This site contains the full text of William Henry Fox Talbot’s writings contained in The Pencil of Nature published in London between 1844 and 1846. The purpose of this site is to make Talbot’s fascinating initial thoughts on photography more widely accessible to serious students of photography.
Footnotes and end-notes do not exist in the original. The “sliding notes” are a work in progress, and it is hoped that they will prove to be valuable to readers. Reader submissions are welcomed. To submit your information or link for consideration, click here.
Questions and comments may be submitted here.
A few facts about The Pencil of Nature:
- The Pencil of Nature was published in London between 1844 and 1846 in six separate fasicles.»
- Printing technology at that time» was unable to reproduce photos in ink, so the published documents contained actual photographic prints.
- Talbot planned 50 plates for publication, but he only was able to produce 24.
For more information on Talbot or The Pencil of Nature, see the following links:
- Lacock Abbey, Fox Talbot Museum and Village
- The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot
- Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department, Book of the Month, February 2007, The Pencil of Nature
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, W.H.F. Talbot and the Invention of Photography
- BBC Biography of W.H.F. Talbot
Related:
from Latin facisculus, which means little bundle
Later, in 1852, Talbot predicted that photographic tones could be reproduced by using screens, but it took another 50 years before newspapers could effectively print the dot patterns which we take for granted today.