Getty Curator Karen Hellman: Experimenting with a New Medium

“One of the most incredible works in the show is the earliest – William Henry Fox Talbot’s Milliner’s Window made within five years of the invention of photography. For Talbot, the window was a ground for experimentation with the new medium – the photograph in the exhibition doesn’t actually depict a window but a staged one – shelves were placed outdoors (the exposure required a great deal of light) and propped in front of a black cloth. Various ladies’ hats were arranged to simulate the look of a shop display. I also like the fact that with this motif you can carry certain “kinds” of windows through from the past to present – and so Talbot’s fake ladies’s hat shop window is placed next to Eugène Atget’s document of a woman’s wig shop in Paris at the turn of the century. Another sixty years later you find the play with reflections of a store window on a busy street corner in Harry Callahan’s Detroit.”

—Karen Hellman, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum