Reconciling image and reality in W H F talbot's early photographs

From its public beginning in1839, the photographic image presented perceptual problems for the viewer. Even the inventor and developer of negative/positive photography, WHF Talbot (1800-1877) had to deal with the problem that what could be seen with eye did not appear to be exactly or accurately represented on paper in a photograph. With his publication The Pencil of Nature (1844-1847), the first commercially available publication of photographs, Talbot sought to identify photography - with or without the use of a camera - as an easy process for the precise, fast and detailed copying of the objects of the world, and for the rendering of entirely new perceptual experiences. A highly regarded natural philosopher, Talbot was both an expert user of optical instruments and an experienced and skilled observer who was accustomed to encountering novel visual images, such as those seen through microscopes and telescopes, for example. Talbot showed, through his texts and the photographic images in The Pencil of Nature, that both seeing, and visual experience, were more complicated than the mere act of looking and perceiving with the eyes. For mid 19th-century viewers of the photograph the challenge was to determine how to look at these curious little pictures on paper, and to work out what senses to use in order to see, translate and understand the new kinds of images of a familiar world newly described by a photograph.