We are gathered here today, ladies and gentlemen, to enjoy a very special lecture,
because the whole season of photography to some extent has been centred around the work of Professor Geoffrey Batchen,
our colleague here, the Professor of the History of Art, and who came to us at the most difficult time in December 2019.
Little did he know that he would be plunged almost immediately into lockdown, separated from his loved ones and, as indeed we all were,
and put into the most difficult circumstances to organise his teaching and research and to
support the community of scholars in the History of Art that are here in the university.
But he did so, ladies and gentlemen, alongside his colleagues,
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
in the midst of all of that and coping, of course, as we all had to with the pandemic,
Professor Batchen has managed to curate these two extraordinary exhibitions,
immersed himself in the archives and the other resources that you see displayed in the vitrines of the two galleries,
and indeed has written not one but two books to accompany those exhibitions. They're not catalogues of the exhibitions
but they accompany the shows and they are, if I may
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
bookstores. I urge you to purchase a copy.
I daresay that the Professor of the History of Art may be persuadable to sign copies.
So do make, do avail yourselves of that opportunity. However
enough of me rambling on, you're all here
as indeed am I, to listen to Professor Geoffrey Batchen.
Please join me in welcoming him and ask him to give his lecture.
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.
But it was an interesting experience, of course,
working on these two exhibitions in the middle of a pandemic where you actually couldn't get to see the archive.
And so I did very much rely on colleagues. And indeed, although I get to take responsibility,
both of these exhibitions very much depended on the hard working staff of the Bodleian, and that indeed made them possible.
Indeed, thanks to the generosity of the Bodleian Libraries and I have to say in particular the support of
Richard and with the considerable help of the expert staff that the library has at its disposal,
I've been given an opportunity to curate a pair of exhibitions for the library's galleries.
And each of those exhibitions, if you've had a chance to see them, you'll recognise, has the distinct character and purpose.
A New Power sets out to recalibrate the story of photography's development and dissemination in Britain during its first 50 years.
Bright Sparks, on the other hand, presents a kind of creative way to think about historical archives while also offering
us a glimpse into the Victorian world occupied by photography's English inventor,
William Henry Fox Talbot. In offering these two stories simultaneously
the exhibitions collectively reveal the richness of the Bodleian's own photographic collections
a reminder that this is a library that really does have something for everyone.
But they also demonstrate what happens when histories of photography are presented by a library rather than an art museum.
Here we see an installation view of a 2007 exhibition held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Impressed by Light British Photographs from Paper Negatives
1840 to 1860. As the museum proudly claimed, and I quote,
This exhibition is the first major exhibition to survey British calotypes, works of exceptional beauty and rarity,
which are made from paper negatives and are among the earliest forays into the medium of photography.
Driven, as you can hear from that quotation, by the logic of art history,
museums like this present the history of photography as a history of photographs.
As a consequence, they exhibit only pictures in excellent condition, selected from those few photographs that happen to have survived.
And they are exhibited a singular works of art evenly,
even, dare I say, soporifically, spaced on tastefully coloured walls in identical frames and completely divorced from any sort of cultural,
social or economic context, and even from other competing types of photograph.
The Bodleian's exhibitions do their best to present an alternative view not only of photography's early history,
but also of modes of exhibition making. More specifically, they set out to channel the words of two Indian naval architects who,
having been resident in London in 1840 and seeing the process demonstrated to them,
wrote that, and I quote, the daguerreotype is the most extraordinary production of modern times, unquote.
A New Power tries to demonstrate just what was extraordinary about that production.
But let's begin with Bright Sparks and the context in which the Bodleian's two exhibitions were conceived.
The Bodleian and as you probably know, is a library of legal deposit.
And so William Henry Fox Talbot was obliged to send it a copy of the Pencil of Nature in 1844 when it first appeared.
But the Library has not consciously collected photography as part of its purview
until quite recently. Under the guidance of the magnificent Richard Ovenden,
in 2014, the library purchased the Talbot family's, Talbot family's archive,
an extraordinary treasure trove of diverse material that includes, among its many other items, 100 early photographs.
Then in 2021, the library was offered another 192 Talbot photographs on deposit suddenly making it a major holder of early British photography.
It was decided that a public exhibition of this material would be an appropriate way to showcase this new collecting strength.
Hence our two exhibitions. The first thing we wanted to do was show the sheer breadth of the Library's Talbot Archive, containing,
as it does everything from this miniature painting of Talbot as a young boy to this collection of letters cut up into pieces,
but kept by him for posterity. Yes,
it turns out that Talbot was a total packrat, as we say in Australia, seemingly incapable of throwing anything away.
Even the more or less empty seed packets left over from his efforts as a gardener.
What a boon he is for researchers and indeed exhibition makers in our own museum age.
The richness of the archive allows us to present any number of interesting juxtapositions,
including these two little architectural models commissioned by Talbot and his own photograph of the South Gallery in Laycock Abbey,
which he renovated, adding these same windows to its facade in 1831.
It also allows us to highlight the contribution of certain key women in Talbot's life,
such as his mother, Lady Elizabeth Fielding. Here in her diary entry for 25th August 1822
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.
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.
Or, how about this sketch by Talbot's wife, Constance. Talbot dated his first idea of photography to October 1833,
while he was on a belated honeymoon in Italy.
He tried, he tells us, to sketch the scenery, the scenic surroundings with his portable camera obscura, but without notable success.
That lack of success was made all the more apparent by the relatively confident efforts of the women in his party, including Constance.
The invention of photography, it seems, was the by-product of a certain masculine insecurity, as are so many other things.
Talbot's invention of negative-
positive photography allowed picturesque views of landscape to be taken with the camera and distributed in the form of multiple prints.
In 1845, Tolbert demonstrated his own skill as a photographer while taking a series of views in Scotland,
recording tourist sites made famous by the writings of Sir Walter Scott.
And you can see one of those prints on your left. In the exhibition, Bright Sparks,
we have tried to show that the conventions that Talbot adopted, including the exploitation of bodies of water as reflective surfaces,
have been repeated by later photographers such as this albumen example made in New Zealand in 1882,
produced as if in distant homage to photography's inventor.
Indeed a curated conversation between the Talbot archive and more recent photographic
practices soon became the template for the Bright Sparks exhibition as a whole.
The aim is to show the degree to which Talbot's work inaugurated later photography, sometimes consciously and sometimes less so.
In some cases, the connection between past and present is very direct.
In 2012, for example, the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto borrowed Talbot's electrostatic discharge wand from the Bodleian. He used it to generate
sufficient sparks to create photographs that display a pattern of white electrical efflorescence against a black ground.
Although, in essence, a photography about photography, Sugimoto's pictures, promised a glimpse of something far greater,
a cosmos in formation, but also, as the artist himself has claimed, the dark room of my own mind.
Here's a similar example. In 2000, in 2016,
the British artist Cornelia Parker borrowed eight of the surviving examples of Talbot's glassware
from the Bodleian Library and made a series of prints showing them in various configurations.
In her work, the glass objects are made to float in a white space, softened by differential focus and a high-end photogravure process.
By these means, the artist renders them as ghostly survivors from the dawn of photography.
But of course, how fantastic that we have the actual glassware from Talbot's house,
the photograph that Talbot made of that glassware, and now a contemporary artist responding to that, that those same utensils.
The vitrine in which the work by Parker appears also happens to house a wonderful selection of high quality prints by Talbot,
all of them dedicated to the photographing of things. Starting in about 1843, Talbot took to photographing domestic objects in his sunlit courtyard,
where they could be arranged on wood shelves, propped on bricks.
In other words, he arranged these objects so that they could be photographed outside while pretending to be inside.
The resulting images documented examples of his or his family's possessions,
but also tested his photography's capacity to capture different textures and degrees of transparency.
Formally accomplished, these are also among the most conceptually complex of Talbot's pictures.
They all adopt the dead pan, deadpan, taxonomic aesthetic of scientific analysis so common in contemporary art photography
while simultaneously referencing the visual conventions of modern commercial display.
Lady Elizabeth even captioned the one of rows of her own bonnets as 'the milliners window',
proposing that the photograph be taken as a surrogate for a shop window with its buyable goods made
visible from the street by the recent introduction into the British commercial world of plate glass.
And in her eyes then it's a photograph about consumer desire.
In each case, these photographs conjure questions about photography's relationship to truth and artifice,
property and evidence, femininity and masculinity and consumerism and commerce.
In short, they offer themselves as images ripe for further analysis.
Some of our juxtapositions in Bright Sparks are self-evident.
Oh, we just lost another image. Okay, sorry about that.
We'll talk about it instead.
And others, I was going to say a more playful, perhaps not as playful as blanking it out entirely, but there you go.
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,
one of a number of dismembered plaster limbs in Talbot's archive,
plus a reproduction of the photograph by Talbot that we don't otherwise have in our collection.
A reminder that an archive consists of secondary sources as well as primary text.
