Book review: Capturing The Light: The Birth of Photography by Roger Watson & Helen Rappaport

CAPTURING THE LIGHT: The Birth of Photography

by Roger Watson & Helen Rappaport

Macmillan, 295pp, £20

The next time you take a photograph on your digital camera, mobile telephone or iPad, spare a thought not only for the stages of development that photography has gone through but also for those who dedicated many years to capturing and preserving moments in time.

Some inventions, like Hoovers, are called after their inventor but there was no Mr Camera. The closest to a name being preserved is that of Louis Jacques Daguerre who gave his name to the Daguerreotype. He competes with Henry Fox Talbot, whose contribution to the development of the photograph was at least as important. This book tries to answer the question: who got there first?

The two men were different in every way. Daguerre was born in 1787 and grew up in Orleans but left for Paris as a teenager. A charismatic extrovert, he showed early gifts as a painter and became an apprentice architect and an important portrait painter. These activities developed the precision and craftsmanship that gave him the tenacity to pursue his dream of capturing light as a photographic image. He became apprenticed to a panoramic painter, a phrase first coined by Robert Barker, who represented Edinburgh on a cylindrical surface in 1793 – a replication of reality which led the way to photography.

Henry Talbot on the other hand was the precocious son of the owner of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, although the estate was deeply in debt. When most boys at boarding school were playing rugby and cricket, he was doing geometry. He insisted that his letters home be kept for posterity so a great deal more is known about him than about Daguerre, who left few papers. He was a quiet, introverted Englishman with a passionate determination to solve the mystery of replicating reality in photographic form. He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge and became a MP.

Meanwhile, Daguerre had opened the first Paris Diorama in 1821 and subsequently one in London in the buildings now occupied by the Prince’s Trust. He showed two views, Canterbury Cathedral and a Swiss landscape. They were a significant attraction which gave him money to pursue his real interests. He wanted to capture and keep the original view, not a painted replica. Before long he discovered that combining silver and iodine was essential to the photographic process.

Henry Fox Talbot had similar frustrations. He noted “the gulf between the beauty of what he saw and the reality of what he was able to draw”. This led him to put his scientific knowledge to good use. In 1833, on the shores of Lake Como, he captured the world’s first photographic negative. Whereas the Daguerreotype was a one-off sharp image, the calotype discovered by Talbot (his mother wanted him to call it after himself) was a negative from which limitless prints could be taken but the image was still blurred.

Eventually, Daguerre lost interest and enjoyed a state pension given by a grateful French government. Talbot continued to experiment but was dogged by problems over copyright. As the Industrial Revolution brought wealth to Britain, photography even in its early form became popular. It is worth remembering in our age of digital photography that in 1850 a photographic portrait cost £1, an average weekly wage for a skilled worker. It could also mean sitting still for a very long time. Lacock Abbey now houses the Fox Talbot Museum for those who want to understand how the process was discovered.

This book gives considerable detail about the scientific development of the various stages of photography which will delight the experts. Attempts to capture images of light go back to at least the fifth century, so it’s a fair bet that the digital camera or the iPad will not be the end of the story.