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Essay

Open Access

Experimental Metallic Surfaces and Absent Images: On the Materiality of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Photomechanical Practice

Francesca Strobino

Published online:

06 Oct 2025

Abstract

Abstract

This essay engages the approximately 100 metal plates held in the William Henry Fox Talbot collection in Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, examining them as material traces of Talbot's (1800–1877) experiments in photomechanical printing. Blank or bearing illegible images, these plates are often dismissed, but they shed clear light on the trial-and-error phase of Talbot's photomechanical practice, a crucial yet unexplored aspect of his scientific and photographic research. Shifting the focus from image content to the materiality of Talbot's photomechanical research during the late 1840s and the 1850s, the essay challenges and expands the prevailing narrative centred on his photochemical pursuits. More broadly, it calls for a reassessment of photographic ‘mistakes’ and ‘accidents’ so often simply omitted from history as central to this experimental medium.

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Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte Issues

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