Anna Artaker | The Pencil of Nature

The exhibition borrows the title of the publication with which William Henry Fox Talbot introduced his photographic method in 1844–46: The Pencil of Nature. To produce the first photograms, Talbot pressed plants onto sensitised paper with glass plates and exposed them to the sun to fix them as negative silhouettes. I combine this moment of the “birth of photography from the spirit of botany” with nature printing, a technique perfected in the mid-nineteenth century by the k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei (Austrian National Printing Office) in Vienna. Like the photogram, nature printing is also based on contact with nature “that gives its very self to printing” and produces faithful images not only of but also through nature. For the exhibition I have transposed plants seen on Talbot’s photograms into contemporary nature prints. Besides the prints, the exhibition also shows the different intermediate stages of the process and an original print from Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature.