1 00:00:03,400 --> 00:00:09,390 We are gathered here today, ladies and gentlemen, to enjoy a very special lecture, 2 00:00:09,400 --> 00:00:18,820 because the whole season of photography to some extent has been centred around the work of Professor Geoffrey Batchen, 3 00:00:19,060 --> 00:00:30,220 our colleague here, the Professor of the History of Art, and who came to us at the most difficult time in December 2019. 4 00:00:30,940 --> 00:00:42,010 Little did he know that he would be plunged almost immediately into lockdown, separated from his loved ones and, as indeed we all were, 5 00:00:42,400 --> 00:00:49,000 and put into the most difficult circumstances to organise his teaching and research and to 6 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:54,040 support the community of scholars in the History of Art that are here in the university. 7 00:00:54,040 --> 00:00:57,339 But he did so, ladies and gentlemen, alongside his colleagues, 8 00:00:57,340 --> 00:01:11,979 and led his colleagues with great skill and dedication and commitment and has emerged out of the other end of the pandemic in fine style and just 9 00:01:11,980 --> 00:01:17,830 in the midst of all of that and coping, of course, as we all had to with the pandemic, 10 00:01:18,340 --> 00:01:26,040 Professor Batchen has managed to curate these two extraordinary exhibitions, 11 00:01:26,730 --> 00:01:36,060 immersed himself in the archives and the other resources that you see displayed in the vitrines of the two galleries, 12 00:01:36,510 --> 00:01:43,979 and indeed has written not one but two books to accompany those exhibitions. They're not catalogues of the exhibitions 13 00:01:43,980 --> 00:01:47,730 but they accompany the shows and they are, if I may 14 00:01:49,590 --> 00:01:57,959 point these out, ladies and gentlemen, Christmas is coming, they are published by the Bodleian Libraries, they are available in our shop and indeed all good 15 00:01:57,960 --> 00:02:03,930 bookstores. I urge you to purchase a copy. 16 00:02:03,990 --> 00:02:09,240 I daresay that the Professor of the History of Art may be persuadable to sign copies. 17 00:02:10,170 --> 00:02:17,220 So do make, do avail yourselves of that opportunity. However 18 00:02:17,850 --> 00:02:21,659 enough of me rambling on, you're all here 19 00:02:21,660 --> 00:02:24,900 as indeed am I, to listen to Professor Geoffrey Batchen. 20 00:02:25,170 --> 00:02:31,380 Please join me in welcoming him and ask him to give his lecture. 21 00:02:37,670 --> 00:02:45,020 Thank you very much. Richard, generous and kind, as always, and fascinating to hear one's own story being made up right there in front of you. 22 00:02:45,830 --> 00:02:47,900 But it was an interesting experience, of course, 23 00:02:48,620 --> 00:02:53,030 working on these two exhibitions in the middle of a pandemic where you actually couldn't get to see the archive. 24 00:02:53,450 --> 00:02:59,570 And so I did very much rely on colleagues. And indeed, although I get to take responsibility, 25 00:02:59,810 --> 00:03:06,290 both of these exhibitions very much depended on the hard working staff of the Bodleian, and that indeed made them possible. 26 00:03:08,570 --> 00:03:13,490 Indeed, thanks to the generosity of the Bodleian Libraries and I have to say in particular the support of 27 00:03:14,480 --> 00:03:19,280 Richard and with the considerable help of the expert staff that the library has at its disposal, 28 00:03:19,820 --> 00:03:23,840 I've been given an opportunity to curate a pair of exhibitions for the library's galleries. 29 00:03:24,080 --> 00:03:30,270 And each of those exhibitions, if you've had a chance to see them, you'll recognise, has the distinct character and purpose. 30 00:03:31,070 --> 00:03:39,050 A New Power sets out to recalibrate the story of photography's development and dissemination in Britain during its first 50 years. 31 00:03:39,980 --> 00:03:46,250 Bright Sparks, on the other hand, presents a kind of creative way to think about historical archives while also offering 32 00:03:46,250 --> 00:03:51,200 us a glimpse into the Victorian world occupied by photography's English inventor, 33 00:03:51,500 --> 00:03:56,510 William Henry Fox Talbot. In offering these two stories simultaneously 34 00:03:56,870 --> 00:04:01,490 the exhibitions collectively reveal the richness of the Bodleian's own photographic collections 35 00:04:01,880 --> 00:04:05,630 a reminder that this is a library that really does have something for everyone. 36 00:04:07,550 --> 00:04:14,480 But they also demonstrate what happens when histories of photography are presented by a library rather than an art museum. 37 00:04:15,530 --> 00:04:21,950 Here we see an installation view of a 2007 exhibition held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 38 00:04:22,520 --> 00:04:25,909 Impressed by Light British Photographs from Paper Negatives 39 00:04:25,910 --> 00:04:31,140 1840 to 1860. As the museum proudly claimed, and I quote, 40 00:04:31,650 --> 00:04:38,880 This exhibition is the first major exhibition to survey British calotypes, works of exceptional beauty and rarity, 41 00:04:39,150 --> 00:04:44,790 which are made from paper negatives and are among the earliest forays into the medium of photography. 42 00:04:46,810 --> 00:04:50,560 Driven, as you can hear from that quotation, by the logic of art history, 43 00:04:51,220 --> 00:04:55,930 museums like this present the history of photography as a history of photographs. 44 00:04:57,120 --> 00:05:04,230 As a consequence, they exhibit only pictures in excellent condition, selected from those few photographs that happen to have survived. 45 00:05:05,780 --> 00:05:09,500 And they are exhibited a singular works of art evenly, 46 00:05:09,830 --> 00:05:17,720 even, dare I say, soporifically, spaced on tastefully coloured walls in identical frames and completely divorced from any sort of cultural, 47 00:05:17,960 --> 00:05:23,330 social or economic context, and even from other competing types of photograph. 48 00:05:25,190 --> 00:05:31,280 The Bodleian's exhibitions do their best to present an alternative view not only of photography's early history, 49 00:05:31,580 --> 00:05:39,840 but also of modes of exhibition making. More specifically, they set out to channel the words of two Indian naval architects who, 50 00:05:40,110 --> 00:05:45,030 having been resident in London in 1840 and seeing the process demonstrated to them, 51 00:05:45,420 --> 00:05:51,710 wrote that, and I quote, the daguerreotype is the most extraordinary production of modern times, unquote. 52 00:05:52,710 --> 00:05:57,150 A New Power tries to demonstrate just what was extraordinary about that production. 53 00:05:58,980 --> 00:06:04,570 But let's begin with Bright Sparks and the context in which the Bodleian's two exhibitions were conceived. 54 00:06:05,460 --> 00:06:08,550 The Bodleian and as you probably know, is a library of legal deposit. 55 00:06:08,970 --> 00:06:16,260 And so William Henry Fox Talbot was obliged to send it a copy of the Pencil of Nature in 1844 when it first appeared. 56 00:06:17,040 --> 00:06:20,670 But the Library has not consciously collected photography as part of its purview 57 00:06:21,030 --> 00:06:27,180 until quite recently. Under the guidance of the magnificent Richard Ovenden, 58 00:06:27,390 --> 00:06:32,730 in 2014, the library purchased the Talbot family's, Talbot family's archive, 59 00:06:33,060 --> 00:06:40,650 an extraordinary treasure trove of diverse material that includes, among its many other items, 100 early photographs. 60 00:06:41,600 --> 00:06:51,620 Then in 2021, the library was offered another 192 Talbot photographs on deposit suddenly making it a major holder of early British photography. 61 00:06:52,600 --> 00:06:58,900 It was decided that a public exhibition of this material would be an appropriate way to showcase this new collecting strength. 62 00:06:59,740 --> 00:07:08,090 Hence our two exhibitions. The first thing we wanted to do was show the sheer breadth of the Library's Talbot Archive, containing, 63 00:07:08,090 --> 00:07:15,560 as it does everything from this miniature painting of Talbot as a young boy to this collection of letters cut up into pieces, 64 00:07:15,770 --> 00:07:19,370 but kept by him for posterity. Yes, 65 00:07:19,610 --> 00:07:26,030 it turns out that Talbot was a total packrat, as we say in Australia, seemingly incapable of throwing anything away. 66 00:07:26,390 --> 00:07:30,680 Even the more or less empty seed packets left over from his efforts as a gardener. 67 00:07:31,430 --> 00:07:37,190 What a boon he is for researchers and indeed exhibition makers in our own museum age. 68 00:07:38,880 --> 00:07:43,350 The richness of the archive allows us to present any number of interesting juxtapositions, 69 00:07:43,710 --> 00:07:51,120 including these two little architectural models commissioned by Talbot and his own photograph of the South Gallery in Laycock Abbey, 70 00:07:51,330 --> 00:07:56,430 which he renovated, adding these same windows to its facade in 1831. 71 00:07:58,060 --> 00:08:02,650 It also allows us to highlight the contribution of certain key women in Talbot's life, 72 00:08:03,070 --> 00:08:10,210 such as his mother, Lady Elizabeth Fielding. Here in her diary entry for 25th August 1822 73 00:08:10,480 --> 00:08:17,560 she gives us a remarkable sketch that shows a view of the back of her carriage driver's head as she's being conveyed along the street. 74 00:08:19,460 --> 00:08:28,670 It's her attempt, if you like, at carriage cam, a snapshot view jotted down long before photography was able to make such pictures commonplace. 75 00:08:30,230 --> 00:08:38,210 Or, how about this sketch by Talbot's wife, Constance. Talbot dated his first idea of photography to October 1833, 76 00:08:38,510 --> 00:08:41,240 while he was on a belated honeymoon in Italy. 77 00:08:42,050 --> 00:08:49,370 He tried, he tells us, to sketch the scenery, the scenic surroundings with his portable camera obscura, but without notable success. 78 00:08:50,970 --> 00:08:58,260 That lack of success was made all the more apparent by the relatively confident efforts of the women in his party, including Constance. 79 00:08:59,070 --> 00:09:06,420 The invention of photography, it seems, was the by-product of a certain masculine insecurity, as are so many other things. 80 00:09:08,460 --> 00:09:09,870 Talbot's invention of negative- 81 00:09:09,870 --> 00:09:16,920 positive photography allowed picturesque views of landscape to be taken with the camera and distributed in the form of multiple prints. 82 00:09:17,610 --> 00:09:24,300 In 1845, Tolbert demonstrated his own skill as a photographer while taking a series of views in Scotland, 83 00:09:24,600 --> 00:09:28,530 recording tourist sites made famous by the writings of Sir Walter Scott. 84 00:09:28,860 --> 00:09:33,629 And you can see one of those prints on your left. In the exhibition, Bright Sparks, 85 00:09:33,630 --> 00:09:41,160 we have tried to show that the conventions that Talbot adopted, including the exploitation of bodies of water as reflective surfaces, 86 00:09:41,460 --> 00:09:48,120 have been repeated by later photographers such as this albumen example made in New Zealand in 1882, 87 00:09:48,660 --> 00:09:52,620 produced as if in distant homage to photography's inventor. 88 00:09:55,160 --> 00:10:00,170 Indeed a curated conversation between the Talbot archive and more recent photographic 89 00:10:00,170 --> 00:10:04,880 practices soon became the template for the Bright Sparks exhibition as a whole. 90 00:10:05,780 --> 00:10:13,070 The aim is to show the degree to which Talbot's work inaugurated later photography, sometimes consciously and sometimes less so. 91 00:10:14,180 --> 00:10:17,810 In some cases, the connection between past and present is very direct. 92 00:10:18,650 --> 00:10:28,549 In 2012, for example, the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto borrowed Talbot's electrostatic discharge wand from the Bodleian. He used it to generate 93 00:10:28,550 --> 00:10:35,810 sufficient sparks to create photographs that display a pattern of white electrical efflorescence against a black ground. 94 00:10:36,830 --> 00:10:43,340 Although, in essence, a photography about photography, Sugimoto's pictures, promised a glimpse of something far greater, 95 00:10:43,970 --> 00:10:50,870 a cosmos in formation, but also, as the artist himself has claimed, the dark room of my own mind. 96 00:10:52,740 --> 00:10:56,670 Here's a similar example. In 2000, in 2016, 97 00:10:57,450 --> 00:11:02,759 the British artist Cornelia Parker borrowed eight of the surviving examples of Talbot's glassware 98 00:11:02,760 --> 00:11:07,710 from the Bodleian Library and made a series of prints showing them in various configurations. 99 00:11:08,550 --> 00:11:16,710 In her work, the glass objects are made to float in a white space, softened by differential focus and a high-end photogravure process. 100 00:11:17,520 --> 00:11:22,410 By these means, the artist renders them as ghostly survivors from the dawn of photography. 101 00:11:23,040 --> 00:11:27,210 But of course, how fantastic that we have the actual glassware from Talbot's house, 102 00:11:27,540 --> 00:11:33,870 the photograph that Talbot made of that glassware, and now a contemporary artist responding to that, that those same utensils. 103 00:11:36,200 --> 00:11:43,340 The vitrine in which the work by Parker appears also happens to house a wonderful selection of high quality prints by Talbot, 104 00:11:43,760 --> 00:11:54,140 all of them dedicated to the photographing of things. Starting in about 1843, Talbot took to photographing domestic objects in his sunlit courtyard, 105 00:11:54,500 --> 00:11:57,620 where they could be arranged on wood shelves, propped on bricks. 106 00:11:58,630 --> 00:12:04,900 In other words, he arranged these objects so that they could be photographed outside while pretending to be inside. 107 00:12:05,940 --> 00:12:10,560 The resulting images documented examples of his or his family's possessions, 108 00:12:11,040 --> 00:12:16,890 but also tested his photography's capacity to capture different textures and degrees of transparency. 109 00:12:18,270 --> 00:12:23,670 Formally accomplished, these are also among the most conceptually complex of Talbot's pictures. 110 00:12:24,630 --> 00:12:32,370 They all adopt the dead pan, deadpan, taxonomic aesthetic of scientific analysis so common in contemporary art photography 111 00:12:32,880 --> 00:12:37,440 while simultaneously referencing the visual conventions of modern commercial display. 112 00:12:38,610 --> 00:12:44,370 Lady Elizabeth even captioned the one of rows of her own bonnets as 'the milliners window', 113 00:12:44,970 --> 00:12:50,490 proposing that the photograph be taken as a surrogate for a shop window with its buyable goods made 114 00:12:50,490 --> 00:12:56,220 visible from the street by the recent introduction into the British commercial world of plate glass. 115 00:12:57,120 --> 00:13:01,020 And in her eyes then it's a photograph about consumer desire. 116 00:13:02,770 --> 00:13:08,470 In each case, these photographs conjure questions about photography's relationship to truth and artifice, 117 00:13:08,950 --> 00:13:14,980 property and evidence, femininity and masculinity and consumerism and commerce. 118 00:13:15,730 --> 00:13:19,770 In short, they offer themselves as images ripe for further analysis. 119 00:13:21,950 --> 00:13:25,340 Some of our juxtapositions in Bright Sparks are self-evident. 120 00:13:27,140 --> 00:13:30,410 Oh, we just lost another image. Okay, sorry about that. 121 00:13:31,040 --> 00:13:32,480 We'll talk about it instead. 122 00:13:32,720 --> 00:13:38,210 And others, I was going to say a more playful, perhaps not as playful as blanking it out entirely, but there you go. 123 00:13:39,170 --> 00:13:47,720 Depending on a shared morphology proposed by the curator more than any direct connection between Talbot and the present, here we see a plaster hand, 124 00:13:47,990 --> 00:13:51,650 one of a number of dismembered plaster limbs in Talbot's archive, 125 00:13:52,070 --> 00:13:56,630 plus a reproduction of the photograph by Talbot that we don't otherwise have in our collection. 126 00:13:57,080 --> 00:14:01,970 A reminder that an archive consists of secondary sources as well as primary text. 127 00:14:02,360 --> 00:14:06,229 And finally, if you could but see it, this will be a prompt to go back into the exhibition 128 00:14:06,230 --> 00:14:10,460 and look, a photograph of her daughter by the Australian artist Anne Ferran, 129 00:14:10,700 --> 00:14:17,000 if you remember, the photograph has Ferran's daughter, but with a hand enigmatically across her face, 130 00:14:17,270 --> 00:14:21,680 in effect blinding her, or at least removing her from the photographer's gaze. 131 00:14:22,820 --> 00:14:30,170 The third print shows how later photographers have turned this same subject, the dismembered hand, into an artistic motif, 132 00:14:30,170 --> 00:14:39,360 both mysterious and expressive. Given my own position as Head of History of Art here at Oxford, 133 00:14:39,630 --> 00:14:44,520 it seemed important to acknowledge Talbot's significant contribution to this discipline as well. 134 00:14:45,300 --> 00:14:51,900 In late 1843, Talbot made a calotype negative of a painting his family had acquired during a trip to Italy. 