Anna Artaker: THE PENCIL OF NATURE

For her exhibition the Austrian artist Anna Artaker has borrowed the title of the publication with which William Henry Fox Talbot introduced his photographic method in 1844–46: The Pencil of Nature. To produce the first photograms, Talbot pressed plants onto sensitised paper with glass plates and exposed them to the sun to fix them as negative silhouettes. Anna Artaker combines this moment of the “birth of photography from the spirit of botany” with nature printing, a technique perfected in the mid-nineteenth century by the k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei (Imperial and Royal Court and State Printing Works) in Vienna. Like the photogram, nature printing is also based on contact with nature “that gives its very self to printing” and produces faithful images not only of but also through nature. For the exhibition Anna Artaker has transposed plants seen on Talbot’s photograms into contemporary nature prints. Besides the results of this complex printing process, the exhibition also shows the different intermediate stages of the process and an original print from Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature from the Bank Austria FOTOGRAFIS Collection.