This Wednesday I’ve been at the London Science Museum to check out the new exhibition of William Henry Fox Talbot: Dawn of Photography.
In the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution boomed, Fox Talbot revolutionised culture and communications by inventing the negative-positive process, a technique that formed the basis of photography around the world for over 150 years and immortalised him as father of the photograph.
At the exhibition I’ve finally saw REAL Talbotypes, Talbotype negatives and they even had Daguerreotypes which astatically suited me better than Talbotypes but… as we know, they cannot be copied.
It was Magic! I was imagining the times, like XIX century, when Photography still didn’t exist, there was no other form of recording space, people and many other things than only by drawing or painting. This man actually did invented the analogue process of receiving negatives, which today we can use in darkrooms. Of course we can say, those pictures back then looked a little bit poor quality and size, but if we imagine as well, that they didn’t have the technology like we have today – I can just feel the excitement of people seeing the first photographs!
During my visit at the exhibition I’ve got into few ideas that I probably will put into practice which is:
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Making a small personal analogue album – just for myself, as a record of my photographic works and a part of my heritage
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Restore my interest in “The Noble Photographic Techniques” – Arabic Gum and Chromians
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Try to make a Cyanotype as I really fell in love in the way how it presents itself – the colour and the technique itself
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Do Photography much often than normally – for now I usually do photos every two weeks, sometimes I’m photographing something all week long, but after that, I don’t touch my camera for next two or three weeks. I even spoke to my Technical Tutors in my Uni about it, and he told me, when he was studying photography like 20 years ago, he was making pictures every week, he was scanning them, printing, he was in the darkroom, etc.
This exhibition gave me a lot to think about, more about in general approach to photography.
I want to make it serious, life serious.