135 00:14:52,680 --> 00:14:58,080 The prints he made from this negative demonstrate how Talbot's process could more or less accurately reproduce 136 00:14:59,760 --> 00:15:05,220 oh gone one too far, could more or less accurately reproduce the details of a work of art at a reduced size. 137 00:15:07,050 --> 00:15:11,850 The photographic reproduction of paintings has, of course, transformed the practice of art history, 138 00:15:12,360 --> 00:15:20,960 allowing images of works of art to be documented, multiplied, diminished in size, disseminated widely, and compared with others. 139 00:15:22,070 --> 00:15:30,560 In time, albums of photographic reproductions of paintings were compiled, and new technologies like X-rays or infrared photography were introduced 140 00:15:31,070 --> 00:15:40,520 allowing works to be more closely studied and when necessary, re attributed, in this case from work by Raphael to one by his teacher Perugino. 141 00:15:40,790 --> 00:15:45,980 And if you look closely at this album, you can see that something has gone from Raphael, to Perugino in their attribution 142 00:15:46,250 --> 00:15:51,829 in the margin there. Now, I could be at this point asking for a show of hands, 143 00:15:51,830 --> 00:16:00,980 but I'm sure you all noticed the link between the Bright Sparks exhibition and A New Power where we have a daguerreotype of this same painting. 144 00:16:03,080 --> 00:16:06,490 And that gives me an excuse to shift from one exhibition to the other. 145 00:16:07,580 --> 00:16:10,580 As discussed by one of my predecessors, Francis Haskell, 146 00:16:10,910 --> 00:16:18,380 the studio of London based photographer Edward Kilburn was commissioned to make a daguerreotype of a painting, then thought to be by Raphael. 147 00:16:19,040 --> 00:16:28,029 The client was the British art dealer, Morris Moore. Moore engaged in a decades long struggle to have this painting, now entitled Apollo 148 00:16:28,030 --> 00:16:33,490 and Marsyas, and attributed to Perugino, accepted as an early work by Raphael. 149 00:16:34,800 --> 00:16:37,800 This daguerreotype, no doubt played a part in that campaign. 150 00:16:38,340 --> 00:16:41,850 Moore displayed it, for example, in Berlin in 1856. 151 00:16:42,120 --> 00:16:50,490 So it's got around. Already then we have shifted the conversation from photography as art or even as an age to art history, 152 00:16:50,850 --> 00:17:00,000 to the question of the medium's utility in general, to its role in commerce and its capacity to facilitate a public circulation of reproductions. 153 00:17:00,870 --> 00:17:09,900 We have, in other words, shifted the conversation to the new power of our exhibition's title, to the rhetorical claim to an indexical authority 154 00:17:10,110 --> 00:17:12,930 that photography introduced into British modern life. 155 00:17:14,320 --> 00:17:22,570 This then, is the theme of our other exhibition, comprising a display of about 165 items in the ST Lee Gallery. 156 00:17:23,650 --> 00:17:30,100 By the way, 165 items is a lot for that gallery, as the installation crew would point out to me almost on a daily basis. 157 00:17:32,500 --> 00:17:37,780 First and foremost, the exhibition offers a survey of the first 50 years of British photography, 158 00:17:38,290 --> 00:17:46,900 starting well before the announcement of the medium's invention in 1839 and going up to, up to and including the Great Exhibition of 1851. 159 00:17:48,040 --> 00:17:56,800 It includes not only many early photographs, but also a plethora of prints of various kinds, as well as paintings, portrait busts, 160 00:17:57,100 --> 00:18:07,450 a fragment of the first computer, a ceramic plate, a lump of silver ore, letters, an envelope, books, pamphlets and journals and even a banknote. 161 00:18:08,230 --> 00:18:11,740 It is, in other words, not your usual photography exhibition. 162 00:18:13,830 --> 00:18:17,670 If there's a primary proposition that motivates the exhibition, it is this. 163 00:18:18,360 --> 00:18:23,310 The history of British photography far exceeds the history of British-made photographs. 164 00:18:24,570 --> 00:18:28,380 Taking advantage once again of a situation in a library 165 00:18:28,710 --> 00:18:34,260 A New Power tells the story of British photography's incorporation into print culture and the world of 166 00:18:34,260 --> 00:18:40,650 publishing, that is into a world being rapidly transformed by mass production and expanding markets. 167 00:18:42,050 --> 00:18:45,770 Of course, the exhibition still has plenty of rare photographs on display. 168 00:18:46,700 --> 00:18:55,100 Consider, for example, this half plate daguerreotype depicting Tyrolese Minstrels taken by Richard Beard Junior in 1851. 169 00:18:56,360 --> 00:19:04,070 It shows these musicians in carefully tinted folkloric costumes and holding musical instruments for Queen Victoria's birthday, 170 00:19:04,310 --> 00:19:12,170 held at Osborne in 1852. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arranged for these same singers to serenade her at breakfast. 171 00:19:13,340 --> 00:19:20,660 Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise, the duchess wrote, as one would, perhaps if it wasn't too early in the morning. 172 00:19:21,560 --> 00:19:24,170 But this daguerreotype is actually very unusual. 173 00:19:24,180 --> 00:19:30,680 It's the only one in the exhibition that doesn't have any glass over the front because it's been enamelled according to Beard's patented formula. 174 00:19:30,690 --> 00:19:36,710 That is, it's been varnished in some way that allows you to touch the surface without damaging the daguerreotype plate. 175 00:19:37,040 --> 00:19:42,380 Very unusual object indeed. And it was purchased by the Queen in the same year. 176 00:19:43,040 --> 00:19:48,080 It's one of only two known examples signed R Beard on its surface as you can see down here. 177 00:19:48,950 --> 00:19:52,580 And the other happens to be in the vitrine facing it in the exhibition. 178 00:19:55,330 --> 00:20:02,650 In this exhibition, Beard Junior's daguerreotype is paired with a wood engraved copy of a variant version of the same daguerreotype portrait. 179 00:20:03,600 --> 00:20:06,780 This copy appeared in the pages of the Illustrated London News 180 00:20:07,020 --> 00:20:11,440 in December of 1851. Here then, 181 00:20:12,040 --> 00:20:17,619 is another major narrative the exhibition sets out to recount. The story of the invention of the 182 00:20:17,620 --> 00:20:22,990 photographic image and therefore of the displacement of that image from the photograph itself. 183 00:20:24,730 --> 00:20:28,840 This theme is signalled in our first vitrine to display actual photographs, 184 00:20:29,200 --> 00:20:34,509 the one dedicated to the announcement of photography's invention. Alongside three photogenic 185 00:20:34,510 --> 00:20:40,150 drawings by John Herschel and two full plate daguerreotypes imported from France by John Ruskin 186 00:20:40,570 --> 00:20:45,430 we show the first photographic images to be made available to the eager British public. 187 00:20:47,160 --> 00:20:54,360 These comprise wood engraved facsimiles of photogenic drawings published as cover illustrations for various little English magazines, 188 00:20:54,930 --> 00:21:00,570 each of them dedicated to telling their readers all about the latest advances in science and technology 189 00:21:01,110 --> 00:21:02,700 of which, of course, photography was one. 190 00:21:03,620 --> 00:21:13,400 The second of these published on the 27th of April 1839, and seen there on your right, is the first ever attempt at photomechanical reproduction, 191 00:21:13,880 --> 00:21:20,870 with the images being carved from photographic, with the images being carved from photographs developed directly on the woodblock itself. 192 00:21:23,170 --> 00:21:26,230 Nearby, we have a steel engraving made after a daguerreotype, 193 00:21:26,500 --> 00:21:31,450 which just happens to be the first photographic image of Africa to be made and distributed. 194 00:21:32,360 --> 00:21:39,919 The source daguerreotype was taken on the 7th of November 1839 of the exterior of Pasha Mehmet Ali's harem 195 00:21:39,920 --> 00:21:46,420 building in Alexandria by the French painter Frederic Goupil-Fesquet and his uncle Horace Vernet 196 00:21:46,970 --> 00:21:53,720 after a two minute exposure. So we know a lot about it because they made copious diary entries about their photography adventures. 