In 1724 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered light sensitive silver salts and then the concept of capturing images was considered. In the 1790s Thomas Wedgewood began experimenting with sensitizing paper or leather with silver nitrate. In the late 1820s Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the first permanent image on ground glass and metal plates. He called the technique Heliographs.
Jacques Mande Daguerre, a painter, found the chemistry of creating a permanent image fascinating and began experimenting. His creation, called Daguerretype, was a one off image on polished silver-plated copper, and in January 1839, was shown to the French Academy of Sciences. It became a phenomenal success; the French government took over the rights to it and made it available for free. Daguerre had to go to court and won a lifetime payment.
Discovered by the Germans and the English, during the Belle Epoque, Bellagio became an international resort, famous for its neo-classical beauty. Fox-Talbot sketched Lake Como from Bellagio using light to define form, keenly looking outside the contours, all the while coveting a fix on the lake. Sketching by the Villa Melzi triggered his notion to capture the scene in what was to become photography.
In neoclassic style, Villa Melzi was planned in 1808 by G, Albertolli. The house has square plan and finishes with a dome (cupola); on sides it has a Doric peri style. The marble door come from the ancient Villa Melzi in Milan, demolished in XVIII century. In the inside, besides roman rest, there are eighteenth century’s sphinxs and the statue of dea Sekhnet (XI cent.) presented by Napoleon to Melzi; there are also Etruscan and Greek rests, a drawing of Van Dick, a mural of Rubens and a landscape with seventeenth century figures of J. Van Ruysdael.[i]
Three weeks later, William Fox Talbot presented his 'art of photogenic drawing' to the Royal Society. His process based the prints on paper that had been made light sensitive, rather than bitumen or copper-paper. He manufactured materials and the apparatus as a kit, for people to take photographs. By 1841, the system had evolved to the Calotype which he patented. He prosecuted anyone making Calotypes who had not paid him. When a new process producing negatives on glass coated with light-sensitive collodion was made public, Talbot went to court claiming his patent was infringed, but lost and photography became free.
Fox-Talbot compared photography to "the pencil of the nature", the title of his book of 24 calotypes (1844). Edward Lucie Smith argues that Fox Talbot ‘thought of photography as a kind of collaboration with nature, a means whereby natural forces could be allowed to speak for themselves, instead of having to filter their message through the individual temperament’ (E. Lucie Smith, The invented eye, 1975). Geoffrey Batchen suggests that Talbot thought that "the primary subject of photography was time itself." [ii]
Photographic memory
The Kodak is a photographic notebook. Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees. Such a photographic notebook is an enduring record of many things seen only once in a lifetime and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.”
George Eastman [iii]
Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory...but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.
Roland Barthes [iv]
[Photography is] not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement. Susan Sontag [v]
Freehand sketching, for example, is a mostly nonalgorithmic process: every freely made mark that the artist chooses to execute is the realization of an intention, and the result is usually something that has a strongly personal character. Prestige attaches to skillful and accurate work of this kind: not everybody can do it. But when an artist traces a form with the assistance of a stencil or physiognotrace, or a scene with the aid of a camera obscura (as Fox Talbot did on the shores of Lake Como), the process has a much more algorithmic character: there is little prestige to be had through accuracy.
William J. Mitchell [vi]
In his famous "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) Walter Benjamin argues that art worked only when its aura was available to critical contemplation, but that media technologies such as film and photography, destroy art's "aura", while making available radical new access in mass culture, spectators become participant producers.
I brought a book with me on Fox Talbot
wanting to finish a poem on his sketching trip
to Bellagio and our stay there fixing time
and the view I was conceived in, all
in my script, but the present catches up
the sun moves 15 degrees of arc an hour.
Minor White would wait all day for the light
to be just right, Weston would move on to
the next snail, nude, or pepper.
I just run and hold her hand out
to catch the coloured leaves
being torn from exotic trees.
from Bundanon
Ekphrasis, Lake Como
Fox Talbot sketching this inspirational
shoreline, walking to the edge
where Pliny the Younger lived
facing my conception
and the circularities of light,
flashing snow on the Alps
explaining to the virginal girl on the desk
in sign language why I wanted to view
the honeymoon suite of the Grand Hotel Tremestre
the morning after perspective
that north Italian light gilding my mother,
a young woman, sleeping heavily.
[i] Website URL lost, no longer online.
[ii] Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997, p93.
[iii] Quoted by Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, Saunders Books, 1982.
[iv] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, p91.
[v] Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
[vi] William J. Mitchell, ‘Chapter 3: Intention and Artifice’, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge 1994.