ABSTRACT
Between June 1839 and June 1840 William Henry Fox Talbot sent 36 photogenic drawings and related correspondence to the botanist Antonio Bertoloni, who compiled these "specimens" into an Album di disegni fotogenici, now preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and known as The Bertoloni Album. This important artifact of early photography in Italy was acquired in 1936 by the museum's curator of prints William M. Ivins, Jr. from a London bookseller. Born in Sarzana in 1775, Bertoloni studied medicine at Pavia and Genoa before being appointed Chair of Botany at the University of Bologna in 1815. The article notes that Talbot had sent Bertoloni copies of Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, which the botanist presented publicly at a scientific meeting in Bologna in May 1839. The Bertoloni Album forces us to consider what photography represented and what possibilities it held for those who were not in competition to be "first".
