Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'The Waking Dream', Edinburgh

AT FIRST sight William Henry Fox Talbot's Botanical Specimen looks like nothing much at all: a smudged field of lilac blue on a tiny piece of scrap paper. Closer inspection reveals the ghostly outline of an unidentifiable plant, a faint silhouette of leaf and stem and bloom, traced upon its surface. There it is: the first photograph ever taken.
 
It is also the first picture you see in ''The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century'', an engrossing and labyrinthine display of photographs from New York's Gilman Paper Company Collection currently on show at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. Talbot's picture of a flower is presented here as a generative object, containing within it the seeds of a new visual form. Photography announces itself, at its beginning, as a medium that will simultaneously affirm and resist the transience of all things, a medium that will memorialise the temporary. Talbot sent some of his pictures to his sister-in-law in the early 1830s and she wrote back to thank him for sending her ''such beautiful shadows''. An interesting choice of words, that - suggesting a congruence between the world as recorded by the photographer and the fallen world of Plato's cave, where things can only be experienced as flickering shadows of their true essences. The melancholy implicit in all photographs was recognised early.
 
The photograph, supposedly the most objective form of visual record, has a history of provoking those who ponder it to flights of fancy and arcane metaphorical speculation. The history of the medium is inseparable from the history of the meanings that have been attached to it.
 
Early photographic experiments were seen as modern miracles, a perception that was reinforced by the processes employed. Talbot's Botanical Specimen, made by laying a...

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