The Forms of Nameless Things: Experimental Photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot

Batchen, Geoffrey

ISBN 10: 1851245936 / ISBN 13: 9781851245932

Published by Bodleian Library Publishing, Oxford, 2022

About this Item

Quarto. Hardcover. Illustrated boards. No jacket, as issued. 79 pages : illustrations (chiefly colour) ; 27 cm. William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor of photography, created around 15,000 photographs in the nineteenth century, most of them attempts to produce compelling scientific documents or pictorial records of the world around him. However, among those that have survived are also prints in which an image has been obscured, obliterated or simply failed to register. Borrowing its intriguing title from a poem written by Talbot, this book features twenty-four of these prints, his most experimental photographs. Originally intended as test prints or creative exercises, all that remains on these shaped pieces of photographic paper are chemical stains or imprinted patterns or shapes. Offered to the reader as enigmatic physical artefacts, these failed or ruined photographs are here reanimated as objects of beauty, mystery and promise, as artworks that speak of photography's most fundamental attributes and potentials.An accompanying essay illustrated with comparative images places these photographs in a broad historical context leading up to the present, revealing what relevance Talbot's experiments have to contemporary concepts of the art of photography. -- publisher's statement.

Seller Inventory # 209614

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Forms of Nameless Things: Experimental Photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot
• Publisher: Bodleian Library Publishing, Oxford
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1851245936
• ISBN 13: 9781851245932
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: VG. Light shelfwear/bumping.
• Seller catalogs:
  • Photography

About this title

Synopsis

William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor of photography, created around 15,000 photographs in the nineteenth century, most of them attempts to produce compelling scientific documents or pictorial records of the world around him. However, among those that have survived are also prints in which an image has been obscured, obliterated or simply failed to register. Borrowing its intriguing title from a poem written by Talbot, this book features twenty-four of these prints, his most experimental photographs. Originally intended as test prints or creative exercises, all that remains on these shaped pieces of photographic paper are chemical stains or imprinted patterns or shapes. Offered to the reader as enigmatic physical artefacts, these failed or ruined photographs are here reanimated as objects of beauty, mystery and promise, as artworks that speak of photography’s most fundamental attributes and potentials.

An accompanying essay illustrated with comparative images places these photographs in a broad historical context leading up to the present, revealing what relevance Talbot’s experiments have to contemporary concepts of the art of photography.

About the Author

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford.