Being a photographer? As I started doing Tolbert studies, I started carrying a camera around.
This is a homemade copy stand, it all folded up into a briefcase.
And this is with me in St. Petersburg in 1994, was in St. Petersburg.
During the Cold War, I would have been shot as a spy, rather stupid spy, I think.
But you know, I have this whole little kit here with the camera outfit,
but very limited capability of taking pictures because you were limited by the 36
shots or in the roll film and then you had no way to merge that with the computer.
The one before digital photography. And so, you know, the two had to exist in parallel.
I started. A little earlier and then, but about that time, a flat file database,
if some of you in here would have heard of DOS and it was an incredible thing to be able
to organise about 14000 records of individual negatives and prints that were worldwide.
And I was travelling a lot at that time, lecturing quite a bit.
So any time I would go somewhere, I would take very primitive laptop and a four line screen recorded on micro cassettes.
But I would take that into the collection and record all the data.
Of course, don't pictures associated with it.
And so I had to describe something that was trapezoidal and bumped up three millimetres on the left and so on.
And the field lengths were quite restricted. And so if I ran out of room in one field, I had to tuck things in to another.
So it became a real dog's breakfast after a while.
But but as dogs find breakfast is interesting. No, I don't remember exactly when we met.
It's a fake. I still have the same brown leather bag in the same punch, but I'm not sure too much else is the same.
The same as Colin said he came to visit while I was teaching.
Photo history at University of Texas is actually teaching photojournalism, and they needed a history component.
So I started teaching photo history and started working with the helmet on Ellis and Grandson Collection and generally agree with Colin.
There's times I have to steer him back towards the path of truth, but we agree on most things,
and certainly one of the things that we agree on is that people likely Gerhard Simes did the outline map of a continent and it's up to us to.
I'm stealing one of your lines now up to us to fill in the interior with all the details.
And that's what we've been attempting to do ever since.
Many of you in here, I know, are familiar with William Henry Fox Talbot.
And then there are some new faces in here who perhaps have avoided that fate so far.
So I just wanted to quickly review. This is a daguerreotype portrait taken of Talbot in 1844.
So right around the time of the introduction to photography in the public in 1839,
and you can see nice erudite man with with his book you don't see his balding here because of the top hat.
He was a prodigious young man born in 18:00. This is always one of my favourite portraits of him.
I should have put up an inverted version of this. If you'll all just stand in your head, it'll have the same effect.
This was done when he was seven years old.
It was done by one of his Welsh cousins, and I've always loved that solar flare of thoughts coming out of the top of his head.
But in fact, it's an ink drip. And of course, it doesn't drip upwards.
Except maybe in Trump's world, but ink doesn't drip upwards. This was inverted and ran down.
So this was done at a minimum with a candle.
And one of his cousins tracing the pattern on a piece of paper, possibly done in a camera obscura, which would have been around at the time.
But he was introduced to optics and science and photography early on.
This is now in National Museums Scotland.
They call it Taubitz head its electrostatic machine and when you turn a crank at the little doll, circles attracted up there.
But this is the sort of thing that he grew up with. These were his toys.
Science brought up and tutored largely by his mother, Lady Elizabeth Fielding, who is the daughter of the Earl of Chester.
Very bright lady and very ambitious for her son, something he didn't always share.
And she she tutored him up to about age 10 or 11,
and she taught him Greek and Latin and mathematics until she finally realised that he was beginning to outstrip her and overtake her,
which I'm sure actually pleased her no end. The idea for photography started out, perhaps in a pattern that we would immediately recognise.
This is a photo grim, a negative. This is a piece of botanical material put on a light sensitive surface, put out in the sun,
and the light affected the area of where the leaves did not block the light.
Lt was something that Torbett had studied, particularly.
This is an apparatus that he designed before photography for measuring different effects of colour light in different perceptions of colour.
And as you put things in here and crank them and our eye blends colour together.
This was known to exist in the form of a printed paper and not too many years ago.
One miraculously turned up in the United States in the collection and was acquired again by National Museums Scotland, who.
Recognised what it was, so we have that physical manifestation.
It was in October of 1833 that Talbot was travelling on the continent outside England,
travelling on the continent, and he was a member of parliament at that time.
But Parliament was in recess during the summer, and he had gotten married the year before.
His wife, Constance, had never been on a European tour.
So you could call this a delayed honeymoon. But in any case, he was going with his wife and his sisters joined up with him from time to time,
and they found themselves outside Bellshill on Lake Como in Italy, specifically at Villa M.C.
Everybody was sketching Intel, but for all of his accomplishments,
he had published dozens of papers by now and several books for all of his accomplishments, he couldn't draw.
And so he turned to the established little thing you see here burn a hole in the screen,
a camera lucida, literally a room of like a camera lucida is prison and a little stem, as you see.
And when you bring your eye up to the edge of the prison, when you get it just in the right position,
your eye can still see your hand below on the drawing paper, and you can see through the prism nature out in front of you.
So. As in many things, artistic, anybody standing next to you is not going to see anything, but you are combining that image in your brain.
