Dec 05, 2002 - Sale 1954

Sale 1954 - Lot 242

Price Realized: $ 39,100
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 50,000
"THE FIRST PUBLICATION ON PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE WORLD" TALBOT, WILLIAM HENRY FOX. Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, Or The Process By Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of an Artist's Pencil. Folio, modern 1/4 morocco, with original 14-page offprint bound in. London: R. & J. E. Taylor, 1839
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On January 7, 1839, the Frenchman Francois Arago proudly announced to the Academy of Sciences that Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre had discovered a procedure for capturing images called the daguerreotype. In England, Talbot had invented a fundamentally different technique which relied on the negative/positive process, the principle still employed in photography today. Talbot referred to his process as "photogenic drawing," and described it as follows: "If the picture so obtained is first preserved so as to bear sunshine, it may afterwards itself be employed as an object to be copied; and by means of this second process the lights and shadows are brought back to their original desposition." (p. 12)

According to Beaumont Newhall this extremely rare document "was printed by Talbot as a fourteen-page pamphlet for private distribution; in this form it is the first separate publication on photography in the world." Cf. Beaumont Newhall,