The Invention of Photography
In Our Time
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The State Sponsoring of Photography in France
Henry Fox Talbot was a Cambridge Jack graduate, a landed gentleman of some wealth though very often castrapped. His closest associate, who I want to mention here, was the preeminent astronomer John Herschel. And it was working with Herschel in the early 1830s that began to draw Talbot's attention to photochemistry in general and the specific possibilities of capturing images on silver salts in particular. He started off being a show and that's part of it. And also the French were onto it. When they got a really good aren't they? From the very beginning he said, okay we're going to photograph all the monuments in France. We didn't do that anyway.
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