197 00:21:54,260 --> 00:21:57,530 Indeed, as Vernet reported the day before in that diary, 198 00:21:57,890 --> 00:22:03,440 we kept daguerreotyping away like lions unquote. They were doing so on commission 199 00:22:03,440 --> 00:22:08,570 from a French optician and publisher named Noel Marie Paymal Lerebours, 200 00:22:08,840 --> 00:22:16,190 who wanted to publish engravings based on daguerreotypes in his 1840 book Excursion Daguerriennes. You could 201 00:22:16,190 --> 00:22:22,970 buy engravings from that publication in Antoine Claudet's glass shop in High Holborn in London in 1841. 202 00:22:23,570 --> 00:22:30,500 And when you did, you might be surprised to find this image for sale. Plate 4, the first ever photographic view of the Thames 203 00:22:30,740 --> 00:22:37,670 taken by a now unknown daguerreotypist. Your appetite for photographic images having been whetted 204 00:22:38,090 --> 00:22:41,270 you would, especially if I can get, ah there we go 205 00:22:42,250 --> 00:22:46,510 But go away. You would no doubt have been attracted by the promise of editor Herbert Ingram. 206 00:22:47,020 --> 00:22:55,060 In 1842, he issued an advertisement that said he would supply you with an unprecedented panoramic view of London based on daguerreotypes. 207 00:22:55,330 --> 00:23:04,240 if you subscribe to his new journal, The Illustrated London News, Ingram hired Antoine Claudet, the owner of that glass shop I mentioned a moment ago, 208 00:23:04,270 --> 00:23:10,360 a moment ago, and now a professional photographer to make the daguerreotypes on which the panorama was to be based. 209 00:23:13,520 --> 00:23:18,170 Claudet set up his camera on a small balcony at the top of the Duke of York's column 210 00:23:18,560 --> 00:23:26,750 then the tallest lookout in London. Over a period of several days, he exposed a sequence of consecutive horizontal daguerreotypes of the city 211 00:23:27,140 --> 00:23:34,220 using a lens camera he'd imported from France, providing a 180 degree view of the city looking both north and south. 212 00:23:35,030 --> 00:23:37,070 These daguerreotypes were then traced over, 213 00:23:37,220 --> 00:23:46,280 and their images transferred onto a sequence of Turkish woodblocks before being engraved by a team of expert wood carvers and then inked and printed. 214 00:23:47,540 --> 00:23:55,159 I should mention that the choice of wood engraving rather than the cheaper woodcut process as the means of illustration allied The 215 00:23:55,160 --> 00:24:03,260 Illustrated London News with middle class taste and thus with the aesthetic and political interests of Ingram's intended market. 216 00:24:04,100 --> 00:24:09,649 The panorama's subtitle The picture of the Metropolis of the British Empire exemplifies 217 00:24:09,650 --> 00:24:14,060 both the publisher's worldview and the global scope of the newspaper's reporting. 218 00:24:17,560 --> 00:24:25,210 A number of contemporary commentaries on this panorama marvelled at the accuracy of its perspective and its extraordinary delineation of detail. 219 00:24:25,840 --> 00:24:33,490 As one journalist recorded, whoever be the artist he has given an accurate representation of London as it is at the present moment, 220 00:24:33,820 --> 00:24:40,720 and all the steeples, including the scaffolding around the Nelson Monument, are handed down to posterity with wonderful precision. 221 00:24:41,610 --> 00:24:48,480 As you can see here on the right hand side of the detail. So people marvelled at this, if you like, excess of information. 222 00:24:49,320 --> 00:24:53,610 An image based on a photograph gave you more information than an artist would ever bother recording. 223 00:24:53,910 --> 00:24:56,870 If somebody had simply drawn this, they would have idealised this scene 224 00:24:56,910 --> 00:25:01,830 and they certainly wouldn't have bothered to include things like scaffolding, which weren't considered particularly picturesque. 225 00:25:02,370 --> 00:25:05,909 What made something photographic rather than simply, you know, illustrative, 226 00:25:05,910 --> 00:25:10,050 was this excessive amount of detail, this excessive amount of information. 227 00:25:11,220 --> 00:25:18,600 And of course, that excessive information, that photographicness was underlined by the fact that other things, like people playing 228 00:25:18,600 --> 00:25:22,770 down in the park on the lower left, or going up the steps of that building over there 229 00:25:23,310 --> 00:25:26,820 all of that, of course, would have had to have been added by an imaginative engraver, 230 00:25:26,830 --> 00:25:33,390 because none of those kinds of details would have been captured in Claudet's daguerreotype. From the beginning then 231 00:25:33,540 --> 00:25:39,990 the photographic image involves a visual reconciliation of mechanical truth and creative embellishment. 232 00:25:42,310 --> 00:25:46,930 So what did this panorama have to say to its audience about the nature of photography? 233 00:25:46,990 --> 00:25:51,880 Remembering that for many people, this could have been one of their first encounters with a photographic image. 234 00:25:53,370 --> 00:26:00,090 It demonstrated that the photographic image could be a kind of abstraction, allowing an impossibly extended vision, 235 00:26:00,390 --> 00:26:04,230 a vision acquired as if in motion through the continual turning of one's head 236 00:26:04,560 --> 00:26:09,780 beyond the normal optical capacity of either a human viewer or any single camera. 237 00:26:10,800 --> 00:26:18,210 By means of this abstraction and by using the latest industrial technology along with complex modes of production 238 00:26:18,840 --> 00:26:21,570 married to manual craftsmanship of the first order, 239 00:26:21,720 --> 00:26:29,670 I'd say one of the things the exhibitions really drive home to you is the extraordinary degree of manual skill that mid-19th century people had. 240 00:26:30,870 --> 00:26:34,920 The Illustrated London News managed to turn London into a portable visual spectacle, 241 00:26:35,550 --> 00:26:41,520 and because the spectacle was coded as a photographic one, it could be at once plausible and impossible. 242 00:26:42,390 --> 00:26:44,310 I think again, when you go into the exhibition 243 00:26:44,310 --> 00:26:48,840 one of the amazing things, I think, ok this was meant to be taken out of the newspaper and pinned up on your wall. 244 00:26:49,350 --> 00:26:53,550 It's an amazing survivor. It's just newsprint and it looks as fresh as if it was printed yesterday. 245 00:26:54,890 --> 00:26:57,469 But this abstraction, as I'm calling it, 246 00:26:57,470 --> 00:27:05,300 also signalled a new place for photography as but one component of a continuous multimedia flow of topical news and images. 247 00:27:06,050 --> 00:27:11,180 In this transference from unique daguerreotype to a multitude of ink replicas, 248 00:27:11,510 --> 00:27:17,990 we surely see photography hovering between an artisanal past and its imminent future as a virtual image form. 249 00:27:18,770 --> 00:27:26,780 Indeed, the introduction of engravings after daguerreotypes as disseminated in the illustrated press meant that photographic images were 250 00:27:26,780 --> 00:27:35,149 themselves now itinerant entities being potentially distributed all over the world and capable of being experienced simultaneously in, 251 00:27:35,150 --> 00:27:39,980 say, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta, New York and London. 252 00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:44,800 A daguerreotype of a comfortably plump Englishman 253 00:27:45,130 --> 00:27:52,330 shown seated while casually holding a copy of the Illustrated London News in one hand, is, in effect, 254 00:27:52,330 --> 00:27:57,850 an occupational portrait of a typical middle class British citizen of the mid-19th century. 255 00:27:58,720 --> 00:28:04,720 The newspaper signifies his literacy, his class and a certain implied imperial worldview. 256 00:28:05,690 --> 00:28:12,290 In this context, the sharing of printed images gathered from all over the world allowed the British Empire to maintain a 257 00:28:12,290 --> 00:28:19,190 sense of its own coherence as an apparently benign and yet all seeing, all powerful colonial enterprise. 258 00:28:21,810 --> 00:28:26,040 Given the extra costs involved in the transfer from daguerreotype to engraving, 259 00:28:26,370 --> 00:28:31,680 we have to assume that the caption from a photograph or from a daguerreotype was considered worth it, 260 00:28:32,130 --> 00:28:38,370 giving any particular multiplied image a kind of rhetorical authority it might not otherwise have attained. 261 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:43,980 We're looking here at lords and ladies dressed in fancy costumes for a charity ball. 262 00:28:44,190 --> 00:28:48,150 So each of them is dressed as a, as a former English monarch. 263 00:28:48,180 --> 00:28:51,930 So it's Anne Boleyn, for example, on the far left and so on and so forth. 