I'm the Henry Talbot of our family. I can't draw worth a damn. But this is my wife, Elizabeth's camera.
Go see this set up at this position.
I now want to show you, and I've researched it for many years, the very finest drawing that Talbot ever accomplished.
And it was using a camera lucida at this very location.
And I think you can clearly see why he needed to invent photography.
He knew there in Italy that the camera lucida was of no value, both to helping him draw or making any permanent record.
But he began to think about what light is and what light up and realise light does have a physical effect on things.
You know, we see it in chlorophyll. We see it in other forms, of course, our own skin when we get a suntan.
But light does physically change objects. And so he thought of the camera obscura room with darkness rather than a room of light.
And the fact that light was actually projected within that camera and therefore there were different intensities of light.
And he began to wonder if there was a way that he could record those different intensities.
He had no apparatus with them. At that point, return to Laycock concavity returned to parliament.
And sometime in 1834 began to experiment trying to take that idea that he had had in Italy and convert it to a reality.
This is the so-called bottle room.
It's a room at Lake Okeechobee, right above the kitchen, the kitchen, of course, a good source of glassware and pans and chemicals and water and heat.
This was parts of this were purchased by the Smithsonian in Washington.
And this is a slide I took from memory in 1974, thereabouts of this waxworks diorama that they set up in the Smithsonian,
which sadly they since dismantled it and it's now off in storage.
I don't know what happened to the wax in retail, but I would love to have in my living room.
But he soon discovered by quoting paper with a light sensitive silver compound, that he could do this.
He could put it out in sunshine below an opaque object, and the light would affect the chemical compound around that object.
And so it would remain white. Now, unfortunately, as Wedgwood and others had found before him.
As soon as we started looking at this, it kept darkening because light within reach the areas where the plant was no longer.
And the picture would self-destruct very, very quickly.
Fortunately. He was forced to take a certain route.
Silver chloride is the most sensitive of the silver compounds to light, but silver chloride is a bit like the snow in a snow cone here.
That's John Ashcroft a bit like the snow in a snow cone.
It's a flock in that matter. But by taking silver nitrate, which is not particularly sensitive to light,
but it's easily soluble in water, you can put table salt sodium chloride in the paper fibres.
And then when you coat on silver nitrate. Silver chloride is embedded, precipitated an embedded right there in the fibres.
And it's actually fortunate that he was forced to go through that two step process to make his light sensitive materials.
He soon discovered looking at the edges of his pictures that there was an accidental difference in the ratio between salt and silver.
And as you can see here, the edge, which happened to receive more salt actually is not as sensitive to light.
And so he discovered by using a weak solution of table salt with silver nitrate.
He got a relatively sensitive paper.
And then after exposure, if he flooded it with a strong solution of salt, that it was preserved and his images became relatively permanent.
The next summer, the glorious summer of 1835, there was ample sunshine.
He had improved his coating techniques, a great deal still using the same chemistry.
This is what we would call a negative if the terms are reversed, it's done a little tiny camera obscura.
His wife once called the mousetraps. She had the village carpenter box together and they had a hole on one end for a lens.
He would have borrowed from his stock Laycock Gabby, and he would set these around the grounds of Laycock.
You can imagine in this top hat the squire doing a crazy thing, and this is sharing its tower Laycock Abbey.
A beautiful early negative, you can see how informal the paper is,
it was just pasted inside this little box still preserved at the George Eastman Museum.
The older amongst you would still want to call it George Eastman House Jersey Museum in Rochester, New York, and it's still perfectly visible.
This is from 1835, and as far as I'm concerned, he has nailed it.
This is permanent photography. That's even older than I am.
And so by 1835, I would say he was fully successful.
He understood the idea of making a print from that negative that if he simply put another piece of sensitive paper, it would be reversed.
But he saw no need to because, you know, he was perfectly happy with this drawing.
Nature had done this drawing. He understood why it was the way it was, and he was entirely pleased.
As was typical of Talbot, he put this away.
He was very good at procrastinating, but he was also a very busy man, publishing quite a few more papers, some books.
And along comes the year 1839, four years after this and in Paris,
Louis-Jacques Monday together announced that he had found a way to capture and preserve the images in the camera obscura.
Talbot knew absolutely nothing about what these looked like, what they were.
But here is somebody who has at least come up with the same idea.
De Gea was very strongly supported in France.
The academy you got behind him and his materials were first shown here in the academy's rooms very August,
setting amongst the scientists promoted particularly by Francois Arugbo,
who at one time had been a friend of Talbot's but was very ambitious for French science at the time.
Gilbert hastened to his friend Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution in London and on the 25th of January.
He pulled things out of his old desk drawers. There wasn't anywhere near enough light to create anything new.
But he drew out his several year old pictures and Faraday, after one of his popular Friday afternoon lectures,
announced that there was a special exhibition in the library.
And these were Talbot's earliest photographs that were shown to the public, as you can possibly see from the slide.
It was a mixed audience, the royal institution very different from the academy.
These cells from Paris Royal Institution did admit women.
It did admit anybody who was good character and you simply needed to get a free ticket
and come in to hear the lecture and see this surprising exhibition afterwards.
