If you know even just a smattering of photographic history, you’ll be aware of William Henry Fox Talbot. Generally regarded as the inventor of photography – in British history at least – Fox Talbot was an interesting character. In this new book, compiled from extensive archive material held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, we learn that rather than it being a single act in a moment, photography was in fact a medium that Fox Talbot continued to reinvent throughout his life.
The new book, Inventing Photography, takes a look at Talbot’s work, organising it by themes, rather than chronologically, to get a more holistic overview of his motivations – including the competing Daguerreotype process that came out of France at the same time.
To get a better insight into Fox Talbot’s life and work that went into the book, I asked the author, Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, to explain more.
AP: This is not your first book about Talbot – what about him do you find so interesting?
GB: William Henry Fox Talbot is England’s claimant to the invention of photography and he produced about 15,000 photographs during his career, inaugurating many of the photographic genres that
