William Henry Fox Talbot. The Pencil of Nature. Chicago: KWS Publishers, 2011. 164p. ISBN 978-0981773667. $149.95

Abstract

Rediscovering William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially produced photography book, led my mind back more than 20 years to when, as a young photographer, I studiously devoured the lessons wrought from the photographers Eugène Atget, Man Ray, and August Sander. One day as I sat in a verdant backyard absorbing books filled with images by these three photographers, my father plopped The Pencil of Nature by my side. In his quiet but immutable manner he said, “He [Talbot] did it first.” Atget, a late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century photographer, took more than 5,000 pictures of Paris and . . .