264 00:28:52,140 --> 00:28:56,820 Imagine if in our histories we had all of these daguerreotypes still with us, what that would look like. 265 00:28:59,360 --> 00:29:05,749 The exhibition does its best to demonstrate the various examples of this dissemination of photographic images and to 266 00:29:05,750 --> 00:29:12,050 show how this process of image transfer crossed a number of different media boundaries as well as national borders. 267 00:29:13,420 --> 00:29:16,480 Of course, this new power came at a cost. 268 00:29:17,260 --> 00:29:23,110 The destruction of thousands, possibly thousands of thousands of daguerreotypes in the process of their being 269 00:29:23,110 --> 00:29:28,089 traced over and copied into these other media. Daguerreotypes and metal plates 270 00:29:28,090 --> 00:29:34,630 they're very fragile. If you touch the surface of them, you rub the image off. Put a piece of tracing paper over and trace that image 271 00:29:34,870 --> 00:29:42,160 in the process you basically destroy the daguerreotype. Every reproduction image I show you here, we have no daguerreotypes. 272 00:29:42,520 --> 00:29:48,100 So we have to assume, that is they haven't survived, we have to assume they were destroyed in the process of their reproduction. 273 00:29:48,910 --> 00:29:55,360 So to put this in an aphorism, the photograph had to die if its reproduction was to be given life. 274 00:29:56,590 --> 00:30:01,270 Our exhibition is therefore largely comprised of a graveyard of dead photographs. 275 00:30:01,720 --> 00:30:06,530 And the history of British photography that it provides is no less than a ghost story. 276 00:30:08,380 --> 00:30:16,810 The complexity of that ghost story is perhaps embodied in the very last item on display in the vitrine devoted to the Great Exhibition of 1851. 277 00:30:17,620 --> 00:30:23,830 The Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, died two months after the Great Exhibition opened. 278 00:30:24,640 --> 00:30:30,910 Fittingly, his obituary in the Illustrated London News was accompanied by a wood engraved portrait based on a daguerreotype, 279 00:30:31,600 --> 00:30:39,940 but contrary to its own caption, it used an 1848 daguerreotype made by an American photographer, Charles Meade, as its source. 280 00:30:41,020 --> 00:30:47,860 So here we have an English wood engraving of a French photographer based on an American daguerreotype appearing 281 00:30:47,860 --> 00:30:54,010 in multiple copies of an illustrated newspaper that could be read simultaneously throughout the British Empire. 282 00:30:54,870 --> 00:31:00,190 As as I've often said to my own students, you don't need to look offshore for signs of globalism. 283 00:31:00,580 --> 00:31:05,260 It's right here in front of us reproduced as a single piece of photographic ephemera. 284 00:31:08,820 --> 00:31:10,380 Among all its other narratives, 285 00:31:10,890 --> 00:31:17,459 A New Power is an invitation to imagine what our histories of photography might look like if all of these erased daguerreotypes had, 286 00:31:17,460 --> 00:31:18,930 in fact, survived to the present. 287 00:31:19,740 --> 00:31:27,000 Not only would our histories include numerous photographs of lords and ladies dressed in fancy costumes while pretending to be ancient monarchs 288 00:31:27,570 --> 00:31:35,640 but they would also be graced by images of actors caught as if in mid-performance, of a disabled man selling nutmeg graters in the street, 289 00:31:36,060 --> 00:31:42,540 of frogs shaving and a courting, and of a still life from the Great Exhibition that demonstrates exactly what happened 290 00:31:42,750 --> 00:31:48,180 when Talbot's deadpan visual taxonomy met the seductive world of modern commerce. 291 00:31:50,540 --> 00:31:51,259 We are reminded 292 00:31:51,260 --> 00:31:57,920 why all these photographs are no longer with us, by a daguerreotype plate in the exhibition that has been deliberately damaged by its owner. 293 00:31:58,790 --> 00:32:04,760 Francois Arago, in a report to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris on the 3rd of July 1839, 294 00:32:05,180 --> 00:32:11,540 had warned that touching the surface of a daguerreotype was, as he put it, like brushing the wings of a butterfly. 295 00:32:12,650 --> 00:32:20,240 This is demonstrated in this 1852 group portrait of Queen Victoria and her family. As Victoria recorded in her journal, 296 00:32:20,960 --> 00:32:25,370 went back to the, I can't really do Victoria so just go with it, went back to the gardens where 297 00:32:25,370 --> 00:32:29,030 a daguerreotype by Mr. Kilburn was taken of me and five of the children. 298 00:32:29,510 --> 00:32:34,460 The day was splendid for it. Mine was unfortunately horrid, but the children were pretty. 299 00:32:35,630 --> 00:32:38,750 Apparently Victoria had been captured with her eyes closed. 300 00:32:39,500 --> 00:32:46,340 Horrid indeed. She therefore scratched out her face on the plate in a blizzard of annoyance, leaving herself decapitated 301 00:32:46,520 --> 00:32:49,700 but the children unblemished and strangely, I think, 302 00:32:49,820 --> 00:33:00,610 unmoved. The sight of the wounded raw metal of Victoria's daguerreotype is a reminder 303 00:33:00,610 --> 00:33:04,480 of the context in which any photograph was made in mid-19th century Britain. 304 00:33:05,230 --> 00:33:12,820 We have tried to sketch that context in our opening vitrine with its conflation of images representing an industrialised English landscape, 305 00:33:13,210 --> 00:33:20,710 according to then-princess Victoria, The country continues black, engines, engines, flaming coals in abundance everywhere, 306 00:33:20,710 --> 00:33:26,350 smoking and burning coal heaps intermingle with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children. 307 00:33:26,830 --> 00:33:30,399 So we have this idyllic view of the English landscape of the 19th century 308 00:33:30,400 --> 00:33:37,940 but Victoria suddenly reminds us actually this is what was going on in that landscape in 1832 when she wrote that diary entry. 309 00:33:38,920 --> 00:33:44,290 But then we also have images of some factory architecture which apparently recedes as if to infinity, 310 00:33:44,620 --> 00:33:50,230 a lump of silver ore imported from South America, a plate manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood, 311 00:33:50,680 --> 00:33:58,659 the demonstration of the scientific innovations, computing engines that promise precision engineered automation and romantic efforts, 312 00:33:58,660 --> 00:34:03,700 as in the John Constable painting, to reconcile fleeting time and static space. 313 00:34:05,220 --> 00:34:13,350 The ramifications of that context, let's call it industrial capitalism as a convenient shorthand, are also evident elsewhere in the exhibition. 314 00:34:14,070 --> 00:34:18,060 Consider, for example, this remarkable daguerreotype by the Kilburn studio. 315 00:34:18,780 --> 00:34:26,520 It records the immense crowds, many of them members of the working class, at one of the Chartist rallies held in South London in 1848. 316 00:34:27,480 --> 00:34:33,580 Calling for political reform the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order. 317 00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:40,260 Fears were so great the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family was moved whole, 318 00:34:40,260 --> 00:34:44,430 the whole family was moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for their own protection. 319 00:34:45,410 --> 00:34:52,400 In the event, the Isle of Wight, in the event the rally passed peacefully and Prince Albert himself purchased this record of it. 320 00:34:52,820 --> 00:34:59,180 One of perhaps eight that were made by Kilburn that day, something mentioned by the Royal Collection Conservators, 321 00:34:59,180 --> 00:35:03,229 because actually there are numbers seven and eight on the back of the two plates that they own, 322 00:35:03,230 --> 00:35:07,820 which suggests that at least that that many were made by Kilburn on the day. 323 00:35:09,720 --> 00:35:15,209 The striking aspect of this daguerreotype, especially if you've had a chance to look at the digital media in the gallery, 324 00:35:15,210 --> 00:35:21,510 where you can really blow it up at high scale, a striking aspect of this daguerreotype are the factories and chimneys 325 00:35:21,510 --> 00:35:27,630 it shows lining the edge of Kennington Common, a reminder of the growth of new industrial buildings in London, 326 00:35:27,810 --> 00:35:34,140 where many of these protesting people must have worked. Note also that the daguerreotype plate has been solarised. 