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This chapter examines the way the early photograph was historicized, analyzed and discussed by its early practitioners in reviews on photography in journals and newspapers that appeared in the 1840s. It argues that for early practitioners the photographic image was conceived to be very different from the image of the camera obscura. While in the camera obscura the image forms itself instantaneously and uniformly, the photograph develops through time. Thus the camera obscura image was always the same because it excluded time from its process of formation, whereas the photograph introduced time as a differentiating element into its form of production, resulting in a variety of contingent unaccountable effects. The chapter analyses Talbot’s botanical images, John Herschel’s vegetable photographs and Robert Hunt’s early histories of photography.

The second chapter focuses on Talbot’s second major discovery account, his 1844 “A Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art,” which appeared in his book The Pencil of Nature. In this account Talbot attributes his discovery to an unaccountable imaginative thought. The chapter traces the philosophical and aesthetic formulation of the faculty of the imagination in Kant and Coleridge. Finally, it links this analysis of the imagination to the category of the picturesque and to Talbot’s landscape images.

This chapter focuses on Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, the first illustrated book with photographs, in which Talbot offered a range of applications to photography. I relate Talbot’s statements in the book on the evidentiary status of the photograph to the role of documents in literary and historical genres of writing. For Talbot the value of the photograph as a document does not simply consist, I argue, in its capacity to copy, to accurately depict everything the camera sees, but in its capacity to evoke the imagination. Consequently, the problem for Talbot is not to “authenticate” the past or prove “what has been,” but how to make the past alive and intimate: the re-enactment of the past not its authentication.

This chapter thus focuses on Talbot’s first 1839 discovery account, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing.” It argues that by evoking the inductive method Talbot didn’t assign a privileged epistemological status to photography because during this time the validity of induction as a scientific method was challenged. Talbot conceptualized photography as a copying method that is based on theories of industrial labor and on deskilling.

This chapter considers how late-eighteenth-century chemical replicas after chemically unstable academic paintings were rediscovered in the early 1860s. Seeking to acquire a prototype of James Watt’s steam engine from the Soho manufactory established by Matthew Boulton in the mid-1760s, curator Francis Pettit Smith unearthed a set of replicas, which he called “sun pictures.” Smith identified the images as early photographs. On that basis, he claimed that photography must have been invented at Soho in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Although Smith’s story found support among several leading photographers in the 1860s, it was strongly opposed by Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, grandson of the Soho industrialist. This chapter demonstrates how M.P.W. Boulton destroyed Smith’s story. It also highlights the ways in which Boulton simultaneously integrated Smith’s chemo-mechanical findings into his own aircraft designs. The chapter concludes by arguing for the extensive connections between the leading inventors of photography and combustion-engine research.

Fugitive and fictive testimony though a photograph may be, photographs, or images of photographs have come to play a critical role in the particular form of the graphic narrative that is the graphic memoir. At once personal memento and material witness, at once familial relic and visible evidence, the photographic snapshots “drawn and quartered” on the pages of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir offer a vestigial glimpse of all that photography still means within the affective economy of the historical work that is remembrance. Rendered and, at the same time, withheld, the reproduced and drawn photographs of her graphic memoir intimate the history and inheritance of the “pencil of nature” that was William Henry Fox Talbot’s photography, staking a claim to its evidential status even as they challenge its forms and its terms. Moreover, in ways that exceed the largely playful retrospective link forged between the contemporary practice of taking pencil in hand to draw photographically and Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s album, like Bechdel’s memoir, holds within it photographs, portraits of a sort, that may bear equivocal witness to something as ineffable as desire.

The practical invention of photography is historically accepted as dating from January 1839 and Scotland embraced it with unrivalled enthusiasm. In that month in Paris, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre announced his daguerreotype process, and this was shortly followed by William Henry Fox Talbot in London of his photogenic drawings. This chapter describes the prehistory of photography and the beginnings of photography in Scotland.

What does literature make, and what can literary criticism make with it? This book proposes a new theory of the novel as a social model, entailing a new program for literary critics and the humanities more broadly: reading aesthetic forms for how their composition of relations illuminates a general composedness of social life. The introduction names this new program “political formalism,” developing it in conversation with aesthetic formalism and the revolutionary advancements in Victoria-era formalist mathematics. Political formalism regards the merely formal quality of the structures of social experience, from collectivity and the city to the law and the state. A position—and a positive affirmation of organized sociability that departs sharply from the negative critique prevalent in the humanities—and a method—an approach to the composition and agency of forms in the tradition of aesthetic formalism—political formalism serves a distinctive critical practice of recomposing forms of social being. Elaborating political formalism by overviewing antiformalist tendencies in critical theory, the introduction also provides an interpretative reading of constructive commitments in Marx’s German Ideology and Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (the first ever book of photography).