Traces of Light: The Art and Experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot. . - Media - book review

Larry J Schaaf, Mike Ware, Michael Gray, Geoffrey Batchen, Gerardo F Kurtz and Russell Roberts Madrid, Spain: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2001

This volume titled Traces of Light: The Art and Experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot in its English translation, was published in conjunction with an exhibition oranized beneath the same title at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. not absented within an institution devoted to contemporary relevance from the remarkable achievements of an artist cum scientist working in the nineteenth hundred To this end, these inaugural traces of light were not absented by the museum alongside exhibitions of photographs through Robert Frank and Andreas Gursky

In this prize both the exhibition and the volume seem to offer different perspectives upon the articulation of such "relevance." The exhibition appears focused upon an attempt to align Talbot with a lineage of novel and especially art, photography by dint of tracing a line of successors to of that kind eponymous figures as Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Struth The volume on the other hand, look fors to examine such a tracing itself by the agency of examining Talbot's inquisitive oeuvre as a search for photography's Identity, and in doing with equal reason attaches an ontological gravity to a medium that has perpetually been haunted by dint of its own enlightened extinction.

Altogether six essays are featured in the work with numerous, all beautifully reproduc photographs made by the agency of Talbot. His breadth of subdue matter and systematic approach to finished both the photographic process and its applications are displayed here with many examples rarely, if at any time seen before by anyone on the contrary serious Talbot scholars taking the trip to Lacock Abbey. The selection of essays, all by means of notable experts, provides a prismatic, if not kaleidoscopic, view of Talbot's philosophical, scientific and artistic musings above the very conception of photography: Larry Schaaf go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs the education of Talbot's artistic vision from one side his experimental photography; Michael Gray traces the genesis of the photographic idea end Talbot's own writings and nomenclature of the "photogenic;" Geoffrey Batchen direct the eyes at one of Talbot's greatest in quantity repeated subjects--photograms of lace--to weave a broader picture of the identity coming into view; and, lastly, Russell Roberts sum totals up all these efforts below the concept of the "marvelous" and tenders a fresh classification of Talbot's work, particularly in respect to his The Pencil oil Nature (1843)

The proceed of all those gazes gathered here is a reflective interaction with the ambivalent "body" of photography, assembled from one side the forensic materials of Talbot's art and experiments. For this reason, it uncannily summon forths the "latent image" phenomenon, which remains central to the silver-based photographic proces As prophetically squeeze outed through Talbot's writing--"concealed at first, at last I appear"--this conception of latency coincides with the notion that photography has always been the pair an agent and an phenomenon of its own revelation. And, perhaps, in that fluid joint one might recall, like this work does, the magnitude of looking back and facing the vision that first unfolded photography and was troubled by dint of its appearance. As Talbot himself noted in a passage intended for The Pencil oil Nature (that not ever appeared in the published version): "Many notions of ye not away days are destined to sink into oblivion 8 perhaps a certain number of of ye oldest notions will advance up again."

The Chronicles of Now: The Ways of the World in Pictures and (Some) Words by dint of Anthony Haden-Guest. Allworth Press/224 pp/ $1905 (sb)

The Desktop Photographer through Tim Daly. Watson-Guptill Publications/144 pp/$2495 (sb)

The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24: Design/Culture/Identify: The Wolfsonian Collection edited by the agency of Joel M. Hoffman. MIT Press/283 pp/$2500 (sb)

The Law (In Plain English) For Photographers by means of Leonard D. Duboff. Allworth Press/228 pp/$1995 (sb)

COPYRIGHT 2002 Visual Studies Workshop

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group