At Lacock Abbey, an elegant window���comprising a
graceful, vertical Elizabethan screen of small diamond
shaped panes protruding from a robust stone-wall���is
arguably the most famous window in the world. In the
early 1830s Henry Fox Talbot, employing the earliest of
photographic techniques, recorded permanent images
of the window, made possible by his invention of the
negative, itself made possible by the creation of a device,
itself a chamber with a window.
For the first time in history, there existed an independent
mechanical device, appended to our eyes, that served
as a mechanism to permanently memorialize moments.
Fox Talbot stood in his camera (his room) with a camera
to eye, to space, photographing through and beyond the
eye���the window���to the world beyond the walls of the
building, beyond the precincts of the made environment,
to nature.
