DOI Heft:
Teoretyczno-historyczne perspektywy fotografii
DOI Artikel:Czekalski, Stanisław: Talbotowski paradygmat wizualności fotografii
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.43310#0034
32
Stanisław Czekalski
Stanisław Czekalski
Instytut Historii Sztuki
Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
THE TALBOTIAN PARADIGM OF VISUALITY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Summary
The concept of visuality proposed by Norman Bryson, which refers to conscious per-
ception determined by a system of concepts and knowledge of the visible, is related
in the paper to the relationship between two kinds and ideas of photography intro-
duced respectively by Louis J. Daguerre and William H. Fox Talbot. The discourse
about daguerrotypy stresses the quasi-telescopic properties of the picture whose visu-
ally ungraspable surface triggers an effect of reaching with the eye far beyond it toward
even the farthest details, invisible without a looking glass but still clearly visible in the
picture. In response to this feature, Talbot connected the photographic picture primar-
ily with the effects of transferring the relations of shadow and light to contrast on the
surface of photosensitive paper. He referred the "photogenic drawing" to a tradition
older than the Albertian paradigm of the illusion of perspective adopted by Daguerre
in his famous views of the streets of Paris from the window. His technique, called "ski-
agraphy" Talbot associated with an ancient legend about the origin of drawing as the
art of fixing shadows on a flat surface. His photographs of Lacock Abbey windows were
a paradigmatic example that determined the understanding of each photo on the level
of its basic self-reflexive content: in the first place, the photographic picture shows how
reality before the camera lens projects its "skiagraphic" drawing - a "stamp," as it were
- on the paper surface, and how the forms of objects are reduced to that surface and
grasped on it. In his Pencil of Nature, Talbot connected photographic pictures with
text, determining the visual status of print photography as replica - both repetition of
the highly appreciated daguerrotypy, and a rival response to it, showing the advantages
of Calotypy based on the visible proximity of the picture and the surface. Thanks to
the properties of Calotypy, precise "fixing of shadows" allows one to arrest despite the
flow of time and fix in a visual structure what is the most volatile and changeable.
Keywords:
visuality, photography Daguerre, Talbot, hermeneutics
Stanisław Czekalski
Stanisław Czekalski
Instytut Historii Sztuki
Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
THE TALBOTIAN PARADIGM OF VISUALITY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Summary
The concept of visuality proposed by Norman Bryson, which refers to conscious per-
ception determined by a system of concepts and knowledge of the visible, is related
in the paper to the relationship between two kinds and ideas of photography intro-
duced respectively by Louis J. Daguerre and William H. Fox Talbot. The discourse
about daguerrotypy stresses the quasi-telescopic properties of the picture whose visu-
ally ungraspable surface triggers an effect of reaching with the eye far beyond it toward
even the farthest details, invisible without a looking glass but still clearly visible in the
picture. In response to this feature, Talbot connected the photographic picture primar-
ily with the effects of transferring the relations of shadow and light to contrast on the
surface of photosensitive paper. He referred the "photogenic drawing" to a tradition
older than the Albertian paradigm of the illusion of perspective adopted by Daguerre
in his famous views of the streets of Paris from the window. His technique, called "ski-
agraphy" Talbot associated with an ancient legend about the origin of drawing as the
art of fixing shadows on a flat surface. His photographs of Lacock Abbey windows were
a paradigmatic example that determined the understanding of each photo on the level
of its basic self-reflexive content: in the first place, the photographic picture shows how
reality before the camera lens projects its "skiagraphic" drawing - a "stamp," as it were
- on the paper surface, and how the forms of objects are reduced to that surface and
grasped on it. In his Pencil of Nature, Talbot connected photographic pictures with
text, determining the visual status of print photography as replica - both repetition of
the highly appreciated daguerrotypy, and a rival response to it, showing the advantages
of Calotypy based on the visible proximity of the picture and the surface. Thanks to
the properties of Calotypy, precise "fixing of shadows" allows one to arrest despite the
flow of time and fix in a visual structure what is the most volatile and changeable.
Keywords:
visuality, photography Daguerre, Talbot, hermeneutics