OBJECT LESSON
Printer’s Ink and Old Lace
Talbot and the Mechanization of Labor in Victorian Britain
Sarah Mirseyedi
FIG. 1
William Henry Fox Talbot
British, 1800–1877
A Strip of Lace, with Selvage, ca. 1852–1857
Photographic engraving
Plate: 12.9 × 20.1 cm (5 1/16 × 7 15/16 in.)
Georgianna Sayles Aldrich Fund and Mary B. Jackson Fund 2023.132.1
One of the RISD Museum’s most recent acquisitions is a print made between 1852 and 1858 by pioneering British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, depicting a small piece of lace (Fig. 1). Its diminutive size and modest subject matter belie its significance, however, as one of the first photomechanical prints ever made. In 1852, Talbot patented a process that he termed “photographic engraving.” Much like the photogravure process still employed by artists today, photographic engraving is based on the light-sensitive properties of bichromated gelatin, which hardens when exposed to light. Coating a steel or copper plate with a layer of this gelatin mixture, then exposing it under a photographic film positive, produces a hardened, acid-resistant image on the plate that can then be etched, inked, and printed using a standard intaglio press (Fig. 2).
1. Mylar is coated with sensitized gelatin mixture, often referred to as carbon tissue.
2. The tissue is exposed to ultraviolet light beneath a photographic film positive.
3. After exposure, the tissue faintly registers the photographic image.
4. In a bath of lukewarm water, the tissue is placed face down onto a degreased and polished copper plate. The Mylar backing is then peeled away, leaving a layer of gelatin on the copper plate.
5. The plate is washed to remove excess (unexposed) gelatin from the surface.
6. The photographic image has been transferred to the copper plate as a thin layer of hardened gelatin.
7. An even layer of powdered resin (or aquatint) is applied to the gelatin-coated plate. Heat from a blowtorch melts the resin grains onto the surface.
8. The hardened gelatin image and the aquatint both act as acid resists while the plate is etched in a bath of ferric chloride
9. After etching, the remaining gelatin is cleaned off the plate. It can then be inked and printed onto paper.
FIG. 2
The contemporary photogravure process, from top left.
Photography by Sarah Mirseyedi.
The resulting image, printed in ink rather than developed chemically, is both more permanent and more easily reproducible than the kinds of photographs Talbot had been making up to that point. As early as the 1830s, Talbot began experimenting with ways to capture a camera image using silver nitrate and common table salt coated onto a piece of paper, fixing the image with a solution of sodium thiosulfate. By 1841, Talbot had achieved enough success in his experiments that he was able to register a patent for his salted-paper process, and between 1844 and 1846 he published the multi-volume The Pencil of Nature to showcase his discovery to the world. To Talbot’s dismay, however, the salted-paper photographs produced for this publication quickly began to fade and discolor, sometimes in as little as a few months after production.
For this reason, Talbot devoted the following three decades of his life to developing the photographic engraving process, the results of which might last centuries if printed using high-quality ink and paper. But even as he transitioned from exploring paper photography to photomechanical printmaking, Talbot’s ultimate goal remained the same—to mechanize the labor of artistic rendering by harnessing the power of light to do that work instead. As he described with wonder in The Pencil of Nature, it required little to no effort for the practiced camera operator to produce, as if by magic, a perfect image of the outside world. To capture these images by hand, Talbot recognized, not only required skill and training in the art of drawing, but also a great deal of time to carry out the same degree of detail that the camera could capture instantaneously. Photography appeared to solve both sides of this equation, with Talbot explaining that what “would take the most skilful artist days or weeks of labour to trace or to copy, is effected by the boundless powers of natural chemistry in the space of a few seconds.”1
The resulting photographs, he later argued, “differ in all respects, and as widely as possible, in their origin, from plates of the ordinary kind, which owe their existence to the united skill of the Artist and the Engraver.”2 As Talbot rightly recognizes in this passage, ensuring the permanence, reproducibility, and eventual dissemination of his photographic images was much more complicated than simply capturing a camera image. In fact, it would require mechanizing two distinct aspects of picture-making: depiction, on the one hand, and the publication or reproduction of that depiction on the other. With his salted-paper photographs, Talbot had managed to mechanize the labor of depiction but not reproduction, which quickly became clear during the mid-1840s production of The Pencil of Nature.
