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View at the museum ↗Lace
William Henry Fox Talbot1844/45
- Attribution
- William Henry Fox Talbot English, 1800–1877
- Medium
- Salted paper print
- Physical dimensions
- Image: 18.6 × 22.8 cm (7 3/8 × 9 in.); Paper: 18.6 × 22.5 cm (7 3/8 × 8 7/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Everett Kovler
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public domain
View the museum record ↗From the museum
William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, was a polymath who felt as comfortable writing Greek verse as he did experimenting with botany and chemistry. His negative/positive process—and the reproductive possibilities it engendered—came to dominate photography until the digital age. Talbot held artistic aspirations, but he was also interested in the myriad scientific and commercial applications for photography. He hoped that his photographs of lace, for example, might make it easier to copy intricate patterns and thus facilitate manufacturing. The negative for this print was likely made by laying a fragment of lace upon a piece of photosensitized paper and exposing it to the sun, without the aid of a camera.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0