I enjoyed the Bright Sparks exhibition, partly because it includes a lot of pleasing and fascinating items, and partly because it is so unintentionally funny. At the start of the show a cabinet containing various objects owned by Talbot, including a set of seven wooden geometric blocks, a gyroscope, a cork-stoppered bottle holding ‘Oxide of T’, a glass prism, a pile of torn-up letters, is, we are told, evidence that Talbot ‘never threw anything away’. We cannot of course know what the man did and did not discard, but what this eclectic assemblage indicates is that he was, like other Victorian gentlemen, an amateur scientist, a collector and a documenter. We owe a lot to these nineteenth-century enthusiasts, but rather than putting Talbot’s contribution in historical context, this exhibition attempts to ‘create a dialogue’ between his work and that of a somewhat random choice of ‘later photographers’.
I did not see the earlier show A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800–1850, which I hope put Talbot's work in the context of his contemporaries. The assumption in this show seems to be that exhibition-goers cannot relate to anything historical, scientific or informative. We can only think of photographs as something to put on Instagram. Many of the objects and images on display are interesting, but the text that accompanies them makes extraordinarily tenuous connections based on silly or unsubstantiated assertions. It is true that Talbot believed photography had enormous commercial potential in recording and illustrating areas as diverse as botany and travel. But to state that in publishing The Pencil of Nature Talbot ‘helped to launch the genre of the photo book’, and then represent this ‘genre’ with a random selection of publications by art photographers including Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows and Robert Frank is bizarre. The only connection between these books and Talbot’s is that they contain photographs, but so does an underwear catalogue, which would probably be closer to what Talbot was doing.
Other attempts to relate Talbot’s work to the contemporary viewer include the assertion that a photograph of some books he owned is ‘a kind of surrogate self portrait’, because ‘Strikingly, Talbot never took any photos of himself’. Is that really so surprising, given the technical means at his disposal? How many other Victorian photographers took selfies? This is simply another rather pathetic attempt to make the show accessible to an apparently moronic public.
Another tenuous link is that between Talbot’s desire to make photographs commercially reproducible, and Stieglitz’ magazine, Camera Work. The exhibition text makes the ridiculous assertion that ‘Camera Work is often regarded as the finest photography magazine ever produced’. Regarded by whom? Pictorialism went out of fashion well over 100 years ago. The exhibition is full of these strange assertions and wild claims. The text accompanying one of Man Ray’s images in his series Les voies lactées states that ‘American artist Man Ray made this photograph while he was living in Paris (he’d lived there for more than 50 years when he made this work) and concludes with the grammatically incorrect sentence: ‘Made near the end of his life, Man Ray contemplates the heavens above while looking down on a domestic, prosaic material, a juxtaposition typical of his Surrealist approach to art making’. Where does one start to demolish this? Man Ray was not a Surrealist, Surrealism was not about juxtaposing the banal with the cosmic, and anyway the image was made half a century after the movement. Who is to say what Man Ray was thinking at the time he made it? And what does any of this have to do with Talbot?
One photographer in the show who has seriously engaged with Talbot’s work is Simon Murison-Bowie, who spent a number of years revisiting Talbot’s photos of Oxford – location, lighting, time of day and year. Murison-Bowie's work – an enormous undertaking of detection and devotion – attempts to understand Talbot’s relationship with the city and how it differs from our present-day experience. In the Bodleian show this project has been dumbed down to a handful of images that happen to be made in publicly accessible places. There is no comparison to the Talbot original, except in thumbnail images on a map encouraging visitors to recreate the same photos themselves and put them on social media. How this suggested activity contributes to anyone’s appreciation of Talbot and his work is beyond me.
The overall feeling I got from the show was annoyance at being patronised. I would have liked to have felt enriched by my visit rather than insulted. I was also irritated by various silly factual mistakes and errors of spelling and grammar in the texts accompanying the exhibits. Next time, Bodleian, employ a proofreader. There is no shortage of them in Oxford.
But it has its hilarious moments – it is fun to see that Stephen Spender’s family photo album is just like everyone else’s from that era, even if its link to Talbot is a puerile attempt to make a connection between his posed portraits of family members and our snaps today. And the show includes some exhibits which make the trip down Broad Street worthwhile. Talbot’s etching of a fern is exquisite, as is his photogram of three grasses. I enjoyed seeing the first photograph of the Mona Lisa, I was touched by Talbot’s ‘Collection of hand-folded seed packets (mainly empty) with manuscript labels’, I liked Garry Fabian Miller’s camera-less photos of ivy leaves. And I loved seeing a Julia Margaret Cameron print on display (Oxford has so many of these languishing in cellars), despite the laughable assertion accompanying it that ‘photographs make pretence look plausible’.
The item I most coveted was Talbot’s electrostatic discharge wand. The photographs made by Hiroshi Sugimoto using sparks from the wand could never have been produced by Talbot with the methods available to him, and yet they are in the same spirit of invention, experimentation and wonder at the world shown by this photographic pioneer almost 200 years ago.
Details: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/brightsparks
Comments
Interesting article. Early photography needs no more than to be shown - which happens rarely!