And finally, if you could but see it, this will be a prompt to go back into the exhibition
and look, a photograph of her daughter by the Australian artist Anne Ferran,
if you remember, the photograph has Ferran's daughter, but with a hand enigmatically across her face,
in effect blinding her, or at least removing her from the photographer's gaze.
The third print shows how later photographers have turned this same subject, the dismembered hand, into an artistic motif,
both mysterious and expressive. Given my own position as Head of History of Art here at Oxford,
it seemed important to acknowledge Talbot's significant contribution to this discipline as well.
In late 1843, Talbot made a calotype negative of a painting his family had acquired during a trip to Italy.
The prints he made from this negative demonstrate how Talbot's process could more or less accurately reproduce
oh gone one too far, could more or less accurately reproduce the details of a work of art at a reduced size.
The photographic reproduction of paintings has, of course, transformed the practice of art history,
allowing images of works of art to be documented, multiplied, diminished in size, disseminated widely, and compared with others.
In time, albums of photographic reproductions of paintings were compiled, and new technologies like X-rays or infrared photography were introduced
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.
And if you look closely at this album, you can see that something has gone from Raphael, to Perugino in their attribution
in the margin there. Now, I could be at this point asking for a show of hands,
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.
And that gives me an excuse to shift from one exhibition to the other.
As discussed by one of my predecessors, Francis Haskell,
the studio of London based photographer Edward Kilburn was commissioned to make a daguerreotype of a painting, then thought to be by Raphael.
The client was the British art dealer, Morris Moore. Moore engaged in a decades long struggle to have this painting, now entitled Apollo
and Marsyas, and attributed to Perugino, accepted as an early work by Raphael.
This daguerreotype, no doubt played a part in that campaign.
Moore displayed it, for example, in Berlin in 1856.
So it's got around. Already then we have shifted the conversation from photography as art or even as an age to art history,
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.
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
that photography introduced into British modern life.
This then, is the theme of our other exhibition, comprising a display of about 165 items in the ST Lee Gallery.
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.
First and foremost, the exhibition offers a survey of the first 50 years of British photography,
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.
It includes not only many early photographs, but also a plethora of prints of various kinds, as well as paintings, portrait busts,
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.
It is, in other words, not your usual photography exhibition.
If there's a primary proposition that motivates the exhibition, it is this.
The history of British photography far exceeds the history of British-made photographs.
Taking advantage once again of a situation in a library
A New Power tells the story of British photography's incorporation into print culture and the world of
publishing, that is into a world being rapidly transformed by mass production and expanding markets.
Of course, the exhibition still has plenty of rare photographs on display.
Consider, for example, this half plate daguerreotype depicting Tyrolese Minstrels taken by Richard Beard Junior in 1851.
It shows these musicians in carefully tinted folkloric costumes and holding musical instruments for Queen Victoria's birthday,
held at Osborne in 1852. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arranged for these same singers to serenade her at breakfast.
Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise, the duchess wrote, as one would, perhaps if it wasn't too early in the morning.
But this daguerreotype is actually very unusual.
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.
That is, it's been varnished in some way that allows you to touch the surface without damaging the daguerreotype plate.
Very unusual object indeed. And it was purchased by the Queen in the same year.
It's one of only two known examples signed R Beard on its surface as you can see down here.
And the other happens to be in the vitrine facing it in the exhibition.
In this exhibition, Beard Junior's daguerreotype is paired with a wood engraved copy of a variant version of the same daguerreotype portrait.
This copy appeared in the pages of the Illustrated London News
in December of 1851. Here then,
is another major narrative the exhibition sets out to recount. The story of the invention of the
photographic image and therefore of the displacement of that image from the photograph itself.
This theme is signalled in our first vitrine to display actual photographs,
the one dedicated to the announcement of photography's invention. Alongside three photogenic
drawings by John Herschel and two full plate daguerreotypes imported from France by John Ruskin
we show the first photographic images to be made available to the eager British public.
These comprise wood engraved facsimiles of photogenic drawings published as cover illustrations for various little English magazines,
each of them dedicated to telling their readers all about the latest advances in science and technology
of which, of course, photography was one.
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,
with the images being carved from photographic, with the images being carved from photographs developed directly on the woodblock itself.
Nearby, we have a steel engraving made after a daguerreotype,
which just happens to be the first photographic image of Africa to be made and distributed.
The source daguerreotype was taken on the 7th of November 1839 of the exterior of Pasha Mehmet Ali's harem
building in Alexandria by the French painter Frederic Goupil-Fesquet and his uncle Horace Vernet
after a two minute exposure. So we know a lot about it because they made copious diary entries about their photography adventures.
