Capturing the Light - Softcover
This is the story of two lone geniuses and the extraordinary race to invent photography. "Capturing the Light" starts with a tiny scrap of purple-tinged paper, 176 years old and about the size of a postage stamp. On it you can just make out a tiny, ghostly image of a gothic window, an image so small and perfect that it 'might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist': the world's first photographic negative. This captivating book traces the lives of two very different men in the 1830s, both racing to be the first to solve one of the world's oldest problems: how to capture an image and keep it for ever. On the one hand there is Henry Fox Talbot: a quiet, solitary gentleman amateur tinkering away on his farm in the English countryside. On the other Louis Daguerre, a flamboyant, charismatic French showman in search of fame and fortune. Only one question remains: who will get there first?
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About the Author:
Roger Watson is a world authority on the early history of photography. He is currently the Curator of the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey and an occasional lecturer at DeMontfort University in Leicester. Helen Rappaport is a historian with a specialism in the nineteenth century. She is the author of eight published books, including Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and Magnificent Obession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy.
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- PublisherMacmillan
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 0230768865
- ISBN 13 9780230768864
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages306
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Capturing the Light: The birth of photography
Published by
Macmillan
(2013)
ISBN 10: 0230768865
ISBN 13: 9780230768864
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Soft cover
First Edition
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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. 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 by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport charts an extraordinary tale of genius, rivalry and human resourcefulness in the quest to produce the world's first photograph. Seller Inventory # ABE-1715359639771
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