Out of respect to busy schedules during the holiday season, I’ll try to keep these posts pleasantly brief. A fortnight ago I headed towards the Cambridge University Library in order to renew my reader’s pass. The forbidding exterior of the building belies the delights that awaits one inside. Much of my early research on Sir John Herschel was done at Cambridge, both at St Johns College and in Special Collections in the Library, for like Talbot, Herschel was a Cambridge man. The Library is on the Western periphery of the University, seemingly almost out in the country across the River Cam. As I was headed there I recalled another one of my favourite Talbot photographs, that of Clare Bridge.

The symmetrical reflection of the graceful ancient bridge is a scene of tranquility. Talbot’s imagination transformed this image into a giant pair of eyeglasses, one that has always reminded me of the signs one used to see hanging outside opticians’ shops. Spectacles are a good metaphor for the evolution of Talbot’s photographic vision by the time he composed this. His new art had become his spectacles, helping him to see the world around him in a way that he never could before.

Although Talbot was a Cambridge man he photographed there very little. The superior railway connections to Oxford had exaggerated the relative distances of the two universities from Lacock Abbey. Encumbered by large cameras and bottles of chemicals and supplies, the temptation of more expeditious transport was too much to resist. Hence we have many more views of Oxford than of Cambridge.

Talbot often photographed the modern and many of his images are deceptive to us, looking ancient and stable when in fact they depict a society in flux. The university towns of Oxford and Cambridge offered Talbot a wealth of subjects that were new, but equally many that long pre-dated the birth of photography. Such is the case here. Founded in 1326, Clare had been destroyed twice by fire and the medieval buildings were replaced in the first half of the 17th century. In order to facilitate access to open country (that same countryside where the University Library is now), its scholars petitioned King’s College to sell them a parcel of land to build a bridge. It took some political wrangling to get King’s to part with the land, but eventually it was agreed and in 1640 Thomas Grumball’s graceful design was erected. Tourists today might get the impression that the bridge was erected in order to avoid interfering with the punts being poled down the river. However, it was actually cholera that provided the less romantic motivation. The bridge had originally been requested by the scholars to “enable the members of the College to escape into the fields in time of infection” without the danger of wandering down the town’s crowded streets.

This tiny image (about 6×9 cm.) is also fascinating as an artifact. The haphazard trim of its paper base is strangely compelling. It is varnished, but curiously only on the verso. Varnishing was attempted as a means of preserving the prints (and as we will see in a future post, it sometimes did a good job of that). But why varnish the verso? It made the print more transparent when held up to the light, but Talbot had long ago abandoned the idea of window frames when the sunlight rapidly degraded the photographic prints. Could he have varnished this later with the thought of using it as the master for a photogravure? This is just possible, for the positive had to be printed in direct contact with the sensitised metal plate and an uneven coat of varnish would have disrupted the optical contact.

Finally, there is another aspect to this photograph that is not apparent from this print. The negative survives and has been cut down to the size of this print. However, another print from an earlier state of this negative reveals that Talbot’s photographic outing that day was perhaps not as tranquil as the finished photograph makes it appear. The camera was very severely tilted, perhaps inevitable when placing the tripod on the bank of the River Cam. It took Talbot’s sheers to restore the sense of calm symmetry.

Larry J Schaaf

• Questions or Comments? Please contact digitalsupport@bodleian.ox.ac.uk • WHFT, Clare Bridge, Cambridge, salt print from a calotype negative, varnished on verso only, ca. 1845, National Media Museum, Bradford, print 1937-2300, negative 1937-2275; Schaaf 299. • The history of the bridge is drawn from John Reynolds Wardale, Clare College (London: F.E. Robinson and Co., 1899), p. 62. • The print made from the earlier state of the negative, when it measured 7.3 x 9.7 cm., is in the British Library Fox Talbot Loan Collection, London, LA574.