[Articles of Glass on Three Shelves]

In his 1844-46 treatise on photography, The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot observed that “the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso” might be photographed, “the more strange and fantastic the forms . . . , the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions. . . . However numerous the objects—however complicated the arrangement—the Camera depicts them all at once.”

Outside Lacock Abbey, temporary shelves, draped in black velvet, supported arrangements of objects relocated from indoors, not unlike a traditional museum exhibit. Talbot created at least two variations on this theme. This image and Articles of China were published in The Pencil of Nature. The Milliner’s Window shows a display of caps and bonnets on the same shelves.

The complicated surfaces of the cut glass items in this work create a strong visual tension with the purity and transparency of the interiors. Light is reflected and refracted simultaneously, yielding a lively complexity unknown in most photographic subjects. Somewhere hidden in those reflections—tantalizingly just beyond our perception—are multiple images of Talbot himself. This print identifies another maker in a clearer way, however. At some point when the print was vulnerable, someone’s palm rested on the surface. The skin many have transferred a chemical or simply left behind bodily oils that repelled later chemistry, but the imprint of the palm testifies to the tricky process of making each sensitive print by hand. Perhaps someday we will have the forensic tools to determine whose palm this was.

Larry Schaaf, William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 78. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.