November 29, 2006
Sight Scene: Q&A With Molly Springfield

ARTIST MOLLY SPRINGFIELD has found a soulmate in William Henry Fox Talbot, a 19th-century British gentleman and pivotal pioneer in the field of photography. Talbot developed the calotype process of printing positive images from negatives prints. Springfield has benefited from Talbot's process: The artist is known for drawing by hand highly realistic graphite reproductions of texts, including notes from middle school and photocopies of the works of Proust.

"Gentle Reader," a show of her works on display through this weekend at Transformer Gallery, sees Springfield deviate somewhat from her traditional trompe l'oeil style by adopting Talbot's primitive photographic process. Express caught up with her this week.

EXPRESS: How did you come upon William Henry Fox Talbot's work?

SPRINGFIELD: It was by accident, in the public library, the downtown branch here in DC. I was trolling the stacks, looking for books that I might make photocopies of to draw, and I found The Pencil of Nature. It was just sitting there on the stacks. I picked it off the shelf because the title grabbed my attention. Up to that point I didn't know his work—I didn't know who Talbot was, I didn't study the history of photography, I've never taken a photography class. So it was all really new to me. I opened it up and started reading the introduction, and I got interested in how he invented photography, or positive-negative photography—basically, he was a bad drawer. That's what led to my research.


EXPRESS: What did you find in your research?

SPRINGFIELD: The show is really just a little bit of my research. I did a lot of research this past summer, I'm still doing research now. Because my work up to that point had to do with reproduction — reproduction of text and images, among other things — that was one of the concepts I was dealing with. Talbot wasn't the only person who was making discoveries in photography at the time, but what set him apart is that he realized what it was going to mean for the future of reproduction, the relationship the reproduced image would have to the original image. That was pretty exciting to me to find out: He was more of a visionary than his colleagues.

EXPRESS: Did you find kinship in his ideas?

SPRINGFIELD: I think so. What it does to an image to reproduce it, and how it elevates it or cheapens it, and the dialogue between those two camps about the reproduced image. Also, his relationship to drawing is still one of my focal points in dealing with him.

EXPRESS: Because he started photography as a technological workaround to a problem?

SPRINGFIELD: When he first started, he called them "photogenic drawings," and he considered them drawings — before this word photography came into greater use. He didn't see them as being any different than if you drew them with your hand and eye. It didn't take him long to figure out how to make a positive from a negative, but before he did, he considered those negative images to be works in their own right.

EXPRESS: Can you talk about Talbot's process? I don't think it's one that people are immediately familiar with.

SPRINGFIELD: It's pretty simple. Basically, the original Talbotype or calotype was a salt solution over a piece of paper. Talbot would put leaf or a piece of lace or something over that paper and expose it to sunlight, UV light. He was in England, and it wasn't always that sunny, so it would take anywhere from many hours to 5 minutes. In the beginning, there would only be a latent image; he refined that process over time and ended up using silver nitrate solutions. That's pretty much all the original negative was — a fancy salt print.

Then he figured out that if you did that negative on a transparent piece of paper, you could make a positive. He had help from Sir John Herschel in developing the hyposolution that fixes the image so that it won't continue to darken. That was an early problem: You could only look at them in candlelight, because if you had them in normal light they would continue to darken and finally fade away.

EXPRESS: The works in the show are made by this process?

SPRINGFIELD: The calotypes in the show are the more refined version: Silver nitrate solution on paper, then I laid my stencils on top of it, and then they were developed and fixed in the darkroom.

EXPRESS: Talbot thought the negative was equivalent to the drawing. That's obviously something you've been working around, too. What do you think changed in your process by adopting the calotype, that extra remove between the image and your hand?

SPRINGFIELD: When I first started researching Talbot, I thought I would make drawings that looked like calotypes. The more I thought about it, I thought I should make my own to understand. Once I decided to do that, I had to decide what to make them of. It didn't seem quite right to make images that he would have made — botanical specimens or frilly Victorian lace — but I thought I could reference that with the research I was doing. I had all these photocopies of the research I was doing, so I used those, and cut out the text. His typeface and his handwriting.

EXPRESS: What was the text?

SPRINGFIELD: His typeface and his handwriting. The handwritten text that are in some of the calotypes are from his research notes on the process of developing the calotypes.

EXPRESS: Like marginalia? That's something you've done in your other work.

SPRINGFIELD: Yeah. And his research notebooks — people don't have handwriting like that any more. They're really beautiful things just to look at as objects. And he says things in the notes that are often quite poetic. They weren't just kind of standard scientific notes. Even though he didn't consider himself to be an artist, to some degree he thought more like one.

EXPRESS: When you say he didn't consider himself an artist, how does that relate to what he thought about draughtsmanship being equivalent to reproduction.

SPRINGFIELD: He took himself out of the equation. I might change my mind if I find something else about that in my research. But he didn't consider himself to be an artist in the sense that he could create images on his own, even though the images he created are pretty great images.

EXPRESS: But it was an artistic problem that spurred him.

SPRINGFIELD: Yeah. I've seen his drawings; they're pretty bad.

EXPRESS: In the context of what you're , how do your calotypes differ from the drawings in the show?

SPRINGFIELD: They are more — I hate to use the word "immediate," but they are. They're not as labored, and I had a lot less control over how they ended up. I have complete control over what the drawings like, but not so much with the calotypes. I had to yield to nature to a certain extent.

EXPRESS: In your research, did you come across Talbot dealing with any of these questions?

SPRINGFIELD: He had to deal with the weather in England. He did most of his work in the summer, when it was going to be sunny. We take these things as a given now, but back then, it was much more work to do the chemistry.

EXPRESS: Which things have been borne out by his predictions about reproduction?

SPRINGFIELD: In The Pencil of Nature, he has descriptions for the plates, but the descriptions don't always match the plate. Sometimes he'll just talk about something else. I forget which plate it is, but he basically describes an x-ray — "wouldn't it be cool if we could do this? And someone will have to figure this out later, because I don't think we can do that" — that's what he says. He describes these things that have become actualities.

There's a plate in The Pencil of Nature that's called "Facsimile of an Old Printed Page." It's a photograph of a manuscript. Talbot did a lot of different photographs of manuscripts, whether they were typeset or handwritten — there's a photograph that gets reproduced every so often of a handwritten Lord Byron manuscript. He recognized what it would mean for the reproduction of texts: that you could photograph a page and reproduce it in a way that would be more economical than the printing press.

One of the calotypes is of Talbot's handwriting, saying "Copy page in black letter" (at right) — that was a note to himself to remind him to try to do that.

EXPRESS: What are some of the other things you're working with in this research?

SPRINGFIELD: I'd like to do something more about his relationship with SirJohn Herschel. The two of them were more collaborative than I was aware. Something that happened in the Transformer show is that there are all these pairs; I wasn't conscious of doing that, and I think it came from all the negative/positive work. I want to be more deliberate with that in future works about Talbot. The dual nature of photography, the relationship of positive to negative, and the relationship between those two men. Talbot couldn't have done what he did without Herschel, but unless you're a scholar of photography, Herschel's kind of a silent partner.

EXPRESS: You think that might play into the process or content of what you do next?

SPRINGFIELD: Maybe both. In terms of process, I hope it might result in terms of a collaboration between myself and someone else. That's a pretty big stretch for me, because I'm used to having complete control over what I'm working on.

EXPRESS: Have you thought about any Herschel candidates?

SPRINGFIELD: Yes. [laughs] I don't want to jinx it. It'll start to take place this spring and summer. It's tentative, but the next Talbot thing will happen in New York next fall [at Moti Hasson Gallery].

EXPRESS: Do you say calotypes or talbotypes?

SPRINGFIELD: I like both, but I use calotypes, because that was his word for them, and it comes from the Greek word for "beautiful." He recognized that other people would come along and work on this juggernaut [of photography]. Maybe if he's been less humble, he'd be as well known as [Louis Jacques Mande] Daguerre.

(Kriston Capps)