William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)
Noteworthy for the early appearance of a photographic print in a periodical, a Talbotype, or “sun picture,” commonly known as a calotype. William Henry Fox Talbot, began experimenting with capturing images on light-sensitive paper around 1834, and patented the calotype, also called a Talbotype, in 1840. It was the first instance of a photograph secured on paper and produced with paper negatives, which allowed for multiple copies of the same image to be made, as opposed to the daguerreotype invented by L.J.M. Daguerre in 1839. In 1845 Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs, and the appearance of a Talbotype in The Art-Union is likely in response to the reaction to the book.
An improvement upon Henry Fox Talbot’s process of photogenic drawing, the calotype was the first negative photographic process. It was evolved in 1840 after experiments over several years, and patented in 1841. The calotype negative was suited (whereas the daguerreotype was not) to making salted paper prints for large-scale reproduction in publications, such as Art Union or Fox Talbot’s own works The Pencil of Nature and Sun Pictures in Scotland. The article speculates that “the date of the announcement of Daguerre’s discovery (January 1839), being five years after the commencement of the labors of Mr. Talbot, makes it sufficiently clear that, had Daguerre’s researches been unsuccessful, the discovery of this other branch of photography had still been secured to the world by those of Mr. Talbot – since the inventions are altogether independent of each other.
Information courtesy of Skinner Inc. & PBA Galleries