The book project required scaling up from Talbot’s modest home studio to an industrial-scale facility, the construction of which he personally funded but did not operate himself. Run by Nicolaas Henneman, one of his former domestic servants, the production facility required a great deal of skilled labor and material resources that were not easy to come by in the small town of Reading, where it was located.3 The work was slow and painstaking, and the success of each photograph depended on manual and chemical operations that were difficult to replicate from one print to the next.4 Talbot’s turn to photomechanical printmaking in the early 1850s is a direct outcome of the difficulties he encountered during this earlier period, as he sought to mechanize the manual labor required to reproduce and disseminate photographic images.
Talbot was not alone in this conundrum, of course. The issue of labor and its mechanization touched nearly every aspect of visual and material culture during the Victorian era, as well as their economic underpinnings. New technologies such as the steam engine and the mechanized loom displaced skilled laborers across a wide variety of industries, ushering in a new era of wage labor and managerial exploitation. The social consequences of mechanization were highly uneven, and it is important to situate Talbot’s position within these larger cultural and economic shifts. As a member of England’s upper-class landed gentry, Talbot experienced mechanization very differently than his middle- and working-class contemporaries. Within the circumscribed sphere of scientific activity and research in which he was engaged, confronting the broader implications of mechanizing labor was more of an intellectual exercise than a question of enhancing—or possibly losing—his material livelihood.5
This contradiction between Talbot’s own class position and the broader implications of his experiments in mechanization stands out most profoundly in his photomechanical print of a piece of lace. Lace, gauze, and other kinds of fabrics were frequent subjects for Talbot across his photographic career, especially during periods in which he was actively developing a new process. In many ways, lace appears to have provided an ideal testing ground. When contact printed or exposed onto a printing plate, lace designs presented intricacies that could easily be examined for visual crispness in the final print. Lace could be laid flat, a helpful characteristic when it came to contact printing, yet it also maintained an inherent three-dimensionality with varying degrees of depth, thanks to the looping and overlapping nature of the designs. These designs provided Talbot with a range of tonal qualities, line weights, and other visual measures against which to judge the success of his various experiments.
Even beyond these formal and aesthetic qualities, Talbot also recognized lace’s import as a manufactured commodity during this time. One particular piece of lace (Fig. 3) served as subject for more than one hundred contact negatives, many of which are still in archival and museum collections today.6 In 1839, Talbot sent a picture of lace to a friend in Glasgow, Scotland, and asked if he would show it to local textile manufacturers there, perhaps in the hope that his framing of photography as a labor-saving device would impress commercial manufacturers, whose efforts to mechanize work previously done by hand mirror Talbot’s in striking ways.
FIG. 3
William Henry Fox Talbot
British, 1800–1877
Lace, 1845
Salted-paper print from paper negative
Gift of Jean Horblit, in memory of
Harrison D. Horblit, 1994 1994.197.5
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Mechanization had been introduced in the lacemaking and textiles industries much earlier than other manufacturing operations. Starting in the late 1700s, warp frames and other labor-saving devices were used in England to speed up the production of lace. For centuries, this industry had relied on the skilled manual labor of women and children who were taught lacemaking from an early age in specialized schools. Child labor was common, and the work itself was time-consuming and physically difficult, even for adult fingers. There was an argument to be made that mechanization of the trade might help to alleviate the need for child labor. Other reformers, however, lamented the decline of handmade lace; by the early 1800s, it was one of only a few cottage industries that allowed women to be breadwinners for their families.7
FIG. 4
Bobbinet lace machine, no. 136.
Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life, Tiverton, UK.
Image courtesy of Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life.
The mechanization of the lacemaking industry was in full swing by the time that Talbot made his first photographs of lace, but there was still a long way to go before completely mechanized lacemaking was achieved. After the introduction of the revolutionizing bobbinet machine (Fig. 4) in 1808 through the 1830s, machines were used primarily for the production of plain netting, which served as the ground onto which more intricate patterns were embroidered by hand. The most abundantly available kinds of lace during the period Talbot worked were therefore hybrid products made through the combined efforts of manual and mechanical labor.8 It is most likely this kind of hybrid lace that Talbot used in 1845 to make his salted-paper photograph (Fig. 3).
