"The same scene from the other side," The Castle of Doune 1844

This is "The same scene from the other side," The Castle of Doune, made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the early days of photography. Instead of traditional artistic materials like paint or clay, Talbot worked with light-sensitive paper, a camera obscura, and chemical solutions. The hazy quality of the image speaks to the experimental nature of the calotype process he pioneered. You see the rough texture of the paper, and the soft focus, inherent in the way the image was captured. The final print was achieved with an exacting methodology that involved treating paper with silver iodide, exposing it in a camera, developing the latent image with gallic acid, and fixing it. Talbot's focus on castles and landscapes wasn't just aesthetic; it spoke to the way photography could document and classify the world, much like scientific inquiry. This new medium democratized image-making. It moved artistic creation away from the skilled hand of the artist and toward a chemical and mechanical process, forever changing our relationship to art and representation.