The BBC4 series The Genius of Photography reflects a wide interest in the history of photography as well as the history it depicts. Roger Taylor, in Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Yale, £45) captures the impact of surprise that the first photographs made. When in 1844 Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature a part-work of his ‘sun-pictures’, he wisely included a Notice to the Reader in the second instalment to remove misunderstandings: ‘The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.’

Unlike the daguerreotype and its successors, the paper-negative calotypes could produce multiple copies. And they were less cumbersome and fragile than the glass negatives that appeared in the 1850s. Much depended on the printing, and the best showed the Victorians things that they liked in images they had never imagined. So, among the 118 full-page examples that Taylor reproduces, there is a picturesque farmyard at Compton, Surrey (1852), by the admired Benjamin Brecknell Turner, in which the shaven sides of the haystack can almost be felt like a cat’s back. Or, in 1847 sitting beside the basaltic columns of Fingal’s Cave, John Muir Wood catches a mutton-chopped traveller in coat and tall silk hat. In their day these photographs were vicarious tourism, and as the name calotype was meant to suggest, they were beautiful pictures, and remain so to us.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP