Copy of a Large Italian Print, Reduced in the Camera
c. 1840
Medium
Salted paper print
Dimensions
17.9 × 15.5 cm (7 1/16 × 6 1/8 in.)
Classification
salted paper print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
127285
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, developed a negative-positive process that permitted the reproduction and dissemination of images with relative ease. In The Pencil of Nature—one of the first commercially produced, photographically illustrated books—Talbot noted an advantage of the new art form beyond mere duplication: “it enables us at pleasure to alter the scale, and to make the copies as much larger or smaller than the originals as we may desire. . . . Yet preser...
About the Artist
William Henry Fox Talbot · 1800–1877
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), a British polymath whose ingenuity transformed visual representation, was born on 11 February 1800 at Melbury House, Dorset, the only child of William Davenport Talbot of Lacock Abbey and Lady Elisabeth Fox Strangways, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester. His father died shortly after his birth, leaving the family in financial straits until his formidable mo...