ABSTRACT
As the people have seen, the division between negatives and positive prints has sometimes allowed a certain amount of creative play with the photographic process. Keen to make money from his invention, Talbot sold licenses for the use of the calotype to professional London-based photographers Henry Collen in 1841 and Antoine Claudet in 1844. Despite their inability to turn a profit from it, he also encouraged the formation of a photographic printing business by Henneman, the man in the diptych shown taking a photograph of a statuette. Talbot scholar Larry Schaaf says that "all known printed ephemera from the Reading Establishment can be traced to Cowderoy's reign in 1846". Unfortunately for Talbot, the Art-Union project proved to be a promotional and financial disaster, with most of the photographs fading soon after publication. Having invented negative-positive photography, the system of representation that dominated the nineteenth century, Talbot now introduced photomechanical reproduction, which would similarly dominate the twentieth.