327 00:35:34,770 --> 00:35:41,640 In other words, it's been overexposed to light, creating a chemical reaction that results in this artificial blue colour in the sky. 328 00:35:42,270 --> 00:35:47,430 Yet another instance of photography merging the true and the false in a single image. 329 00:35:49,120 --> 00:35:54,610 By the way, another of these Kilburn daguerreotypes was sacrificed to the altar of reproduceability 330 00:35:54,880 --> 00:35:59,440 while being turned into a wood engraving to grace the pages of the Illustrated London News. 331 00:36:00,100 --> 00:36:07,760 Curiously, if you look at it closely, the engraver has reversed the orientation of the scene, but not the number on the flag, which remains reversed, 332 00:36:08,170 --> 00:36:15,010 a reminder that almost all daguerreotypes are in fact mirror images of what they see and therefore show us a reversed view. 333 00:36:17,060 --> 00:36:22,220 Individual members of the working classes rarely make an appearance in accounts of early British photography, 334 00:36:22,550 --> 00:36:25,970 in part because very few photographs of such people have survived. 335 00:36:26,860 --> 00:36:33,130 A shift in focus to the history of the photographic image has allowed us to remedy this omission in A New Power. 336 00:36:33,850 --> 00:36:42,880 To that end, we have included as many open copies of Henry Mayhew's 1851 publication London Labour and the London Poor as we could muster. 337 00:36:44,140 --> 00:36:48,130 I'll be speaking in more detail about this publishing project in tomorrow's symposium. 338 00:36:48,820 --> 00:36:56,200 Suffice it to say that numerous engraved portraits of members of the working class are featured in Mayhew's multi-volume publication, 339 00:36:56,560 --> 00:37:01,960 all of them based on daguerreotypes taken in the Beard studio. Mayhew's text 340 00:37:02,110 --> 00:37:07,030 provided a richly ethnological and sometimes racist commentary on London's poor 341 00:37:07,420 --> 00:37:11,650 based on interviews, a mountain of statistics and social analysis. 342 00:37:12,460 --> 00:37:16,660 All this was given added force by the addition of wood engravings based on photographs. 343 00:37:17,650 --> 00:37:24,340 Mayhew's interviews were transcribed and published in vernacular English, an effort to allow the working class to speak for itself. 344 00:37:25,180 --> 00:37:32,650 A notable feature of our exhibition is that you can listen on your phone to actors performing a selection of those interviews. 345 00:37:33,100 --> 00:37:36,910 I haven't noticed too many people doing it, so if you haven't tried it, I would encourage you to do so 346 00:37:37,330 --> 00:37:43,330 it's kind of amazing to hear the voice of these people from so long ago speaking directly to you through the phone. 347 00:37:45,540 --> 00:37:46,259 If nothing else, 348 00:37:46,260 --> 00:37:54,300 then the inclusion of these images after daguerreotypes in A New Power reveals the considerable ethnic diversity of mid-century London. 349 00:37:56,120 --> 00:38:06,080 Indeed, the exhibition's unusual curatorial orientation allows it to make class and ethnic differences a visible aspect of the history it relates. 350 00:38:06,890 --> 00:38:11,540 But the exhibition also tries to acknowledge the role played by women in photography's development. 351 00:38:12,200 --> 00:38:18,800 It opens with two plaster busts by Francis Chantrey, the premier English portrait sculptor of his time. 352 00:38:19,430 --> 00:38:26,120 A reminder once again, of class, of the class of those people who are in a position to dabble with photographic chemistry in 353 00:38:26,120 --> 00:38:30,920 the 1830s and who could obviously afford a portrait bust by this premier artist. 354 00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:38,360 The Scottish natural philosopher Mary Somerville had her experiments with silver chloride published in the mid 1830s, 355 00:38:38,720 --> 00:38:45,230 while Elizabeth Fulhame experimented with the practical application of light sensitive silver from at least 1780 on. 356 00:38:46,250 --> 00:38:54,800 We also feature on the left the bust of a mysterious Miss Mundy, one of Talbot's sisters in law. In December 1834. 357 00:38:54,830 --> 00:38:56,990 One of those sisters in law, Laura Mundy, 358 00:38:57,200 --> 00:39:05,570 wrote the first description of photographic images in a letter to Henry while thanking him for sending her such beautiful shadows as she called them. 359 00:39:06,440 --> 00:39:09,440 The little, little drawing, she writes, I think, quite lovely, 360 00:39:09,740 --> 00:39:16,280 that and the verse is particularly excite my admiration. I had no idea that the art could be carried to such perfection. 361 00:39:16,760 --> 00:39:24,320 I had grieved over the gradual disappearance of those you gave me in the summer, and I'm delighted to have these to supply their place in my book. 362 00:39:26,250 --> 00:39:30,930 Her comment is a reminder that Talbot was fixing his photogenic drawings with common table salt, 363 00:39:31,290 --> 00:39:33,810 which delayed but did not prevent further development. 364 00:39:34,440 --> 00:39:41,940 In other words they remained light sensitive, and this is why we can't show them in either of our exhibitions this year. 365 00:39:43,270 --> 00:39:49,420 So British women contributed to the scientific knowledge that eventually made photography possible. 366 00:39:49,930 --> 00:39:53,110 But they were also important patrons of this new technology. 367 00:39:54,040 --> 00:40:00,680 The earliest dated daguerreotype portrait to be made in London features the face of the Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth. 368 00:40:01,260 --> 00:40:10,840 It was taken by an unknown operator on the 25th of May 1841, in the newly opened Richard Beard studio in the Royal Polytechnic Institution. 369 00:40:11,770 --> 00:40:16,120 As Maria Edgeworth says in a letter also included in the exhibition 370 00:40:16,540 --> 00:40:25,780 It is a wonderful, mysterious operation. A daguerreotype costs, by the way, the equivalent of a week's wages for a working man or a tonne of coal. 371 00:40:26,560 --> 00:40:30,730 It was, in other words, at this stage, you know, a luxury item. 372 00:40:31,940 --> 00:40:36,620 A luxury, but also, of course, a mixed blessing. As Edgeworth herself says, 373 00:40:36,860 --> 00:40:42,080 repeating a sentiment said by almost every subsequent recipient of a photographic portrait, 374 00:40:42,740 --> 00:40:46,220 Quote, I feel you will not like any of my daguerreotype faces 375 00:40:46,370 --> 00:40:58,310 I'm sure I do not. The truer, the worse. We have this wonderfully detailed 1842 cartoon of the very studio in which Edgeworth was photographed. 376 00:40:59,180 --> 00:41:05,180 You can see its entirety Photographic Phenomena or the New School of Portrait Painting, as it's called. 377 00:41:05,420 --> 00:41:08,840 And it tells us an awful lot about the nature of the studios. 378 00:41:09,980 --> 00:41:16,969 We'll just quickly go round it and see a man here in the foreground and he's buffing the daguerreotype plate to make it as mirror shiny as possible 379 00:41:16,970 --> 00:41:22,400 in order to capture as much light as possible. He's using a stick wrapped in velvet in order to do that. 380 00:41:22,730 --> 00:41:28,490 Behind him, we can see the lab with its burning flame, where they would have prepared the various chemistry and prepared the plate. 381 00:41:29,390 --> 00:41:35,570 We see an operator on his little steps, step stoool, called an operator because photography was considered to be so painful 382 00:41:35,570 --> 00:41:39,170 a procedure to be subjected to, that it was the equivalent of surgery 383 00:41:39,380 --> 00:41:43,940 so early photographers were called operators. You see two customers waiting their turn, 384 00:41:43,940 --> 00:41:52,520 looking rapturously up at the photographer. You see the man they photographed sitting in a kind of elevated throne 385 00:41:52,880 --> 00:41:56,690 You might notice some little ball bearing wheels so that it can be moved through the studio. 386 00:41:56,900 --> 00:42:03,410 And he's being held steady by what was called a daguerreotrap, a metal contraption to stop you from moving during the long exposure time. 387 00:42:03,710 --> 00:42:09,860 And then, of course, we have of course two happy customers who have bought their daguerreotypes and are now looking at them under magnification. 388 00:42:11,050 --> 00:42:14,650 But perhaps the most interesting details are the ones up near the ceiling. 389 00:42:14,980 --> 00:42:21,340 For a start, we see that ceiling. One of the things that Edgeworth tells us is everything's mysteriously cast in a blue light. 