Photographies

In The Pencil of Nature, published in 1844, William Henry Fox Talbot proposes that photography can both create and reproduce works of art. But in those early years, print technologies were more reliable than photographs for reproducing art, as the examples highlighted here suggest. And despite the oft-repeated story that French painter Paul Delaroche responded to the announcement of photography’s discovery with the pronouncement that “from today, painting is dead,” artists continued to rely on painting—and they still do today, over 200 years later.