Capturing the Light: The birth of photography
Author(s): Roger Watson
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?
Product Information
'The history of photography told as a fierce race between two rivals ... Reads like a scientific thriller' Observer 'Cheerfully readable ... the authors' enthusiasm for those pioneering days of photography, the drama and the sense of something fabulous just over the horizon, is catching.' Sunday Telegraph
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 and revolutionary Russia. She is the author of eight published books, including Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy.
General Fields
- :
- : Pan Macmillan
- : Pan Books
- : 0.264
- : 01 March 2014
- : 197mm X 130mm X 21mm
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 June 2014
- : books
Special Fields
- : Roger Watson
- : Paperback
- : Paperback
- : 1
- : 1
- : 770.922
- : 770.922
- : 300
- : 300