The Woodcutters

In his illustrated treatise on photography, The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), William Henry Fox Talbot commented that

“one advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature. Contenting himself with a general effect, he would probably deem it beneath his genius to copy every accident of light and shade. . . . Nevertheless . . . these minutiæ . . . will sometimes be found to give an air of variety beyond expectation to the scene represented.”

This image features Talbot’s former assistant, Nicolaas Henneman, and another man posed in a re-creation of a typical scene on a country estate. Henneman had become the proprietor of the first photographic printing firm, the Reading Establishment, which oversaw the publication of The Pencil of Nature in 1844. This photograph gathers its “truth and reality” not only from their actions but also from the “multitude of minute details” and “accident[s] of light and shade.” In fact, however, the men are not captured in motion, but are carefully holding still for the duration of the exposure. Additionally, one accident of shade was eliminated. In the original negative, the gathering late afternoon shadow of Lacock Abbey presses strongly into the foreground area. After printing the negative in this state, Talbot must have decided that the shadow dominated the scene more than he wished, so he trimmed off the lower part of the negative, leading to this composition. A modern photographer would have done this cropping in the darkroom or on the computer, and with a print, not permanently with the negative. Talbot’s approach with the scissors was confidently final; only the survival of the earlier print (National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, UK) reveals what the negative once was.

Adapted from Larry Schaaf, William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 90. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.