Larry J. Schaaf: "I have Captured a Shadow!" - William Henry Fox Talbot and the Conception of Photography

Frustrated with his inability to draw, William Henry Fox Talbot conceived of the basis of photography on the shores of Lake Como in 1833. He achieved his first successes at his Wiltshire home of Lacock Abbey in 1834 and by 1835 had a fully workable photographic system. When photography became public in 1839, he rapidly perfected his negative-positive process on paper, forging the pathway that photography would follow for the next century and a half. Along the way, he learned from his new art how to be an artist, the first artist to be cultivated by photography.

Professor Larry J. Schaaf is an independent photohistorian and consultant based in Baltimore, Maryland. He taught photography and photographic history at The University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with the Gernsheim Collection of photography. Dr. Schaaf is the author of numerous books and journal articles on the early history of photography. Since 1999, he has been the Editor of 'The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot'. In 2005, he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University.