[Chicken Feathers]

Nevil Story Maskelyne

ca. 1840 · Salted paper print · Photographs

Talbot's first successes were made by placing a pressed botanical specimen directly on a piece of photosensitized paper, covering it with a sheet of glass, and setting it in the sun. Wherever the light struck, the paper darkened; wherever the plant blocked the light it remained white. He called his new discovery "the art of photogenic drawing." Nevil Story-Maskelyne, a teenager home from school during the summer of 1840, saw a demonstration of Talbot's process and tried his hand at the new art. This arrangement of chicken feathers is among his earliest pieces, and, as with Talbot's botanicals, the medium's capacity to record the soft texture of down, the detail of individual barbs, and the barred pattern of the feathers must have seemed an astonishing rendering of natural forms.

Artist

Nevil Story Maskelyne

Date

ca. 1840

Medium

Salted paper print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace and Anonymous Gifts, 1997