As we have seen, Talbot’s photographic production during this period was also very much a hybrid process, caught partway between his desire to fully mechanize the process of recording a detailed image and the limitations of the existing technology for printing camera images onto salted paper. If he had hoped that turning to printmaking might alleviate this problem, however, he was sorely mistaken. As Talbot soon learned, making prints, especially those involving novel uses of photochemistry, required no less skilled labor or specialized expertise than his original salted-paper process had. In fact, the barrier to entry was perhaps even more profound. Talbot had invested years of work to understand the chemistry of silver nitrate and sodium thiosulfate, but working with copper plates, etching acids, and inks involved an entirely different set of chemical operations and manual skills that he would need to learn from scratch.
A Strip of Lace, with Selvage (Fig. 1) offers a glimpse into some of the difficulties that Talbot encountered as he turned his attention to photomechanical printmaking in the 1850s. The first of these had to do with his process, in which the layer of photosensitized gelatin coated over the printing plate hardens when exposed to light through a film positive. As Talbot would soon discover, this occurs gradually, starting from the surface and working its way down toward the plate. Where the gelatin receives the most direct light, it hardens completely, but in areas receiving less light, only the topmost layer hardens, leaving soft, unexposed gelatin sandwiched between the top and the plate underneath. When the plate is washed after exposure, this soft, unexposed gelatin rinses away, resulting in a loss of the middle tones of the original image. As one can imagine, this destruction of middle tones was more of a problem for the reproduction of more nuanced camera images than it was for the documentation of opaque objects like pieces of fabric or plant matter.9
In the case of this particular print, however, Talbot appears to have encountered another difficulty commonly experienced in intaglio printmaking: the loss of ink in lines that have been etched too deeply or widely. This can be seen most clearly in the swirling fiddlehead-like designs at the lower left of the print (Fig. 5), where one sees a loss of ink in the thicker threads outlining the lace motif. In these areas, partially hardened gelatin may have been washed away early on the process, or else the deeply bitten lines resulting from this washing away of the acid-resistant gelatin coating were simply too wide to retain ink during the plate-wiping process. Most likely, it is a combination of both of these factors that we see reflected in this print.
FIG. 5
William Henry Fox Talbot
British, 1800–1877
A Strip of Lace, with Selvage (detail), ca. 1852–1857
Photographic engraving
Plate: 12.9 × 20.1 cm (5 1/16 × 7 15/16 in.)
Georgianna Sayles Aldrich Fund and
Mary B. Jackson Fund 2023.132.1
The losses in Talbot’s print are the very same details that would have been most important to lace manufacturers of the period. Not only were the larger threads and the motifs they outlined the most distinctive aspect of many regional lace designs, but they were also among the most difficult features of handmade lace designs to mimic using machines, and so received special attention during these years. By the 1830s and 1840s, technical improvements in lacemaking machinery allowed for these larger threads to be incorporated into the netting during the run of the machine, alleviating the need for hand embroidery. Often, the main distinguishing factor between machine-made and handmade lace produced in England during this period comes down to subtle differences in how these larger threads are laid into the net.10 The fact that Talbot’s A Strip of Lace, with Selvage lacks detail in precisely these areas of the design makes it difficult to tell whether the piece of lace he was using was machine-made, handmade, or some combination of both. By the mid-1860s, additional technical improvements would make it nearly impossible to distinguish handmade from machine-made lace. At the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, nearly all the lacemaking firms participating had adopted a further technological development—the incorporation of a Jacquard mechanism, an early computational device utilizing punch cards—into their machines, thereby making the machine-lace manufacturing one of the few industries to have achieved full mechanization of all aspects of its production.11
Regardless of Talbot’s awareness of the ins and outs of the textile industry, textiles nevertheless continued to spark significant shifts in his photographic engraving process throughout the 1850s. He had been advised early on in his experiments with printmaking that he would need to find a way to break up any broad areas of tone on his plates, or else he would encounter the kinds of problems with ink retention that we see in A Strip of Lace, with Selvage. A common way to address this was to use aquatint, a powdered resin applied to an etching plate to act as an acid resist. The result after biting the plate is a finely pitted texture capable of holding ink and printing as an even tone. In his correspondence with the printmaker George Barclay, Talbot complained of the difficulty he found in achieving an even application of aquatint; Barclay assured him that with practice, he would master it. But for Talbot, a process that required skill was antithetical to his larger goal of completely mechanizing the image-making process.