390 00:42:21,670 --> 00:42:26,469 And that's because they'd actually replaced the ceiling with blue glass, because in the early 19th, 391 00:42:26,470 --> 00:42:32,680 when photography was first invented, it was mistakenly believed that blue light was the optimal light under which to be photographed. 392 00:42:32,980 --> 00:42:38,139 So early studios were painted an eggshell blue colour, and all of the glass was tinted blue. 393 00:42:38,140 --> 00:42:42,550 So that you got this blue light. So you can see if you go up the stairs as she says everyone's wearing black 394 00:42:42,850 --> 00:42:47,430 mysteriously whispering and then you come into the studio and you're in this weird blue space. 395 00:42:47,440 --> 00:42:51,040 It must have been totally strange it can't really be conveyed by the sketch. 396 00:42:51,470 --> 00:42:55,750 The other interesting thing, of course, are the cameras themselves, which are on a track, as you can see, 397 00:42:55,750 --> 00:43:00,880 to be moved through the studio during the day because they have to follow the movement of the sun through the sky. 398 00:43:01,120 --> 00:43:06,140 So as the sun moves, they can, you know, push the cameras along the track and move the cameras as well. 399 00:43:06,520 --> 00:43:10,630 And you'll notice that the cameras are kind of strange. They're just this box without a lens. 400 00:43:11,020 --> 00:43:14,800 This was actually an American invention called the Wolcott Reflecting Apparatus. 401 00:43:15,040 --> 00:43:20,800 And Beard, who was a coal merchant, bought the patent rights to the French daguerreotype process for England, 402 00:43:21,010 --> 00:43:25,030 and then he bought the English patent rights also for this Wolcott Reflecting Apparatus. 403 00:43:25,300 --> 00:43:31,300 And what it basically consists of is a box, as you can see, with a sort of, you know, a front on a hinge. 404 00:43:31,630 --> 00:43:35,950 And you can see the portraits being made with this camera with the hinged element up. 405 00:43:36,190 --> 00:43:40,780 So what's happening? If I'm taking Richard's portrait, he's trapped in the daguerreotrap as we speak. 406 00:43:40,990 --> 00:43:45,730 I lift the flap, I make the exposure. The light bounces off his face, this blue light, 407 00:43:45,910 --> 00:43:52,690 and it is captured by a convex mirror in the back of the box and projected forward to that daguerreotype plate that we see being buffed down here, 408 00:43:52,870 --> 00:43:58,840 which is actually facing away from him. So the light is then gathered onto that plate and hey presto, you have a daguerreotype portrait. 409 00:43:59,200 --> 00:44:04,030 So this is how the earliest daguerreotypes in the exhibition, including the one of Maria Edgeworth, 410 00:44:04,240 --> 00:44:08,140 were actually made, all captured in this wonderful little cartoon. 411 00:44:11,750 --> 00:44:14,880 But ah, technology 412 00:44:14,900 --> 00:44:22,870 I love it. The exhibition does its best to present a chronologically coherent history of British daguerreotypes, 413 00:44:22,880 --> 00:44:27,770 starting with the one by Edgeworth that you've just seen and similar products of the Beard franchise. 414 00:44:28,040 --> 00:44:33,970 And then by way of comparison, a selection of early examples made in the studio of Antoine Claudet. 415 00:44:34,730 --> 00:44:44,720 This also allows us to showcase the introduction of the use of a painted backdrop as a standard studio prop, an innovation patented by Claudet in 1842. 416 00:44:46,040 --> 00:44:50,240 Disputing who had exclusive rights to the commercial use of the daguerreotype process 417 00:44:50,570 --> 00:44:53,870 Beard and Claudet took out several legal actions against each other. 418 00:44:54,590 --> 00:44:57,110 This resulted in much antagonism between them. 419 00:44:57,650 --> 00:45:07,460 In a letter to Talbot, dated 19th of January 1843, Claudet refers to Beard as, quote, his competitor and fierce enemy, unquote. 420 00:45:08,570 --> 00:45:13,580 Following one court battle during which Claudet first lost his case and then won on appeal 421 00:45:13,790 --> 00:45:19,340 an interesting paragraph subsequently appeared in the Literary Gazette of July of 1841. 422 00:45:20,240 --> 00:45:29,390 It describes two daguerreotypes exhibited by Claudet in his studio, one showing himself in a frame cast in gloom by news of another legal loss. 423 00:45:29,720 --> 00:45:31,460 And then the other, a group portrait. 424 00:45:31,910 --> 00:45:40,190 And I quote When freedom from restraint and sparkling champagne were calling forth expressions of congratulations and joy 425 00:45:40,550 --> 00:45:44,000 very spirited, and were it not for the hue, lifelike. 426 00:45:44,390 --> 00:45:50,660 The figures in the latter are numerous one standing in the very act of pouring out the exhilarating modern nectar. 427 00:45:51,500 --> 00:45:57,620 So you have to imagine this group daguerreotype of this people acting joy and literally pouring champagne out, 428 00:45:58,010 --> 00:46:00,770 you know, for the camera, all caught in a daguerreotype. 429 00:46:01,910 --> 00:46:10,220 Sadly, neither of these extraordinary daguerreotypes survived the fire that broke out in Claudet's studio, shortly after he died in 1867. 430 00:46:10,580 --> 00:46:17,660 So as with much of this history, we have these written descriptions of these amazing images, but we don't have the images themselves. 431 00:46:19,240 --> 00:46:23,980 In our display, we also feature a representative sample of hand-coloured daguerreotypes, 432 00:46:24,250 --> 00:46:29,680 a treatment that the Beard Studio introduced in 1842, took out a patent but never defended it 433 00:46:29,680 --> 00:46:37,540 so every studio immediately adopted the process. So here we have one from one of Richard Beard's, Richard Beard's franchise studios of a young man 434 00:46:37,540 --> 00:46:43,810 quite small, about the size of the palm of my hand. But as you can see, beautifully painted with a cloudy blue sky, 435 00:46:43,960 --> 00:46:49,210 which had become the sort of standard English background when you did paint your daguerreotype. 436 00:46:50,840 --> 00:46:59,000 I was wondering whether any of you have checked out the website called My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, where early photography meets extreme hotness? 437 00:46:59,510 --> 00:47:07,490 Because I've always thought that this guy would be a perfect addition to the array of very good looking young men that one can find on that site. 438 00:47:10,630 --> 00:47:14,350 As we've heard, many important daguerreotypes have not survive to the present. 439 00:47:14,890 --> 00:47:20,350 However, one that has is the portrait of opera singer Jenny Lind, the so-called Swedish Nightingale, 440 00:47:20,620 --> 00:47:27,280 perhaps the prominent musical celebrity of her time, taken by the Edward Kilburn studio in 1848. 441 00:47:27,910 --> 00:47:33,340 It won a prize at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as the best daguerreotype on display 442 00:47:33,670 --> 00:47:38,440 and it's amazing for me, anyway, that we actually have that in our vitrine devoted to the Great Exhibition. 443 00:47:39,440 --> 00:47:46,489 As you can see, Lind is posed so that her image is reflected in a large mirror. According to the judges at the Great Exhibition, 444 00:47:46,490 --> 00:47:51,050 and I quote, that the reflection in the glass is equally perfect with the original 445 00:47:51,230 --> 00:47:53,900 is the point worthy of remark and commendation 446 00:47:54,170 --> 00:48:02,630 unquote. A report in the Illustrated London News in that same year, 1851, also mentioned this daguerreotype as quote, 447 00:48:02,870 --> 00:48:09,620 a masterpiece of this art not excelled if equal by any other specimens exhibited throughout the entire building. 448 00:48:10,040 --> 00:48:15,680 unquote. Even now it shows you the best but daguerreotype were capable of. 449 00:48:17,430 --> 00:48:21,000 But we've been talking a lot about daguerreotypes and daguerreotype culture, 450 00:48:21,480 --> 00:48:26,670 how is Talbot placed in this extended story about the first 50 years of British photography? 451 00:48:27,780 --> 00:48:35,280 Unusually, A New Power has tried to give Talbot what I would consider an appropriately proportionate role in the history that it tells. 452 00:48:36,060 --> 00:48:38,760 As we've heard, his invention, the photogenic drawing, 453 00:48:38,760 --> 00:48:44,160 is noted and a number of representative salt prints and colour types are, of course, on display. 454 00:48:45,270 --> 00:48:52,410 But the reality is that paper based photography was not a prominent part of public culture in Britain before 1851, 455 00:48:52,860 --> 00:48:56,490 the year in which Talbot was at last persuaded to loosen his patent rights. 456 00:48:57,450 --> 00:49:02,760 A comparison between the daguerreotype portraits we've just seen and this one by Talbot of his mother, 457 00:49:02,970 --> 00:49:07,860 Lady Elisabeth Feilding, perhaps indicates why. The fact that the court, 458 00:49:07,860 --> 00:49:15,510 the calotype's chemistry, had to be soaked into its writing paper substrate meant that any image was formed in the fibres of that paper, 459 00:49:15,750 --> 00:49:24,470 resulting in a relatively diffuse likeness. This didn't prevent Talbot from doing his best to promote his process when he could. 460 00:49:25,190 --> 00:49:32,959 In 1846, the editor of the art journal Art Union asked Talbot to supply approximately 7000 salt prints to 461 00:49:32,960 --> 00:49:38,750 accompany a story about the calotype process that was to appear in the June issue of that year. 462 00:49:39,890 --> 00:49:46,910 These prints were made at the Reading Establishment, a printing business run by Talbot's former Dutch valet Nicolaas Henneman 463 00:49:47,210 --> 00:49:52,940 not so far from here. Henneman used as many as 70 available negatives to make these prints. 464 00:49:54,090 --> 00:50:02,370 Unfortunately for both Talbot and Henneman and his small team, the Art Union project proved to be a promotional and financial disaster, 465 00:50:02,670 --> 00:50:07,170 with most of the photographs made in a rush fading soon after publication. 466 00:50:08,250 --> 00:50:14,490 In other words, the three examples that are shown in A New Power, already unusual that we're showing three rather than just one, 467 00:50:14,850 --> 00:50:21,690 are all bad photographs. The kinds of photographs most books and art museums are somewhat reluctant to showcase. 468 00:50:22,610 --> 00:50:29,060 But this poor quality is precisely what makes them such crucial staging points for the future of the photographic image. 469 00:50:30,110 --> 00:50:32,750 Embarrassed by his public failure in the Art Union, 470 00:50:33,050 --> 00:50:41,390 Talbot made virtually no more photographs between 1846 and his death in 1877, a period of almost 30 years. 471 00:50:42,290 --> 00:50:47,030 Instead, he spent much of this time trying to solve the problem of the fatal unreliability 472 00:50:47,240 --> 00:50:51,790 of the calotype process by inventing a form of photo mechanical engraving. 473 00:50:53,140 --> 00:50:58,300 And this is the thread of his story that we pick up in one of the vitrines in Bright Sparks. 474 00:50:59,260 --> 00:51:03,370 We are fortunate that the Talbot archive at the Bodleian Libraries includes an excellent 475 00:51:03,370 --> 00:51:07,780 sample of Talbot's experiments with various forms of photomechanical engraving 476 00:51:08,560 --> 00:51:13,330 that has allowed us to show examples of his own work alongside a print of a photograph 477 00:51:13,330 --> 00:51:18,760 by Roger Fenton made using a rival process, a print that Talbot himself collected. 478 00:51:19,000 --> 00:51:22,780 He's a very interesting guy. He's busy experimenting with his own process 479 00:51:22,780 --> 00:51:30,820 but then he collects, I think, superior examples by other processes in order to find ways to improve his own. 480 00:51:32,850 --> 00:51:37,380 We've also included some later photo reviewers that were published in Camera Work in the United States, 481 00:51:37,410 --> 00:51:41,130 often considered the finest of all photography magazines, 482 00:51:41,430 --> 00:51:47,340 including one that reproduces a calotype derived image from the studio of Hill and Adamson in Edinburgh. 483 00:51:47,820 --> 00:51:53,310 As you will have gathered, this kind of global exchange is a leitmotif of both of our exhibitions. 484 00:51:54,810 --> 00:52:03,180 In October 1852, Talbot filed a patent for his photographic engraving process in which he was able to transfer photographic images onto 485 00:52:03,180 --> 00:52:09,960 steel plates and soon improved it further by using sheets of muslin as a screen through which to pixelate his images. 486 00:52:10,770 --> 00:52:16,230 In April 1858, after perfecting a way to introduce an aquatint ground to the process, 487 00:52:16,590 --> 00:52:22,200 Talbot introduced an enhanced system of photogravure, which he called photographic engraving. 488 00:52:23,330 --> 00:52:27,890 One of the interesting things about Talbot was that he was never satisfied with his own inventions 489 00:52:28,130 --> 00:52:32,960 and he continued to experiment with improvements to photo engraving right up until his death. 490 00:52:34,110 --> 00:52:42,750 As his son wrote in a posthumous appendix to Gaston Tissandier's 1878 book, A History and Handbook of Photography, 491 00:52:43,050 --> 00:52:51,840 and I quote, I may perhaps be, perhaps be permitted to express a hope that photographic engraving has a future before it yet, and that, 492 00:52:51,840 --> 00:52:53,430 as in the case of the calotype, 493 00:52:53,940 --> 00:53:01,350 it will be brought to greater perfection in the hands of others than it, than it attained in those of its inventor. 494 00:53:01,890 --> 00:53:03,870 19th century sentences are very hard to read out 495 00:53:03,870 --> 00:53:10,260 actually, try it sometime, a greater perfection in the hands of others than it attained in of its inventor. 496 00:53:12,160 --> 00:53:16,540 And so it proved to be. Having invented negative positive photography, 497 00:53:16,810 --> 00:53:20,890 the system of representation that dominated the second half of the 19th century, 498 00:53:21,220 --> 00:53:28,990 Talbot laid the foundations for a viable system of photomechanical reproduction, a process which would similarly dominate the 20th century. 499 00:53:30,160 --> 00:53:37,330 It is Talbot, then, who helps to make possible the photo books featured in another of the vitrines in Bright Sparks. Not only, 500 00:53:37,330 --> 00:53:42,430 not only by helping to invent the genre itself through his publications in the 1840s, 501 00:53:42,670 --> 00:53:49,600 but also by advancing the technology that allows the production of photomechanical illustrations of any kind. 502 00:53:50,500 --> 00:53:57,700 Most importantly, Talbot made it possible for us to now disseminate his own work in a new book published in conjunction with these exhibitions. 503 00:53:58,150 --> 00:54:05,380 I'm sure you'll all want to buy a copy, if only to admire the marvels of contemporary photomechanical reproduction that it demonstrates. 504 00:54:05,770 --> 00:54:10,120 And of course, to make your own little tribute to Talbot's incredible legacy. 505 00:54:12,770 --> 00:54:17,299 My talk today has tried to identify what is distinctive about the historical understanding 506 00:54:17,300 --> 00:54:21,830 of British photography presented in the New Power and Bright Sparks exhibitions. 507 00:54:22,730 --> 00:54:25,400 Bringing the interests of the Library to this understanding 508 00:54:25,640 --> 00:54:31,610 we have seen what photography looks like when the photographic image is acknowledged as part of this medium's identity. 509 00:54:32,390 --> 00:54:38,570 Reproduction and dissemination become key issues and the trafficking in photographic images, images that 510 00:54:38,570 --> 00:54:44,600 have been transferred from daguerreotype plates to engravings on paper, is the primary story to be told. 511 00:54:45,500 --> 00:54:49,069 The telling of that story must necessarily address itself to the development of 512 00:54:49,070 --> 00:54:53,630 industrial capitalism and the maintenance of the ideology of the British Empire 513 00:54:53,970 --> 00:55:01,640 for this is the context in which it occurs. The extraordinary contributions of inventors like William Henry Fox Talbot should, of course 514 00:55:01,880 --> 00:55:09,500 and indeed, yes, of course, be acknowledged. But even more important is the anonymous and yet inexorable logic of commerce that 515 00:55:09,500 --> 00:55:14,210 immediately absorbs this new phenomenon and makes it part of everyday modern life. 516 00:55:15,050 --> 00:55:19,280 Central to that absorption is the promise, more rhetorical than actual, 517 00:55:19,460 --> 00:55:26,060 that images derived from photographs are more authentic, more trustworthy, more accurate than other kinds of pictures. 518 00:55:26,960 --> 00:55:32,720 That myth haunts us still, making these exhibitions as much about the present as the past. 519 00:55:33,920 --> 00:55:38,390 For all these reasons, I hope you will now revisit the two exhibitions and look at them again, 520 00:55:38,660 --> 00:55:46,010 perhaps seeing them anew and coming up with your own stories about the central role played by photography in our modern times. 521 00:55:46,790 --> 00:55:47,540 Thank you for listening.