And Faraday himself said that, you know, now that name game nature is our drawing mistress.
He has no idea where this is going to go in the future.
One of the things that we know that Tom showed at that exhibition was this little latticed window negative size of a postage stamp.
And as you can see done with like Camera Obscura done in 1835.
And he said with the aid of a glass, you count the panes of glass, the 200 divided panes of glass that were in that window.
And you can still see them. This negative is still visible.
Fortunately, not shown very often, but it's the.
What is now the national media and science?
National Science and Media Museum, you know, used to be the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television when Colin was in charge.
And they've sort of lost their way a little bit since, but they help preserve things like this.
The daguerreotype is absolutely marvellous. I happen to know there's one degree of type caring person in this audience, but I shall forgive him.
This is actually a John Ruskin daguerreotype done in Venice that's preserved in the Museum of History Science here right across the road.
Daguerreotypes are an incredible experience. Is there anybody here who's not seen a daguerreotype?
Only that's I'm glad I didn't see too many hands there, they're on a polished metal plate, their reflective silver plate.
You need to get it at just the right angle and you actually reflect black into the reflective part of the play.
And when you get it just right, the what is really a negative actually shows is lighter.
And so it looks like a positive, very aethereal positive. It's best seen with a candle in a glass of red wine, maybe two glasses you could share,
but it's a very intimate experience and the way it was always meant to be,
which is strange because Tiger was known as a showman and known as a public entertainer.
Yet he created this most intensely personal of all image making devices.
The daguerreotype had limitations. I don't remember his name anymore, but this one very patient porter at the Science Museum London in the basement,
who dragged out this large daguerreotype, this is a sheet of silver plated copper.
So not only is it very expensive, but I imagine he was grunting a little bit as he was holding this.
Tolbert, on the other hand, had created his negatives, as will now call them, on sheets of paper, which are very versatile and portable.
And as I said, he knew early on that he could take another sensitive sheet and return that negative back to being a positive.
He just simply saw no need to do so until he started giving away all his seed corn in 1839.
These negatives became very popular and everybody wanted one,
and he soon realised he had to start making prints in multiples in order to preserve his stock.
He did begin to see them convinced the spruce needles.
These are static on a sheet of paper. It's a photograph. But that cascade, I'm sure it was not accidental.
He observed that and observed that he could add emotion into his pictures.
And here we have that same window that we saw that little purple negative. But notice now it's not just a flat on view of the window.
He's created a photographic space using the camera, a three dimensionality to this.
And you know, it was growing in his vision. Tolbert was the first artist to be taught by photography, and he had a long ways to go.
And he covered quite a lot of ground. By that, autumn digger had received all sorts of public accolades.
Tolbert had absolutely miserable support from the scientific community in Britain.
And largely withdrew into himself, this is a picture he took in November of 1839, first year,
the end of that first summer in a study and a place that he is in a world here that's familiar with whom there are objects,
art and particularly the books that were the realm of his imagination.
And this is probably to be generous half hour, maybe an hour's exposure.
It's somewhat softened by the angle of light changing in the shadows changing,
but a marvellous record of where he was over the winter when there was no light.
Hardly. He kept thinking about what photography was and what it could do, and how he could improve what he was doing and come the spring of 1840.
He's sufficiently improved his chemistry that he was able to start taking relatively large hole plate camera obscura pictures.
This is his sisters would go with she.
I have strength in this. This is the way it is now. It would have been, of course, much bolder.
Back at the time, this is a negative that was created entirely with the energy of light.
There's no developing involved. When he took it out of the camera, it was as strong as he would ever be.
And then he made it print another negative from that spring of 1840 from foraging ink drawing, as he called it.
Again, this is strictly solar energy a negative now the Getty still in marvellous nick.
And you can see here that he's observing this wall,
which actually isn't very ancient but appears to be and the reflection off the shovel
blade and the composition of the room in that he's beginning to see photographically.
During his experiments that year, he stumbled across something.
In September of 1840, he took a failed experiment.
A negative out of the camera wasn't exposed enough, threw it on the table, went off to get tea, or so the story goes and came back.
It was stunned to find an image there. And he is very analytical.
He went through why this could have happened because he knew it was a blank sheet of paper before,
and he realised he had left the chemical in that paper.
He immediately went to his notes and actually physically cut out the chemical because he didn't want this information to fall into the wrong hands.
The chemicals Gallic acid. Made from goals, trees, it provided a chemical developer, how many of you worked in a wet, dark room?
Oh, good. I feel much better. That can be depressing in some audiences when nobody touches you because you don't
know if they've fallen asleep or if they've simply been deprived of that experience.
Perhaps some of you haven't seen the film blow up, which you know the magic of putting this piece of paper in the pan.
Apparently, blank piece of paper and watching it come up and gain strength.
And if you're lucky, it gains a certain amount of strength and stops.
Sometimes it overshoots, but I don't know how many thousands of prints I've made in my life and.
I don't get the opportunity to do it anymore, but the magic was still there.
