[Lace]

William Henry Fox Talbot wrote in Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing (1839) that “to give an idea of the degree of accuracy with which some objects can be imitated by this process, I need only mention one instance. Upon one occasion, having made an image of a piece of lace of an elaborate patter, I showed it to some persons at the distances of a few feet, with the enquiry: Whether it was a good representation? When the reply was: “that they were not so easily deceived, for that it was evidently no picture, but the piece of lace itself.”

This image is the same as the one Talbot used for the twentieth plate of his 1844-46 illustrated treatise on photography, The Pencil of Nature, but this particular example was mounted separately for sale through a printseller. Although the lace appears white, as it should, this effect is achieved because what we are viewing is a negative. A highly starched piece of lace was placed on the sensitive paper; the threads blocked the sunlight so that only the background darkened. In many ways, surrounded by camera images, this is the most primitive photograph in The Pencil of Nature. It may also be considered the most valuable, for every one of these “prints” is in fact a unique negative made directly in contact with the original piece of lace. It maintains a physical link with the object it depicts.

Larry Schaaf, William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 94. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.