Collection GalleryPlural Origins of Photography: Copy, Reproduction and Facsimile
(A Symposium related with the exhibition "Re-reading Henry F. Talbot's The Pencil of Nature: The Etymology of Photography")
Plural Origins of Photography: Copy, Reproduction and Facsimile
(A Symposium related with the exhibition "Re-reading Henry F. Talbot's The Pencil of Nature: The Etymology of Photography")
HOME ＞ Collection Gallery ＞ The 5th Collection Gallery Exhibition 2015-2016 ＞ Curatorial Studies 10: Re-reading The Pencil of Nature: The Etymology of Photography ＞ Plural Origins of Photography: Copy, Reproduction and Facsimile
This symposium will focus on the origin(s) of the Art of Photography, by re-reading the Pencil of Nature (1844-46), "first photographically illustrated book". It is not a question of a single origin, which would be the starting point in the past, of the "History of Photography," but a question of something we now experience day by day, every time we take or see a photograph.
In fact, we know the famous episode in the Pencil of Nature, which relate how W. H. F. Talbot got the first "idea" of the Photography, episode of his trial to sketch a beautiful landscape of the lake Como (with the aid of his Camera Lucida). It seems to indicate directly the primitive impulse of our daily act of photography today.
Of course, Talbot didn't succeed in making photographs with his Camera immediately. He began with finding a way to make copies of flat objects like a leaf of plant by the method of superposition. And the very choice of leaves of plant must not have been an accidental one. For a man like Talbot, who was very familiar with plants and botany, it was very important to copy a plant in facsimile and to share it with his friends and fellows. Here, we have already something to do with the use of photography in the age of the Social Networking Service.
We will invite to this symposium Mr. Michael Gray from UK, former curator of the Fox Talbot Museum (1989-2003), who published the facsimile edition of the Pencil of Nature, including 24 salt paper prints. We will examine, with him, some problems about the Pencil of Nature and its reprint or reproduction. On the other hand, we will invite Naoya Hatakeyama also, a very innovative photographer, who has been reflecting on the origins of the art of photography, as his camera "obscura drawings" demonstrate it.
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