[Emma Charlotte Dillwyn Llewelyn's Album]

Within a week of Talbot's public presentation of the photogenic drawing process, John Dillwyn Llewelyn was trying his hand at the new technique. He owed his early introduction to the invention to his wife, the inventor's first cousin Emma Thomasina Talbot. This page from an album belonging to Llewelyn's daughter Emma Charlotte (1837- 1929) combines the two principal means of photographic picture-making invented by Talbot: an image made by direct contact with an object (see no. 1) and a camera image printed from a negative. The picture presents two characteristic pursuits of educated Victorian women, art and science, the dual poles that also characterized amateur photography itself.

Many ninete...