Such was the description by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1840 of the remarkable ability of photographic materials to record scenes all around him without the handiwork of an artist. It refers to the image itself, created by exposure of a light-sensitive material within a camera. But the phrase should remind us of the awe we too should feel about the magic that happens whenever we press a shutter button to make an image. Are you impressed by the agency of light alone? I am, and here is why.

The roots of photography go back many years. The camera itself, a simple wooden box with a lens that formed an upside down miniature of the scene before it, was known from Renaissance times, and was used by the great artists to trace studies of their eventual paintings. The salt-and-silver imaging chemistry used by Talbot was simplicity itself (compared to the Daguerreotype process), although Talbot had to arrive at a viable formulation through a great many trials at a lot of expense. But oh, the images he made, they were like a form of poetry in themselves, dreamy but literal impressions that could be reproduced exactly.

And herein is the magic for me--that in the 1840s, the relatively crude "camera" box was the union of a high technology at each end: the lens in front, polished just so, and the sensitized negative at the back, positioned at the focal plane of the lens. Everything we use to make images today, from digital cameras to the Hubble Space Telescope, was derived from this humble instrument.

Talbot's magic is still alive! There are many fine old cameras to be had for a song out there. Find one that is still sound, clean it up, and fashion a way to make it take modern film, and you would be amazed at what was technically possible even for the cameras that Talbot used back in 1850.

My oldest camera is from about 1898, but it is technically very similar to Talbot's basic box camera. The popular age of the large film cameras lasted through the 1950's, during which ever more sophisticated cameras were made. From the 1930's onward, a different revolution was taking place with miniature cameras, yielding the golden age of 35mm film cameras that are ingenious applications of lessons learned from the big cameras. Every film camera, even the "plastic craptastic" variety sold in pharmacies and novelty stores, is a derivation of Talbot's "pencil of Nature" and a scion of the very first photographic tools and processes.

That is why I am "impressed by the agency of Light alone."

--
Don