Indeed, as Vernet reported the day before in that diary,
we kept daguerreotyping away like lions unquote. They were doing so on commission
from a French optician and publisher named Noel Marie Paymal Lerebours,
who wanted to publish engravings based on daguerreotypes in his 1840 book Excursion Daguerriennes. You could
buy engravings from that publication in Antoine Claudet's glass shop in High Holborn in London in 1841.
And when you did, you might be surprised to find this image for sale. Plate 4, the first ever photographic view of the Thames
taken by a now unknown daguerreotypist. Your appetite for photographic images having been whetted
you would, especially if I can get, ah there we go
But go away. You would no doubt have been attracted by the promise of editor Herbert Ingram.
In 1842, he issued an advertisement that said he would supply you with an unprecedented panoramic view of London based on daguerreotypes.
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,
a moment ago, and now a professional photographer to make the daguerreotypes on which the panorama was to be based.
Claudet set up his camera on a small balcony at the top of the Duke of York's column
then the tallest lookout in London. Over a period of several days, he exposed a sequence of consecutive horizontal daguerreotypes of the city
using a lens camera he'd imported from France, providing a 180 degree view of the city looking both north and south.
These daguerreotypes were then traced over,
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.
I should mention that the choice of wood engraving rather than the cheaper woodcut process as the means of illustration allied The
Illustrated London News with middle class taste and thus with the aesthetic and political interests of Ingram's intended market.
The panorama's subtitle The picture of the Metropolis of the British Empire exemplifies
both the publisher's worldview and the global scope of the newspaper's reporting.
A number of contemporary commentaries on this panorama marvelled at the accuracy of its perspective and its extraordinary delineation of detail.
As one journalist recorded, whoever be the artist he has given an accurate representation of London as it is at the present moment,
and all the steeples, including the scaffolding around the Nelson Monument, are handed down to posterity with wonderful precision.
As you can see here on the right hand side of the detail. So people marvelled at this, if you like, excess of information.
An image based on a photograph gave you more information than an artist would ever bother recording.
If somebody had simply drawn this, they would have idealised this scene
and they certainly wouldn't have bothered to include things like scaffolding, which weren't considered particularly picturesque.
What made something photographic rather than simply, you know, illustrative,
was this excessive amount of detail, this excessive amount of information.
And of course, that excessive information, that photographicness was underlined by the fact that other things, like people playing
down in the park on the lower left, or going up the steps of that building over there
all of that, of course, would have had to have been added by an imaginative engraver,
because none of those kinds of details would have been captured in Claudet's daguerreotype. From the beginning then
the photographic image involves a visual reconciliation of mechanical truth and creative embellishment.
So what did this panorama have to say to its audience about the nature of photography?
Remembering that for many people, this could have been one of their first encounters with a photographic image.
It demonstrated that the photographic image could be a kind of abstraction, allowing an impossibly extended vision,
a vision acquired as if in motion through the continual turning of one's head
beyond the normal optical capacity of either a human viewer or any single camera.
By means of this abstraction and by using the latest industrial technology along with complex modes of production
married to manual craftsmanship of the first order,
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.
The Illustrated London News managed to turn London into a portable visual spectacle,
and because the spectacle was coded as a photographic one, it could be at once plausible and impossible.
I think again, when you go into the exhibition
one of the amazing things, I think, ok this was meant to be taken out of the newspaper and pinned up on your wall.
It's an amazing survivor. It's just newsprint and it looks as fresh as if it was printed yesterday.
But this abstraction, as I'm calling it,
also signalled a new place for photography as but one component of a continuous multimedia flow of topical news and images.
In this transference from unique daguerreotype to a multitude of ink replicas,
we surely see photography hovering between an artisanal past and its imminent future as a virtual image form.
Indeed, the introduction of engravings after daguerreotypes as disseminated in the illustrated press meant that photographic images were
themselves now itinerant entities being potentially distributed all over the world and capable of being experienced simultaneously in,
say, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta, New York and London.
A daguerreotype of a comfortably plump Englishman
shown seated while casually holding a copy of the Illustrated London News in one hand, is, in effect,
an occupational portrait of a typical middle class British citizen of the mid-19th century.
The newspaper signifies his literacy, his class and a certain implied imperial worldview.
In this context, the sharing of printed images gathered from all over the world allowed the British Empire to maintain a
sense of its own coherence as an apparently benign and yet all seeing, all powerful colonial enterprise.
Given the extra costs involved in the transfer from daguerreotype to engraving,
we have to assume that the caption from a photograph or from a daguerreotype was considered worth it,
giving any particular multiplied image a kind of rhetorical authority it might not otherwise have attained.