And number four, 4000 or whatever of seeing this image emerge out of nothingness.
Using this process, he greatly shortened his exposure times.
And in November of 1840, set up what I think is one of the most extraordinary images the Great Hall of Leacock.
Huckabee has all of these little terracotta figures set into niches.
And what you're seeing here is a pattern of light coming through the front windows tracing across Diogenes.
One of these terracotta figure, the, of course, the man who is using light to search for truth.
I've been in here.
Having a gin and tonic, frankly, I've been there at the end of the day when Nash stressed visitors have cleared out and just with the family.
And this picture exists for maybe a minute as the Sun is setting.
I guess is Trump would have it as the Sun is rotating that races across room, you can actually watch it move.
And here he is within a matter of a few seconds at most able to capture this very sophisticated image.
In November of 1840. If photography had stopped at that point,
I would have been content because he he obviously now understood the power of having nature do these drawings for him using this developed negative,
this collar type negative. He greatly expanded his range of subject matter.
This is in London. This is his mediaeval view of London.
This is that magic little slop time when the Houses of Parliament have burned and before the new ones before Putin puts them up.
And so we see Westminster here as it was meant to be seen when it was built.
It's dominating the landscape very soon.
Big Ben is going to go up and compete with it, and you'll never see this again.
You also see all of the busy commerce of the river.
This is in June of 1840, and he rented rooms.
I sort of Bill, he rented rooms. The software notice came up again,
so he rented rooms right near where the Showmax building is now for those familiar with London and took the series of photographs.
Very extraordinary. The catalogue raisonné.
Is meant to gather together all the various iterations of these photographs.
They're organised around something in modestly called shots numbers, but each distinct image has its own unique number.
So if it's represented by only a negative that has a unique number, if there's a negative and one print, they will share a number.
If there's a negative and 40 prints, they will share numbers so you can use the catalogue raisonné to gather together these different iterations.
This is just showing a fragment of a screen of no car clue where there's quite a number of them scattered around the world in various forms.
This is why I'm confident I will always stay ahead of Cameron, at least in account.
And this is an example you can select on the catalogue raisonné,
you can hover over any one example after you see this gallery of examples and pick out one that you want to to look at more closely.
The photographs themselves often carry information. So this is on the verso.
One of them you can see very clearly in his own hand is dated it, which is very useful because we can then relate that to the manuscript material.
Sometimes he gives us enough technical information.
These colours are the natural colours silver is going to produce, by the way the the the yellow and the purple, or just different ways of processing.
And we have here his experimental notes and what he was doing.
There are sometimes things that we can see. These are two negatives, obviously, of the same specimen,
so they were made clearly not too far apart because that that pork plant is going to to get tired doing that.
I won't mention the name of the museum, but the one on the right is in a famous museum that's up on a hill in Los Angeles,
and the one on the left is right across the street in museum history.
Science one The left was presented to Sir John Herschel by Talbot and then preserved here.
Some of you will not be shocked that I had a contentious discussion with the then curator at that museum on the Hill,
who was convinced that there was earlier because it was better or.
Some thinking of that sort, I'm not sure I follow it.
However, we have, sorry, a bit awkward here.
We have the evidence. Well, oops, I broke it there.
We have the evidence here. A relief that fell off.
So clearly, the one across the street was done first and the argument.
There are other little things these negatives were on paper,
and they were trimmed by hand with a pair of scissors and so occasionally if you look in the upper right corner here.
I think I'm hearing it. You look in the upper right corner.
You can see where there's a little snag in the paper trimming and the negative that broke off.
So I can't tell you exactly when,
but I can tell you that the print on the left was made first when the negative still had that little stub of paper accidentally,
which then broke off before the one on the right was made.
Since these are trimmed by hand, an important clue for me is the photographer of the negative.
They are never perfect rectangles as we've come to expect materials now.
And so by following that wandering each, I used to take very detailed notes on, you know,
two mm bump at the lower left corner, that sort of thing, the way the corners are clipped.
We can batch up a negative with a print. So in this case, we have a negative that has a date on it.
But it's totally blank, it's faded, have a clue what it is.
And that's in Washington. But we have a print that's in South Africa that very clearly shows what the subject matter was.
So that negative now by matching these up in the catalogue raisonné,
that negative informs us of the date of the print, and the print in turn informs us of the content of the negative.
And occasionally, rarely we have cases where he made.
I'm going to assume aesthetic decisions.
The upper left is the negative as it now exists and below it in brown is a print typical of the prints made from that negative.
You can see that they match up in outline perfectly.
But then there's one surviving print. On the right that was printed before the negative was chopped down.
And so we have much more foreground area, which is not particularly defective,
I think that he made an aesthetic choice here that he preferred the tighter cropping.
We can also using the catalogue raisonné, line up similar subjects,
and so the bust of Patroclus that he had this plaster bust is very reflective, very patient centre.
He photographed many, many times because it modulated light beautifully.
You've got one here, don't you? Yeah. The.
This is made from. One of the tumbling marbles in the British Museum.
I don't know exactly when Typekit got about 18, 20, when I first went after them,
they still had within their curatorial department the ability to make plaster busts.
