The Fujifilm Photo Museum on the second floor of the FUJIFILM SQUARE showroom complex is pleased to present An Exhibition of the World's Oldest Photographs, which runs from January 4 to March 31, 2010.

In 1840, the year after the development of the daguerreotype photographic technology, Englishman W.H. Fox Talbot came up with the idea for the Calotype photographic technology that forms the basis of the modern-day negative-positive printing process. The term Calotype originated from the ancient Greek word, Kalos, meaning ﾒbeautiful,ﾓ to express the beauty of photographs, As the world's first negative-positive reproduction process, this new technology was far superior to the previously-developed daguerreotype technology. In 1844, Fox Talbot published 24 photographic works including landscapes, architecture and still life all processed by the new Calotype method. This series of photos constituted the world's first ever photo collection and was entitled The Pencil of Nature.

In the following years, photographic technology shifted from wet plate photos to dry plate. However, in a series of experimental photographs, in 1873 British photographer Eadweard Muybridge published a series of consecutive photographs that successfully analyzed the movements of a horse. Muybridge expanded his subject matter to include dogs, monkeys, deer and a variety of birds, and then broadened his horizons further with photographic analysis of the human form. In 1887, in the US city of Philadelphia, he published his photo collection Animal Locomotion, the world's first collection of photographs devoted to an analysis of the movements of animals.

In this special exhibition, we are delighted to display 25 reproduction prints of photographs featured in the historic 19th century collections The Pencil of Nature by W. H. Fox Talbot and Animal Locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge.

W. H. Fox Talbot was a British physicist, who, in 1834, devised a process based on the light sensitivity of silver salts and a type of light sensitive paper that allowed him to make photographs with a camera.
Based on this technique, in 1840 he invented paper to develop the photographic image, and this became the basis for the modern-day negative-positive printing process. This process was known as Calotype, after the Greek word Kalos, meaning ﾒbeautiful.ﾓ
In 1844, Fox Talbot published 24 photographic works including landscapes, architecture and still life all processed by the new Calotype method. This series of photos constituted the world's first ever photo collection and was entitled The Pencil of Nature.

Eadweard James Muybridge was a British photographer. In 1872, the former Governor of California and founder of Stanford University, Leland Stanford, was convinced that while in the process of galloping a horse momentarily has all its feet off the ground. He entered into a wager with a friend who felt this was not the case, and Stanford requested Muybridge to take a series of photographs to prove his assertion.
From 1873 onward, Muybridge carried out a series of experimental photographic techniques and was eventually successful in taking consecutive photographs that analyzed the movements of a horse. Muybridge set up between five and twelve wet plate cameras at a converted ranch in an attempt to capture the movement of horses, and later increased this to between 24 to 30 cameras. In 1874, he first used the dry plate type of camera. He set up a series of strings and wires to correspond to the number of cameras being used, and set up a release mechanism that would operate the electromagnetic focal-plane shutters of each camera as a horse dashed past. He compiled his consecutive photographs and in 1882 published his photo collection The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography.
Muybridge expanded his subject matter to include dogs, monkeys, deer and a variety of birds, and then broadened his horizons further with photographic analysis of the human form. With the subtitle An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, Animal Locomotion was originally 11 separate volumes containing a total of 781 photographs taken between 1872 and 1885. The final compilation was published in Philadelphia in 1887 - the world's first collection of photographs devoted to an analysis of the movements of animals.
In 1886, Muybridge met with leading inventor Thomas Edison, and many believe that this meeting proved Edison with the inspiration to develop the moving picture.
We are delighted to exhibit 25 reproduction prints from Muybridge's 1887 original edition.