We're looking here at lords and ladies dressed in fancy costumes for a charity ball.
So each of them is dressed as a, as a former English monarch.
So it's Anne Boleyn, for example, on the far left and so on and so forth.
Imagine if in our histories we had all of these daguerreotypes still with us, what that would look like.
The exhibition does its best to demonstrate the various examples of this dissemination of photographic images and to
show how this process of image transfer crossed a number of different media boundaries as well as national borders.
Of course, this new power came at a cost.
The destruction of thousands, possibly thousands of thousands of daguerreotypes in the process of their being
traced over and copied into these other media. Daguerreotypes and metal plates
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
in the process you basically destroy the daguerreotype. Every reproduction image I show you here, we have no daguerreotypes.
So we have to assume, that is they haven't survived, we have to assume they were destroyed in the process of their reproduction.
So to put this in an aphorism, the photograph had to die if its reproduction was to be given life.
Our exhibition is therefore largely comprised of a graveyard of dead photographs.
And the history of British photography that it provides is no less than a ghost story.
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.
The Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, died two months after the Great Exhibition opened.
Fittingly, his obituary in the Illustrated London News was accompanied by a wood engraved portrait based on a daguerreotype,
but contrary to its own caption, it used an 1848 daguerreotype made by an American photographer, Charles Meade, as its source.
So here we have an English wood engraving of a French photographer based on an American daguerreotype appearing
in multiple copies of an illustrated newspaper that could be read simultaneously throughout the British Empire.
As as I've often said to my own students, you don't need to look offshore for signs of globalism.
It's right here in front of us reproduced as a single piece of photographic ephemera.
Among all its other narratives,
A New Power is an invitation to imagine what our histories of photography might look like if all of these erased daguerreotypes had,
in fact, survived to the present.
Not only would our histories include numerous photographs of lords and ladies dressed in fancy costumes while pretending to be ancient monarchs
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,
of frogs shaving and a courting, and of a still life from the Great Exhibition that demonstrates exactly what happened
when Talbot's deadpan visual taxonomy met the seductive world of modern commerce.
We are reminded
why all these photographs are no longer with us, by a daguerreotype plate in the exhibition that has been deliberately damaged by its owner.
Francois Arago, in a report to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris on the 3rd of July 1839,
had warned that touching the surface of a daguerreotype was, as he put it, like brushing the wings of a butterfly.
This is demonstrated in this 1852 group portrait of Queen Victoria and her family. As Victoria recorded in her journal,
went back to the, I can't really do Victoria so just go with it, went back to the gardens where
a daguerreotype by Mr. Kilburn was taken of me and five of the children.
The day was splendid for it. Mine was unfortunately horrid, but the children were pretty.
Apparently Victoria had been captured with her eyes closed.
Horrid indeed. She therefore scratched out her face on the plate in a blizzard of annoyance, leaving herself decapitated
but the children unblemished and strangely, I think,
unmoved. The sight of the wounded raw metal of Victoria's daguerreotype is a reminder
of the context in which any photograph was made in mid-19th century Britain.
We have tried to sketch that context in our opening vitrine with its conflation of images representing an industrialised English landscape,
according to then-princess Victoria, The country continues black, engines, engines, flaming coals in abundance everywhere,
smoking and burning coal heaps intermingle with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.
So we have this idyllic view of the English landscape of the 19th century
but Victoria suddenly reminds us actually this is what was going on in that landscape in 1832 when she wrote that diary entry.
But then we also have images of some factory architecture which apparently recedes as if to infinity,
a lump of silver ore imported from South America, a plate manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood,
the demonstration of the scientific innovations, computing engines that promise precision engineered automation and romantic efforts,
as in the John Constable painting, to reconcile fleeting time and static space.
The ramifications of that context, let's call it industrial capitalism as a convenient shorthand, are also evident elsewhere in the exhibition.
Consider, for example, this remarkable daguerreotype by the Kilburn studio.
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.
Calling for political reform the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order.
Fears were so great the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family was moved whole,
the whole family was moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for their own protection.
In the event, the Isle of Wight, in the event the rally passed peacefully and Prince Albert himself purchased this record of it.
One of perhaps eight that were made by Kilburn that day, something mentioned by the Royal Collection Conservators,
because actually there are numbers seven and eight on the back of the two plates that they own,
which suggests that at least that that many were made by Kilburn on the day.
The striking aspect of this daguerreotype, especially if you've had a chance to look at the digital media in the gallery,
where you can really blow it up at high scale, a striking aspect of this daguerreotype are the factories and chimneys
it shows lining the edge of Kennington Common, a reminder of the growth of new industrial buildings in London,
where many of these protesting people must have worked. Note also that the daguerreotype plate has been solarised.
