William Henry Fox Talbot – Wrack, 1839 | Giclée Print

A frond of seaweed laid on sensitised paper and left in the sun. Every filament of it, down to the last forked tip, printed itself pale against the ground — and there are hundreds of tips. Nobody drew this and no camera was pointed at it. The plant is its own draughtsman, at the exact size it grew.

1839. The year photography was announced. Talbot called the process photogenic drawing: silver salts on writing paper, an object laid on top, sunlight, then a bath to arrest it. What comes out is reversed — pale where the object lay, dark where the light reached — and that reversal is the whole invention, because from such a sheet a second can be printed, and from that a third, without end. Anna Atkins would take the idea, swap the chemistry for Prussian blue and publish the first book illustrated with photographs four years later. Her subject was algae. So was Talbot's, here, first.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a salted paper print, made with pigment inks. It is not a photogram and is not sold as one — a photogram is a unique object made in sunlight, and Talbot's are in museums.

Scale
Original: 17.5 × 22 cm / 6.9 × 8.7 in — The Metropolitan Museum of Art
30 × 40 cm / 11.8 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1. Image 17.50 × 22.00 cm.

One size only, and here is why. The Met's file gives 341 dpi across the print at original size — comfortably above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. It does not give more. An enlargement would top out at about 1.1×, which is not an enlargement, so we do not offer one. This is the same rule that leaves Monet's late Irises at a single size: we would rather sell one honest print than two, one of which is thin.

The sheet is irregularly trimmed. Talbot cut this one by hand and did not cut it square — the top left runs away in a long curve, the corners are angled, the bottom edge steps. We reproduce the rectangle that contains it, which means cream album paper shows around those cuts. That shape is the object. Cropping inward to a clean rectangle would take the seaweed with it.

What is not in the print. The Met photographed the whole album leaf, including the red binding at the right and a pencilled caption, Fuco, written on the mount below the print. The caption is on the album page, not on Talbot's sheet, so it is not reproduced. What you get is the photogram and the paper immediately around it.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), Wrack, 1839; salted paper print, 22 × 17.5 cm, irregularly trimmed.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Acc. No. 36.37 (25), Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation as open access.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — why this sheet is offered in one size and no other.
Anna Atkins's cyanotypes — the same idea four years later, in Prussian blue.