Anna Artaker: the pencil of nature

Uittreksel

For her exhibition of nature prints Anna Artaker has borrowed the title of the publication with which William Henry Fox Talbot introduced his photographic method in 1844-46: The Pencil of Nature. Starting point for the nature prints are Talbot's photograms: in his experiments for capturing the incidence of light on paper Talbot pressed plants with glass plates onto sensitised paper and exposed them to sunlight to fix them as negative silhouettes. Anna Artaker associates this "birth of photography from the spirit of botany" with nature printing, a technique perfected in Vienna in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the photogram, nature printing is also based on an actual contact with nature "that gives its very self to printing", as Alois Auer wrote, the director of the Austrian National Printing Office (k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei) who advanced the development of nature printing to the extent of attaining patent registration in 1852: Starting out from an imprint in lead of the object to be printed, a copper intaglio plate is made using two galvanoplastic impressions, producing true to original images not only of but also through nature. The exhibition shows contemporary nature prints of plants used by Talbot in his time for photograms, also the intermediate stages of the process and a facsimile and original print from Talbot's publication.