Osamu Maekawa,
Reading The Pencil of Nature ―Between the Photograph of the Book and the Book of the Photograph―
There have been many ways of reading
The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot, which is often said to be the origin of the reproduction of photography and the mass production of photographically illustrated books, in which for the first time photographic prints were publicly inserted into the book. Many scholars usually read it as a pamphlet for the advertisement of Talbotype, an example of imbalance between text and photographic imagery, or an aesthetically presented catalogue of works. In these ways of reading, however, these photographs are treated as the illustrations of the texts, or as separated from the text, and isolated from other photographs. I would like to insert another way of reading between these readings, through which this book is regarded as an experiment on the relation between two prints: the newly born photograph and the page of text. In other words, my reading is to try to touch on the surface of this book, and thereby to reproduce the friction of its textures caused by puttting a photograph between leaves of the book.