Fionn Montell-Boyd (Oxford), “Art in Context | William Henry Fox Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature” and the Products of Industry” (Yale Center for British Art)

The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot’s first photographically illustrated book, was published in installments between 1844 and 1846. In it, he presented readers with a vision of assorted uses for his new medium. This talk focuses on Talbot’s plates depicting handmade and manufactured goods and their positioning of photography in relation to products of craft and mechanization. His images of china, glassware, and lace demonstrated photography’s capacity to intricately render a range of materials without the need for drawing by hand. These photographs were themselves products of industry that were tied into the Atlantic trade in precious metals. The talk will examine The Pencil of Nature from the point of view of the industrial and colonial networks encircling it, prompting a reconsideration of the narrative of photography’s invention.

 

Fionn Montell-Boyd is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of Oxford and a residential scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. Her thesis examines the materials and industry of photography’s emergence in Britain, with a focus on the transatlantic commerce in silver. Her wider research interests include the networks of production underpinning visual experimentation from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, and photographic representations of labor.

 

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