Capturing the Light
Subtitle: the birth of photography, a true story of genius and rivalry
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9781250009708
Description: "An intimate look at the journeys of two men--a gentleman scientist and a visionary artist--as they struggled to capture the world around them, and in the process invented modern photography. During the 1830s, in an atmosphere of intense scientific enquiry fostered by the industrial revolution, two quite different men--one in France, one in England--developed their own dramatically different photographic processes in total ignorance of each other's work. These two lone geniuses--Henry Fox Talbot in the seclusion of his English country estate at Lacock Abbey and Louis Daguerre in the heart of post-revolutionary Paris--through diligence, disappointment and sheer hard work overcame extraordinary odds to achieve the one thing man had for centuries been trying to do--to solve the ancient puzzle of how to capture the light and in so doing make nature 'paint its own portrait'. With the creation of their two radically different processes--the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype--these two giants of early photography changed the world and how we see it. Drawing on a wide range of original, contemporary sources and featuring plates in colour, sepia and black and white, many of them rare or previously unseen, Capturing the Light charts an extraordinary tale of genius, rivalry and human resourcefulness in the quest to produce the world's first photograph"--
Table of contents: title: Prologue : My first daguerreotype; title: The locked treasure room; title: Shadowgrams; title: The box of wonders; title: An inheritance; title: The panorama; title: An innate love of knowledge; title: More beautiful than nature; title: Lacock Abbey; title: Seeking the impossible; title: The heliograph; title: The melancholy artist; title: Fixing the image; title: The latticed window, August 1835; title: The magic cabinet; title: The most wonderful discovery ever made; title: From today, painting is dead; title: Photogenic drawing; title: The Académie des Sciences, August 1839; title: Daguerreotypomania; title: Portraiture; title: The pencil of nature; title: The monopoly of the sunshine; title: The Great Exhibition of 1851; title: The reluctant inventor; title: Art or science?; title: The mute testimony of the picture; title: The eye of history; title: Epilogue : Everyman's art