William Henry Fox Talbot was the inventor of negative/positive photography which was, until recently, the medium’s dominant mode. While the photographs of his rival Daguerre were one-of-a-kind objects that could be reproduced only through copying, Talbot’s process produced an in-camera negative that could be used to print any number of positives. By the time Talbot made this view of Oxford in 1843, he had not only surmounted many of the limiting technical difficulties he had faced in the past, but also had developed his aesthetic eye. It is important to note that Talbot was one of the creators of the visual vocabulary of photography, a lexicon still very much in use today.

This view of Oxford’s High Street, taken near its junction with Longwall Street, shows the sweep and grace of the town’s architecture. The strength of this print and evidence of its quality is the outline of the University’s Radcliffe Camera dome visible in the far distance, which punctuates the curved street and balances the composition. This is a detail which has sometimes faded in other surviving prints of this image.
Talbot scholar Larry Schaaf has documented Talbot’s career for decades, and his recently launched on-line Talbot catalogue raisonné documents, in detail, this pioneering photographer’s extensive achievements: http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk