William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was born on February 11, 1800 into an aristocratic family. He was an inventor and was a pioneer of photography. He attended Trinity College and Cambridge. Talbot became interested in photography because he was not a very good drawer. He had his hands in many different studies, so his flitting from subject to subject cost him the glory of discovering a perfected version of photography. Although he had lost the race, he still went on to invent his own version of photography called the calotype process and became known as the father of photography in England. This process involves the use of negatives and positives, which is the basis for what was used up until the digital age. The technology he used for the calotypes already existed in pieces, he just put it all together. His first pictures faded due to lack of a fixing method, but after visiting Sir John FW Herschel, he learned of a solvent that would stop the fading. Calotypes were much less popular than Daguerreotypes because calotypes were "fuzzy" and Talbot discouraged public adoption when he aggressively sued anyone who tried to use his method. Talbot went on to start his own business with Nicholaas Hennenan creating photo albums for people. He also created several books with pictures. The most famous was Pencil of Nature. Talbot also did a lot of traveling. He died on August 17, 1877.







Metropolitan Museum of Art
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