And we located the original horse here, mould that I'm sure is the same one that Talbot was made from.
Not great, and I asked for a copy, and then they closed that department and turned it over to British Museum DLC or something like that.
Who, first of all, proceeded to break the original mould. So they're going to some of the romance, but then I ask you to make another mole?
They did. And they shipped over chocolates eventually to the states in a box that was maybe two centimetres larger than the plaster bust.
So I had to head to the spiritual cliffs. And.
They did this three times, shows the economy of privatising things.
They did this three times, ship it over in a box, it was only slightly larger.
So the Petroleos I eventually had. Who is that?
Rock House now in Baltimore, is missing a few locks of hair, but largely intact.
And your Petroleos was made from that same new mould.
You can see here how it's a hand brushed sheet of paper, each coated the materials on there.
This is one Patroclus. Here's another where he set him up outdoors in order to take advantage of the light.
The catalogue raisonné has several components to it,
and there is a search mechanism where you can go in and say you're interested in vitro clips or whatever it might be.
It also had a couple of other major components.
One is about the project, which has supplemental material a biography of Talbott, who is tall but not foxtail.
But. But I'll let you go to the website and figure out that there is also weekly a blog which Thaddeus Levinsky, where are you there?
One hundred and eighty two weekly blocks ago, am I correct in one hundred and eighty two weekly blogs ago,
I was getting a little frustrated that some technical snags.
And so I started doing a blog. As it turns out, every week calls it the damn blog,
which explore different aspects of Torbett and of the catalogue raisonné, and these are still online, you can go.
And there's a good search mechanism that goes with that.
There's some photographs that we understand how they came about.
Again, the museum in Los Angeles, that curator was convinced that this was the head of Christ, but lacking the necessary accoutrements.
It's the head of an unknown saint. We don't have any spheres or anything like that to figure out who he was.
But you know, why would Talbot do something like this?
And for years and years and years, when I visit Leacock Abbey, Anthony Brown, the descendant was very, very patient with my continuing requests.
And finally, one day he triumphantly pulled out of his desk drawer.
This little painted glass and I had asked him about this again and again because I could never find it in the windows at my cock.
And thankfully, it was preserved and it is still preserved.
The Talbot was interested in what colour would do, what light would do,
and so he was using that painted glass not to record a saint, but instead to see what effect the different colours had.
Also with the catalogue raisonné by lining up these different examples here we have.
The wood cutters, as it's popularly known, Nicole Hinman, who will come back to you in a moment,
and William Pullen cleaving and chopping wood, and we can see from one surviving print notice the foreground from one surviving print.
There were defects or shadows in the foreground that Talbot obviously decided to clear up.
So he just got out of the scissors and chopped off the negative. And made the print.
There are pictures that were initially inexplicable, you know, here we have a hand very evocative in many ways, but cut off at the wrist.
What does this mean? And of course, there's a long tradition of recording hands, you know, going back to prehistoric times.
But as we find here was, in fact, a photograph not of a life hand, but of a plaster cast of one of his sisters hands,
which Richard now has in his collection almost didn't get because the widow felt it was a bit creepy,
but was persuaded finally, and that hand is now preserved here.
There are other things that I had pestered Anthony about finding.
This is a new politan carriage that Talbot liked to photograph a painting never quite understood why,
except that he had been to Naples many times before photography, and this is obviously a souvenir painting that they had brought it back at some time.
So I kept pestering Anthony trip after trip in one time, very triumphantly, I think pulled out of the old brewery.
He pulls out this painting, had a hole in it, have been somewhat affected by time, but there was the original.
Again, I'm sure that Talbot was interested in how colours were reproduced and what that would do.
And that painting has now been conserved and is here again at the Bosnian.
I call these his peripatetic shells. He photographed out in the cloisters of Laycock Abbey in order to take advantage of natural light.
And he had these temporary shelves that he set up out there,
sometimes two three four with black velvet or something draped over them so
that he could take advantage of the sunlight and take the various photographs.
So again, in the catalogue raisonné, we can pull together things that use the same shelves, but our different objects.
Not everything went according to plan. And here he's still in with books, but now has zeroed in on the bindings.
And so again, in the catalogue, you can look up books or bindings and gather these various thoughts together.
Articles of Glass. He was fascinated with because glass, of course, modulates light.
Anybody else hear that? Thank you. I was beginning to think it was crazy that it's giving me these little warnings.
It doesn't like the software, which I'm not responsible for the articles of Glass.
He was fascinated with how it modulated light. What I would love to do when Photoshop two comes out, as, you know, cut glass like that,
there is going to be all sorts of little images of the photographer reflected in there.
And so we have dozens, maybe hundreds of portraits of Henry Talbot here.
It's just we can't quite fish them out yet, but hopefully someday some of that glass survived.
It again is now here at the Bodleian and has been used to make modern photographs to evoke Colbert's work.
And again, within this, we just can't see them, but Henry is there and I want to see him someday.
He's got to be in there somewhere. Articles of China, which she observed.