In other words, it's been overexposed to light, creating a chemical reaction that results in this artificial blue colour in the sky.
Yet another instance of photography merging the true and the false in a single image.
By the way, another of these Kilburn daguerreotypes was sacrificed to the altar of reproduceability
while being turned into a wood engraving to grace the pages of the Illustrated London News.
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,
a reminder that almost all daguerreotypes are in fact mirror images of what they see and therefore show us a reversed view.
Individual members of the working classes rarely make an appearance in accounts of early British photography,
in part because very few photographs of such people have survived.
A shift in focus to the history of the photographic image has allowed us to remedy this omission in A New Power.
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.
I'll be speaking in more detail about this publishing project in tomorrow's symposium.
Suffice it to say that numerous engraved portraits of members of the working class are featured in Mayhew's multi-volume publication,
all of them based on daguerreotypes taken in the Beard studio. Mayhew's text
provided a richly ethnological and sometimes racist commentary on London's poor
based on interviews, a mountain of statistics and social analysis.
All this was given added force by the addition of wood engravings based on photographs.
Mayhew's interviews were transcribed and published in vernacular English, an effort to allow the working class to speak for itself.
A notable feature of our exhibition is that you can listen on your phone to actors performing a selection of those interviews.
I haven't noticed too many people doing it, so if you haven't tried it, I would encourage you to do so
it's kind of amazing to hear the voice of these people from so long ago speaking directly to you through the phone.
If nothing else,
then the inclusion of these images after daguerreotypes in A New Power reveals the considerable ethnic diversity of mid-century London.
Indeed, the exhibition's unusual curatorial orientation allows it to make class and ethnic differences a visible aspect of the history it relates.
But the exhibition also tries to acknowledge the role played by women in photography's development.
It opens with two plaster busts by Francis Chantrey, the premier English portrait sculptor of his time.
A reminder once again, of class, of the class of those people who are in a position to dabble with photographic chemistry in
the 1830s and who could obviously afford a portrait bust by this premier artist.
The Scottish natural philosopher Mary Somerville had her experiments with silver chloride published in the mid 1830s,
while Elizabeth Fulhame experimented with the practical application of light sensitive silver from at least 1780 on.
We also feature on the left the bust of a mysterious Miss Mundy, one of Talbot's sisters in law. In December 1834.
One of those sisters in law, Laura Mundy,
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.
The little, little drawing, she writes, I think, quite lovely,
that and the verse is particularly excite my admiration. I had no idea that the art could be carried to such perfection.
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.
Her comment is a reminder that Talbot was fixing his photogenic drawings with common table salt,
which delayed but did not prevent further development.
In other words they remained light sensitive, and this is why we can't show them in either of our exhibitions this year.
So British women contributed to the scientific knowledge that eventually made photography possible.
But they were also important patrons of this new technology.
The earliest dated daguerreotype portrait to be made in London features the face of the Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth.
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.
As Maria Edgeworth says in a letter also included in the exhibition
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.
It was, in other words, at this stage, you know, a luxury item.
A luxury, but also, of course, a mixed blessing. As Edgeworth herself says,
repeating a sentiment said by almost every subsequent recipient of a photographic portrait,
Quote, I feel you will not like any of my daguerreotype faces
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.
You can see its entirety Photographic Phenomena or the New School of Portrait Painting, as it's called.
And it tells us an awful lot about the nature of the studios.
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
in order to capture as much light as possible. He's using a stick wrapped in velvet in order to do that.
Behind him, we can see the lab with its burning flame, where they would have prepared the various chemistry and prepared the plate.
We see an operator on his little steps, step stoool, called an operator because photography was considered to be so painful
a procedure to be subjected to, that it was the equivalent of surgery
so early photographers were called operators. You see two customers waiting their turn,
looking rapturously up at the photographer. You see the man they photographed sitting in a kind of elevated throne
You might notice some little ball bearing wheels so that it can be moved through the studio.
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.
And then, of course, we have of course two happy customers who have bought their daguerreotypes and are now looking at them under magnification.
But perhaps the most interesting details are the ones up near the ceiling.
For a start, we see that ceiling. One of the things that Edgeworth tells us is everything's mysteriously cast in a blue light.
And that's because they'd actually replaced the ceiling with blue glass, because in the early 19th,
when photography was first invented, it was mistakenly believed that blue light was the optimal light under which to be photographed.
So early studios were painted an eggshell blue colour, and all of the glass was tinted blue.
