Between Pandora and Diogenes: Fox Talbot and the Gender of Archives

Abstract

Critical attention to Talbot has as yet failed to account with methodological consistency for a specific and significant way in which the archive figures as a symbolic object in his work and thought – for the way in which his understanding of visual and textual media acquires a kind of unity determined by the association of a series of terms: archiving, endlessness, and femininity. This article reconsiders key images and texts in Talbot’s work in order to re-contextualise his practices within the symbolic logic of the archive, and thus within a number of long-term transitions that concern the political, cultural, and technological spheres of later 19th-century British culture. Through this attention, and in the context of the rise of cultural and academic interest in technology and memory, the argument redefines existing historical and theoretical understanding of the gender politics of archive.