Worked very differently from Glass, because China, of course, doesn't reflect reflect the light, it reflects the light only.
And so here we have that same set of shelves that dress basket, amazing lacy baskets still survived.
Still in the. Roger? Yeah, yeah. I'm amazed that it did.
He talked about how this could be used to catalogue a collectors collection
and might someday be a novel argument in court if something were purloined.
Some of the China was purloined from Mike Huckabee in the 50s, but nothing that they could prove photographically articles of silver.
Had a different lighting challenge. But using the catalogue raisonné, we can bring all these things that share a common environment together.
He was like, I said, beginning to see photographically. I think your first reaction of this is of spaciousness.
You know, there's a sense of the great outdoors.
In fact, this is a little stew pond where the nuns kept their fish for dinner and the cameras on the ground.
And those grand trees back there, probably smaller than I am.
But by virtue of that very little angle where Anthony had to go out and as well.
And you know, we traipsed around trying to recreate the single until it finally occurred to me.
If you put the camera on the ground. There you go. Photographic portraiture is something that.
I'm going to say has been debased, the selfie phenomena, all of you have a camera in your pocket,
I don't know how many selfies you've taken today, and I'm not interested.
But you know, we take so many portraits now that they really have been rendered fairly meaningless.
Go back to the 1870s, this tintype. There's the child with her doll, that's understandable.
And the mother in her invisibility cloak, who knows we can't see her, that we can see only her child, that she's holding very patiently.
But imagine back in 1840. When?
You might have a portrait painted during your lifetime, maybe a couple.
Here is his wife, Constance, 30, second exposure in 1840, and he's able to capture the countenance of his wife.
Very, very special thing to do and unheard of in any other medium.
And not only. Of his wife, but of his wife and children gathered together.
Posed probably for 30 seconds, you know, very consciously with their knees in the right place and so on.
But still an incredible thing. Oops, I'm sorry, and this amazing picture at Laycock of his wife and three.
Daughters at the time. I'm reading that wrong.
That's us. No, that's my wife and three daughters, his one son was not yet born.
And here they are in this incredible what we now call a snapshot a term that had not
yet been applied by Sir John Herschel and within obviously very short exposure,
judging by the sharpness of the shadows, a matter of seconds able to capture this family scene.
And here again in London, capturing on the River Thames during the same period, something that would not have been depicted otherwise.
Nelson's monument. In Trafalgar Square.
The. Why take a picture of a monument without the monument?
I'm sure that he was fascinated by this space. Trafalgar Square was the first public space to be opened in a major city in Europe because,
as you know, the 1840s were a bit turbulent and they were concerned about it.
The the big fountains where you feed the pigeons, there were not amenities.
Originally, they were designed to break up crowds.
There were crowd control feature, and you can see here that he is concentrating on the base of this, which is under construction,
quite controversially ignoring the monument itself, which would have actually been put up yet by this point.
And what I think is really wonderful.
If you see post no bills and of course, it's by the illegally posted bills, we can actually date this within a very specific time slot within a week.
By looking at the various train timetables in the theatre announcements and that we can take this very, very precisely.
This is in France in 1843. He and his assistant, Nicolas honeymooned, went off to France to photograph in the garage on home turf.
Marvellous view through their window, it ran looking at the curtains again,
the kind of image that he wouldn't even have seen much less been able to record before.
But photography has taught him to see the sort of thing.
Now, an important thing to realise about photography at this point is everything is handmade.
There's no. Buying Kodak or for paper or anything like that, everything is made by hand.
How many of you have made your own pasta? OK, the rest of you, you have an assignment.
Pastor, to me is very much like these early photographs. It's superficially very simple.
You make it Mount Vesuvius flower. You break some eggs into the crater.
Controversially, add water. I don't.
And controversially, you'd add salt, which I bought and salted water, but I don't like the effect of banning it beforehand.
But basically, it's eggs and flour, and that's it.
And and then you roll it out.
Don't ask me why, but going to Rome. One of making my own pasta.
Calls to Newcastle, certainly, and you can see there are the eggs.
The salt that I'm not going to use until I boil it.
The flour and the necessary lubricant for the cook that has to be there, but that serves another function.
Because they found that there were no specific tools for geography, you had to drop things from other areas.
And so roll it out and we have our pasta. You can use a pasta machine.
And you will get under the rule and probably your dinner guests will be satisfied.
But pasta is something that requires your fingers rather than your head, and you need to feel what that dough is doing.
And of course, eggs vary in their moisture content, and flour varies in its age and growing conditions.
And you literally balance those with your fingers until you get just the right one.
And that's a difference in homemade pasta is it's going to be better.
Then it comes out of a machine. Talbot's fingers were well-trained in making photographic materials, so he wasn't keeping back secrets from people.
He just simply didn't quite know everything that his fingers knew about what he was doing.
But he tried to get the information out the best he could. When things went well, this is the haystack.
They went incredibly well. You can see here the shadow of the ladder.
I'm sure that he moved the ladder in order to put the shadow in just the right position.
And you can see the cleaving knife there that will eventually be used to cut up the haystack.