So that you got this blue light. So you can see if you go up the stairs as she says everyone's wearing black
mysteriously whispering and then you come into the studio and you're in this weird blue space.
It must have been totally strange it can't really be conveyed by the sketch.
The other interesting thing, of course, are the cameras themselves, which are on a track, as you can see,
to be moved through the studio during the day because they have to follow the movement of the sun through the sky.
So as the sun moves, they can, you know, push the cameras along the track and move the cameras as well.
And you'll notice that the cameras are kind of strange. They're just this box without a lens.
This was actually an American invention called the Wolcott Reflecting Apparatus.
And Beard, who was a coal merchant, bought the patent rights to the French daguerreotype process for England,
and then he bought the English patent rights also for this Wolcott Reflecting Apparatus.
And what it basically consists of is a box, as you can see, with a sort of, you know, a front on a hinge.
And you can see the portraits being made with this camera with the hinged element up.
So what's happening? If I'm taking Richard's portrait, he's trapped in the daguerreotrap as we speak.
I lift the flap, I make the exposure. The light bounces off his face, this blue light,
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,
which is actually facing away from him. So the light is then gathered onto that plate and hey presto, you have a daguerreotype portrait.
So this is how the earliest daguerreotypes in the exhibition, including the one of Maria Edgeworth,
were actually made, all captured in this wonderful little cartoon.
But ah, technology
I love it. The exhibition does its best to present a chronologically coherent history of British daguerreotypes,
starting with the one by Edgeworth that you've just seen and similar products of the Beard franchise.
And then by way of comparison, a selection of early examples made in the studio of Antoine Claudet.
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.
Disputing who had exclusive rights to the commercial use of the daguerreotype process
Beard and Claudet took out several legal actions against each other.
This resulted in much antagonism between them.
In a letter to Talbot, dated 19th of January 1843, Claudet refers to Beard as, quote, his competitor and fierce enemy, unquote.
Following one court battle during which Claudet first lost his case and then won on appeal
an interesting paragraph subsequently appeared in the Literary Gazette of July of 1841.
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.
And then the other, a group portrait.
And I quote When freedom from restraint and sparkling champagne were calling forth expressions of congratulations and joy
very spirited, and were it not for the hue, lifelike.
The figures in the latter are numerous one standing in the very act of pouring out the exhilarating modern nectar.
So you have to imagine this group daguerreotype of this people acting joy and literally pouring champagne out,
you know, for the camera, all caught in a daguerreotype.
Sadly, neither of these extraordinary daguerreotypes survived the fire that broke out in Claudet's studio, shortly after he died in 1867.
So as with much of this history, we have these written descriptions of these amazing images, but we don't have the images themselves.
In our display, we also feature a representative sample of hand-coloured daguerreotypes,
a treatment that the Beard Studio introduced in 1842, took out a patent but never defended it
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
quite small, about the size of the palm of my hand. But as you can see, beautifully painted with a cloudy blue sky,
which had become the sort of standard English background when you did paint your daguerreotype.
I was wondering whether any of you have checked out the website called My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, where early photography meets extreme hotness?
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.
As we've heard, many important daguerreotypes have not survive to the present.
However, one that has is the portrait of opera singer Jenny Lind, the so-called Swedish Nightingale,
perhaps the prominent musical celebrity of her time, taken by the Edward Kilburn studio in 1848.
It won a prize at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as the best daguerreotype on display
and it's amazing for me, anyway, that we actually have that in our vitrine devoted to the Great Exhibition.
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,
and I quote, that the reflection in the glass is equally perfect with the original
is the point worthy of remark and commendation
unquote. A report in the Illustrated London News in that same year, 1851, also mentioned this daguerreotype as quote,
a masterpiece of this art not excelled if equal by any other specimens exhibited throughout the entire building.
unquote. Even now it shows you the best but daguerreotype were capable of.
But we've been talking a lot about daguerreotypes and daguerreotype culture,
how is Talbot placed in this extended story about the first 50 years of British photography?
Unusually, A New Power has tried to give Talbot what I would consider an appropriately proportionate role in the history that it tells.
As we've heard, his invention, the photogenic drawing,
is noted and a number of representative salt prints and colour types are, of course, on display.
But the reality is that paper based photography was not a prominent part of public culture in Britain before 1851,
the year in which Talbot was at last persuaded to loosen his patent rights.
A comparison between the daguerreotype portraits we've just seen and this one by Talbot of his mother,
Lady Elisabeth Feilding, perhaps indicates why. The fact that the court,
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,
resulting in a relatively diffuse likeness. This didn't prevent Talbot from doing his best to promote his process when he could.
