"In Focus: William Henry Fox Talbot: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum"

The Getty’s In Focus series produces very small books that represent a much larger scholarly effort. A major portion of the text of these derives from a closed conference of invited scholars who undertake to explore the full dimensions of the subject at hand. The Talbot volume, while fitting squarely into this pattern, represented an even more ambitious undertaking, unusual for the series.

When the Getty began constructing its massive photography collection, it built its core from the acquisition of a number of significant private collections. These included, amongst others, the European collections of André Jammes and Bruno Bischofberger and the American ones of Arnold Crane and Daniel Wolf. These figures, especially the Parisian-based Jammes, began building their collections when the field of history of photography was quite young. As such, they were able to identify and acquire material of exceptional rarity and quality, in many cases items that have had no parallel in the marketplace since. Once the Getty’s collection became public, it sought to acquire well selected items that would fill lacuna in their core holdings.

Schaaf had been assembling data on Talbot since the 1970s and was asked by the Getty to catalogue this special material as a foundation for the In Focus book. He was able to relate their holdings to Talbot artifacts found throughout the world (an expanded version of this is the on-line Catalogue Raisonné project currently underway). This greatly expanded the knowledge of these items and provided a substantial foundation for the conference that followed. The Talbot In Focus book was the first one in the series where the Getty accepted that colour reproductions throughout were necessary in order to present a true picture of these visual documents.