One scholar said that that cleaving knife symbolised the early death of each of its children.
It's something I've never understood because they all lived to maturity, unusually so much for academia.
But that is from the original negative, which is absolutely gorgeous and in your collection, a budget.
If you know any picture from generic art history, it's the open door here.
A splendid early prints you can see it was encoded print made by top it himself, I'm sure.
And this is of interest because it's one of the few times we can actually document the evolution of an idea.
This is something his mother originally titled The Slope of the Broom, you can see from 1841 rather ratty broom.
Same general composition, same open-door, same lights through their same lines and that around there,
but this probably wouldn't have made the art history books. And then we jump to 1843.
Brooms got no better. And another one from 1843.
He's now got a clearer idea of the function of that window that you see through there that light,
and he's beginning to take better advantage of that, but really needs a new broom.
And he hasn't figured out the angles or anything here, but he stuck with it.
And here in March of 43, he's changing the angles some.
And he's got a better broom, finally. So he's beginning to pull this picture together.
And we see here from the 1st of March 1843, I'm sorry.
You see this area right here, that door. And you might notice a little diagonal line on that.
Well, we can use the catalogue raisonné to line that up with the date.
Here. And I will use Photoshop for a change here.
We have. His camera was a dark cloth draped over it on a stand tripod, photographing that room in the open door.
And it's very unusual for any work of art to have this series like this leads up to it.
He didn't quite get it here, but this is negative that matches up.
With that. And then finally, in 1844, he pulls the idea together, and we now have this incredible negative.
With light through there, with the surroundings, with the broom and notice the shadow of the broom handle very critical part of this composition.
It was in your damn collection one time I was sitting there looking at a whole bunch of open doors, which I looked at many times and had not.
It was no longer seeing it. You know, it was just too common to me as good a picture as it was.
And then out of this whole stack of prints, suddenly the shadow moved.
And clearly there were two negatives shot moments apart.
The angles on it changed a little bit, and he generally chose the more brownish ones of this one on the left,
which I think is a stronger composition with that larger triangle. But you can see where both of them tied together.
His. Assistant was originally a valet at Lake Huckabee, and when told, was working prior to 1839, I'm sure Nicholas Cinnamon,
a Dutchman, helped him out a great deal of nothing else running out and getting water and such.
And Herman came so in transfer photography that quite unusually, he suffered service would top it.
And in 1843 went off to the nearby market town of Redding and set up his own teletype establishment.
Very brave thing to do, because if you were a servant, once you didn't steal the silver or impregnate the daughter, you had a job for life.
And he left that job because he believed in photography so much.
And. The idea was to promote photography, not only to take photographs, but also to sell materials.
Talbot gave him his first big printing assignment and that was sure making the book The of Nature,
which was issued serially in parts, had original silver prints set up.
There was no way to reproduce them otherwise. But each of these parts you would buy from a bookseller would have some original Talbot prints in there.
The very first one. Is appropriately a view here in Oxford, part of Queens College.
The church now has become a library for college.
The groom that he took this from a first floor room was above a marmalade shop.
I think that has changed now. Hasn't that cafe cafe now? OK.
But. Largely, you could do the same picture today, except he observed that the stone was of miserable quality and the stone was falling apart.
So when I was first looking for this, when I first came here.
I had this weird time warp, because in the 1950s, they finally got around Oxford, never quick.
They finally got around to facing the stone. So it looks newer today than it looked until this date.
But look at this picture and look how photographic this is.
And especially, you know, the dominant part of this picture is the shadow is quite unapologetically saying this is photography.
You know, you wouldn't do an engraving or print that way.
That wouldn't be your subject. You probably wouldn't even include the little coffeehouse on the right.
But you certainly wouldn't let the chateau dominate.
But photography was so new that starting with the second party had to put a notice into the reader that these are original sun pictures,
not engravings and imitation, but these are the original things. Now, when Talbott was working at Lake Huckabee, he had ample resources.
He had enough money for materials.
He had enough money to heat the water to effectively wash the prince, and he could choose to print on days when there was good sunshine.
So if you see the three little dots there, right in the middle with the gentleman,
he's out on the south side of Lake Cathy, printing in the ample sunshine on a day that he chose to print.
Confusingly, or I suppose, understandably, his notes are an alternate days, so if it was rainy, he would write in his notebooks.
And if it was sunny and pretty well, predict the weather now. But whether or not this notebook entry in the universe?
And that's probably top it himself out there with three frames enjoying the sunshine,
very carefully controlling what he's printing with no production schedule, no production demands.
Hahnemann went to running with grand plans. This is diptych of the so-called riding establishment.
We have him on the left with a camera photographing the work of art.
We have. What was supposedly Talbot doing an awkward portrait?
Now it's got to be Talbot because they've now done a bronze statue in Chippenham after this, so surely going to be him.
But I think he missed his mark on photography because if he was able to regrow his hair as it is here,
I think he would have ultimately found a much bigger market for that.
So we have the critical frames out there, each one of these required perhaps 10 or 15 minutes of exposure.
Again, Nicholas Hinman photographing some statuary and doing a mysterious object on the right,
which I believe is a a technical test of of photographic focussing.
