Title: A gift of light
Description: "In January 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot rushed to arrange a showing of experimental images captured on sheets of chemically treated paper placed in the back of a small wooden box. Talbot feared that his rival, L. J. M. Daguerre, would make his similar discoveries public before Talbot had the chance to announce his own. Daguerre's and Talbot's inventions - the paper photograph and the daguerreotype - ushered in a new way of imaging reality that has transformed modern history and culture.".

"A Gift of Light: Photographs from the Janos Scholz Collection takes us back to the first decades following the invention of paper photography. The book's sampling of works by more than sixty of the leading European photographers of the era - Talbot, Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alphonse Louis Poitevin, Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, and Eugene Atget, to name a few - shows a wide variety of photographic techniques and an extraordinary breadth of subject matter.

Among the 112 sumptuously printed plates we see Tennyson, Delacroix, and Gauguin; Victorian ladies, Parisian models, and a Spanish couple in native dress; London businessmen, a Vietnamese youth, Indian maharajas, and a family in Java; street scenes in London, Paris, Istanbul, and Nagasaki; Loch Katrine, the Seine, the falls at Terni, and the expanse of the Bosphorus; a Victorian knot garden, a French olive grove, the pines of Rome, and rocks in Lebanon; a Scottish cemetery, the catacombs of Paris, the tombs of the Mamluks, and a dead man from Pompeii; medieval cathedrals, Roman ruins, Petra's cliffs, and Egyptian pyramids.

Formal portraits and ethnographic studies, landscapes and cityscapes, coppiced trees and industrial sites, catalogues of museum holdings and documents of archaeological digs, mementos of the Grand Tour and monuments to imperialism, painterly allegories and a dog smoking a pipe: the years of Victoria, Napoleon III, and Garibaldi gave us the first photographic record of an era.

And while critics disputed the new medium's meaning and purposes, photographers took their pictures in the thousands." "Containing many photographs unavailable in any other collection and seen here for the first time, A Gift of Light will be an important source of information for historians of photography. The essays, plates, notes, and bibliography will be of service to historians of the Victorian era and French romanticism. And the book as a whole will engage and delight the general reader-viewer curious about photography, about daily life, history, and travel in the nineteenth century, and about how photographic images came to have such an overwhelming presence in our own lives and culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Exhibitions, History, Photograph collections, Photography, Snite Museum of Art
Places: Indiana, Notre Dame
People: János Scholz
Time periods: 19th century