Facing yet another new technique to learn, Talbot continued to search for other more automatic means of producing tonal variation in his photographic engraving process. One of these strategies was to use pieces of woven fabric as a screen to break up the photographic image on the plate (Fig. 6). Talbot’s use of fabric mesh in his photomechanical experiments predates and anticipates the development of the commercial halftone screen by several decades. But he did not continue using textiles in this way for long, eventually returning to the aquatint process.
FIG. 6
William Henry Fox Talbot
British, 1800–1877
Torn and Folded Scrap of Crape, 1858–1859
Photoglyphic engraving
Plate: 10.1 × 7 cm (3 × 2 ¾ in.)
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library
Talbot’s tendency to waffle in this way, going back and forth between different solutions and techniques, was a cause of frustration for the printer Barclay, who corresponded with Talbot for a period of about six years as he experimented with his photographic engraving process. Unlike Talbot, Barclay was a contract printer, executing a variety of different jobs to make money; his approach to printmaking was therefore deeply practical rather than experimental in nature. Barclay did not understand why Talbot was content to work so slowly and inefficiently on a process clearly aimed at mechanizing and economizing the production of images. “Interested as I have been in Your progress,” Barclay writes to Talbot in 1857, “I cannot but feel a little, dismay at seeing others step in and win, where all was gained, for had you placed Yourself in the hands of any engraver to witness your own manipulation it seems to me impossible to have escaped perfection three Years since.”12 A few months later, Barclay is even more frank in his criticism of Talbot’s leisurely approach. He concludes: “The pleasures of experimenting are reserved for men of Fortune.”13
Even in industries as seemingly distinct from one another as lacemaking and picture-making, economic interest remained the primary driver of mechanization throughout the nineteenth century. Talbot, however, remained immune from these concerns owing to his class position. In the end, A Strip of Lace, with Selvage, with all its imperfections, encapsulates Talbot’s ambivalent attitude toward skilled labor and the question of its mechanization during this era.
1 W. H. F. Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 14 (January–June 1839): 199. The broader implications of Talbot’s framing of photography as a labor-saving device are discussed in Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 18–24.
2 W. H. F. Talbot, “The Pencil of Nature,” in Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Mike Weaver (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993), 75.
3 Aside from Henneman, at least one other of Talbot’s former domestic servants—Charles Porter—worked at the Reading facility. As Geoffrey Batchen points out, nearly all the workers Talbot employed to produce his early photographs “represent the class aspirations of the petit bourgeoisie, shopkeepers and domestic staff leaving more traditional employment to join a start-up company in a new, risky high-tech industry with a view to eventually becoming middle-class business-owners themselves.” Geoffrey Batchen, “The Labor of Photography,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 1 (2009): 295.
4 Larry J. Schaaf, “‘The Caxton of Photography’: Talbot’s Etching of Light,” in William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography, eds. Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, and Chitra Ramalingam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 164–65.
5 Batchen, “The Labor of Photography,” 292–96.
6 Geoffrey Batchen, William Henry Fox Talbot (London; New York: Phaidon, 2008): pl. 44.
7 Lara Kriegel, “Lace, Ladies and Labours Lost: The Meanings of Handicraft in Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” in Art versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, eds. Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016): 21–38.
8 Patricia Wardle, Victorian Lace (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969): 219–43.
9 Larry Schaaf, “Talbot and Photogravure,” in Sun Pictures Catalogue Twelve (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., 2003): 9.
10 Wardle, Victorian Lace, 228. Wardle describes, “[N]ot only are [the thicker threads] more prominent on the front of the lace than the back (whereas in hand-made lace they appear equally on front and back), but it is also possible to detect cuts in the threads of both sides of any motif. Since the machines could not go backwards over their work, it was necessary to use a separate thread to outline each side of any given motif. In hand-made lace it is perfectly possible to make a thick thread encircle a motif completely.”
11 Wardle, Victorian Lace, 239.
12 Letter from George Barclay to William Henry Fox Talbot, dated February 26, 1857, British Library, London, Manuscripts / Fox Talbot Collection, https://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/transcriptName.php?bcode=Barc-G&pag…;
13 Letter from George Barclay to William Henry Fox Talbot, dated May 7, 1857, Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Media Museum, Bradford, UK, https://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/transcriptName.php?bcode=Barc-G&pag…
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