The reality of the running establishment would have been more like this. And they had no money.
He couldn't really afford to heat the water. He couldn't afford all these helpers.
And so. There was a buoyant frames, but he had to churn out prints no matter what.
And if a certain number of prints were required by a certain date, then he had to do that.
Consequently, a lot of the prints that had been made didn't hold up well, and photography soon got quite a black eye over this.
So we have here two prints. The top one was actually in a pencil of nature,
probably viewed a number of times in a drawing room in London, with coal smoke and sulphur affecting it.
The bottom one was, for whatever reason, not used, probably put in a portfolio, put in a drawer and consequently survived in much better condition.
By 1852. When the Society of Arts held its first major exhibition of photography.
Tolbert entered some photographs as the Grand Old Master Photography also won album and the album.
He labelled in his own hand here, these specimens represent an early period of the art from 1841 to 46.
None of them are later already by 1852. Photography is ancient history to top it.
He's gone past that his original plan failed.
But he believed in the power of nature drawing.
And he finally separated the two processes, he got nature to do the drawing in the camera and then made the print not using silver,
which was vulnerable but made the prints in printer's ink. So he invented photography or he invented a photographically produced plate,
which was then cleared of all photographic chemicals and printed in time tested printers ink on good paper.
And so these photographic engravings, as they came to be known, this is my angel with patches.
She's obviously a test one.
But you would start with a glass positive, which was nature's recording of her own drawing you, then on the bottom there make a metal plate.
That plate would be cleared of all photographic chemicals and you would make conventional prints and conventional press.
So he would really solve the problem for the graphic publishing by this point.
So we start with this marvellous idea and this hand attention to detail and finally get to the way that.
Well, I used to say the way that we've seen most photographs, but of course we see most of them on a screen now,
but if we can put back 10 years or so ago, we saw most photographs in our life in printer's ink, not not in silver.
By 1846, this is the last negative that I know of it took his good friend, Calvert Jones is in there.
It's in the cloisters of Laycock Abbey. National Trust has removed all the ivy now.
It's not good for the stone, but it's certainly good, pictorially.
And there's this marvellous print of somebody taking up the baton, someone taking up photography and taking it all in from him.
In 1934, Matilda Talbot had a huge exhibition in Lake Gabby.
No, I was not there, but all through Laycock, they set up all these panels and tables and put out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.
That panel right now, I've actually identified.
There's a bit sad, but I've been able to identify a few of these by where the pins are in them and match them up with modern pinholes.
I knew Harvey, but that panel, Richard, if we sent us off today.
What would that be worth at auction, I wonder? More than 50 people you're seeing here.
If all these were still in the same condition, you're probably seeing. Some hundreds of thousands, anyway.
And but all of Laycock AP was was peppered with this, and it was at this time that they rediscovered this negative.
And so often Talbots photography is dated back to the summer of 1835, but it's really because of this one negative.
He really accomplished it in 1834. And yes, you can still count.
I don't know if there's 200, but you can still count all those panes of glass.
But to me, the incredible thing is these earliest pictures the the photo Grahams,
where he took a natural object and had nature do her own drawing of that.
And we see it here in its first iteration. All the veins and everything that are in those sleeves.
This is my original title slide. Maybe I should have stuck with it, I'm not sure.
Still credits Colin Ford with the lecture? To me, this shows the wonderful balance between light and its very powerful companion,
the shadow and the tension between reality and the reality of our imagination, what we've put into things.
So to me, this encompasses a lot of what it was about for photography.
Thank you. You've been very patient. And this young lady has an important announcement.
Yes, it involves drink. Yes, it does.
Thank you very much for coming. It was wonderful. I'm sure we all enjoyed it immensely.
Thank you. And I will now get Colin to present you with your mental health here.
I. I'm glad Jim is already said that I want to do, because how can you top that?
That's one of the most extraordinary lectures about the history I've ever heard of.
And I thought I knew much about it and I've learnt so much.
Well, this is just the intermission. The last figure I heard was that in the world today, and you've referred to it several times,
we think there are more than four billion photographs taken every single day.
Yes. Have we found the method of the man to catalogue more anyway?
Although it is true, as I said at the beginning that the idea of the Colin Ford lecture was not mine on the money I used for it is not mine.
I did decide in the end that the speaker should have some kind of souvenir.
And so yes, it's perfectly true that commissioned and paid for the middle of which this is number two.
The first one having built on the front, it says the ALP's Royal Photographic Society Historical Group Professor Larry Charles,
Larry Jascha on me 2020 Colin Ford lecture on the back.
It has a lenticular stereo, a series of which some of you will know are made by 3D images by a man called David Bird and.
When we decided on this little trial, David, if he'd made to Fox Tobin Images.
Oh, really? But he said, I sold the business. I don't do them anymore.
So you'll have to make do with Julia Margaret Cameron. Well, but Larry, thank you a thousand times.
I'm sorry. This is when you had a beer. It's no, it's you.
Well, I thank you very much. There is the box that you can keep it in.
Thank you.