WRITERS PRIZE: 24 / JAN / 2025
PHOTOGRAPHY’S ROOTS AND FLOWERS
by Melissa McCarthy
I didn’t expect to end up in a darkened drawer in LA on a botanic detective mission, but looking at art takes you to some strange places. I’d written a book about photography, and to illustrate a section on impermanence and memory, I wanted to use an image of something from the Getty collection. The item is a piece of paper. Specifically, a photogenic drawing negative, made by W.H.F. Talbot in around 1835, catalogue number 85.XM.150.14.
This item is an irregular rectangle, some 11x5 cm, and the subject it depicts is a scrap of dark linen damask woven with a lighter figure of tumbling flowers, each with undulating leaves, a cog-like centre. The original linen was the same size; it’s a photogenic drawing made by treating the paper, placing the fabric on it, exposing to light. But it’s a photogenic negative, so the object, the dark linen with light flowers, produced for Talbot an artefact that looks the other way round: a dark, trapezoid background with a ghostly pale field (the fabric) floating on it, fraying away at the edges. Dark flowers blooming. It’s a lovely image, that I unearthed in two separate Getty publications, as I fossicked about online.
So I asked the Getty if I, too, might use this image in my book. Yes, they said, and offered me a different picture, one showing a dull brown block, marked only with what looked like cigarette burns (or perhaps umbilical dents). Where have all the flowers gone? Had they muddled their prints? Is it a conspiracy, a film noir (or film sepia) theft plot? The truth was more mundane; clear as daylight, perhaps. In 1988 the Talbot negative was photographed, for inclusion in books. In 1989, it was exhibited in Experimental Photography: Discovery and Invention, but its display affected the delicate chemical balance, decaying and un-differentiating the image; the flowers faded from the paper and cannot now be seen. It’s the constant museology / curation problem, of the extent to which you can share and promulgate the works under your care, while preserving and protecting them.
So now the Getty has a policy allowing use of images of the negative as it looks now, and has looked for fifteen years: faded, plain, Rothko-esque. They prefer not to allow use of the earlier photo of the negative, of how it did look for the first 150 years of its existence, with the pretty flowers. This is their prerogative (and they are entirely helpful and constructive with researchers). But it strikes me as strange: you can use this image of something as it looks now, but not that image of something as it used to look in the past. This is against the whole mode of the art-form as it has unrolled and developed, surely: a photograph does show us the past, the thing that is gone. That’s its tenacious magic: it re-lives.
The photograph also proliferates unpredictably and in intricate ways, like flowers in a meadow: here I was trying to gather an image of a paper with an image of a textile on it, visible on my screen as I looked for pictures to be printed onto my pages. I haven’t seen with my own eyes the Talbot negative, now sequestered dark and deep in the Getty archives. Nor the original scrap of linen, swept into a Lacock Abbey fireplace two centuries ago. And I’ve definitely never seen the real flower, long wilted, that the fabric designer might have considered. But I stared at it, at these flowers on my screen, for a long time, before realising I didn’t know what sort it was. Small, curvy, with a stem, three leaves, a distinct central aperture, perhaps six petals. The Royal Horticultural Society suggets that it’s a myosotis, or forget-me-not. I like this, to the extent that I’d propose the flower, and the scrap of linen, and Talbot’s photogenic paper negative, and all the images of it, faded or precise, as the symbolic flower of photography as activity and art form. Forget-me-not, instructs the image, even as it withers in front of us, as it re-blooms.
Image: 85.XM.150.14 [Linen] by William Henry Fox Talbot, circa 1835
Photography’s Roots and Flowers was shortlisted for the Source prize for new writing about photography in 2024.
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