In 1846, the editor of the art journal Art Union asked Talbot to supply approximately 7000 salt prints to
accompany a story about the calotype process that was to appear in the June issue of that year.
These prints were made at the Reading Establishment, a printing business run by Talbot's former Dutch valet Nicolaas Henneman
not so far from here. Henneman used as many as 70 available negatives to make these prints.
Unfortunately for both Talbot and Henneman and his small team, the Art Union project proved to be a promotional and financial disaster,
with most of the photographs made in a rush fading soon after publication.
In other words, the three examples that are shown in A New Power, already unusual that we're showing three rather than just one,
are all bad photographs. The kinds of photographs most books and art museums are somewhat reluctant to showcase.
But this poor quality is precisely what makes them such crucial staging points for the future of the photographic image.
Embarrassed by his public failure in the Art Union,
Talbot made virtually no more photographs between 1846 and his death in 1877, a period of almost 30 years.
Instead, he spent much of this time trying to solve the problem of the fatal unreliability
of the calotype process by inventing a form of photo mechanical engraving.
And this is the thread of his story that we pick up in one of the vitrines in Bright Sparks.
We are fortunate that the Talbot archive at the Bodleian Libraries includes an excellent
sample of Talbot's experiments with various forms of photomechanical engraving
that has allowed us to show examples of his own work alongside a print of a photograph
by Roger Fenton made using a rival process, a print that Talbot himself collected.
He's a very interesting guy. He's busy experimenting with his own process
but then he collects, I think, superior examples by other processes in order to find ways to improve his own.
We've also included some later photo reviewers that were published in Camera Work in the United States,
often considered the finest of all photography magazines,
including one that reproduces a calotype derived image from the studio of Hill and Adamson in Edinburgh.
As you will have gathered, this kind of global exchange is a leitmotif of both of our exhibitions.
In October 1852, Talbot filed a patent for his photographic engraving process in which he was able to transfer photographic images onto
steel plates and soon improved it further by using sheets of muslin as a screen through which to pixelate his images.
In April 1858, after perfecting a way to introduce an aquatint ground to the process,
Talbot introduced an enhanced system of photogravure, which he called photographic engraving.
One of the interesting things about Talbot was that he was never satisfied with his own inventions
and he continued to experiment with improvements to photo engraving right up until his death.
As his son wrote in a posthumous appendix to Gaston Tissandier's 1878 book, A History and Handbook of Photography,
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,
as in the case of the calotype,
it will be brought to greater perfection in the hands of others than it, than it attained in those of its inventor.
19th century sentences are very hard to read out
actually, try it sometime, a greater perfection in the hands of others than it attained in of its inventor.
And so it proved to be. Having invented negative positive photography,
the system of representation that dominated the second half of the 19th century,
Talbot laid the foundations for a viable system of photomechanical reproduction, a process which would similarly dominate the 20th century.
It is Talbot, then, who helps to make possible the photo books featured in another of the vitrines in Bright Sparks. Not only,
not only by helping to invent the genre itself through his publications in the 1840s,
but also by advancing the technology that allows the production of photomechanical illustrations of any kind.
Most importantly, Talbot made it possible for us to now disseminate his own work in a new book published in conjunction with these exhibitions.
I'm sure you'll all want to buy a copy, if only to admire the marvels of contemporary photomechanical reproduction that it demonstrates.
And of course, to make your own little tribute to Talbot's incredible legacy.
My talk today has tried to identify what is distinctive about the historical understanding
of British photography presented in the New Power and Bright Sparks exhibitions.
Bringing the interests of the Library to this understanding
we have seen what photography looks like when the photographic image is acknowledged as part of this medium's identity.
Reproduction and dissemination become key issues and the trafficking in photographic images, images that
have been transferred from daguerreotype plates to engravings on paper, is the primary story to be told.
The telling of that story must necessarily address itself to the development of
industrial capitalism and the maintenance of the ideology of the British Empire
for this is the context in which it occurs. The extraordinary contributions of inventors like William Henry Fox Talbot should, of course
and indeed, yes, of course, be acknowledged. But even more important is the anonymous and yet inexorable logic of commerce that
immediately absorbs this new phenomenon and makes it part of everyday modern life.
Central to that absorption is the promise, more rhetorical than actual,
that images derived from photographs are more authentic, more trustworthy, more accurate than other kinds of pictures.
That myth haunts us still, making these exhibitions as much about the present as the past.
For all these reasons, I hope you will now revisit the two exhibitions and look at them again,
perhaps seeing them anew and coming up with your own stories about the central role played by photography in our modern times.
Thank you for listening.