Photography is in many ways a magical medium. Remote communities are recorded as reacting to it with fear and suspicion, believing the camera had captured their souls along with their images. Even in our present-day society, where it’s become commonplace, it preserves an eerie edge, thanks to its facility for preserving fragments of time. This is particularly true of pictures from the early decades of photography, which often have a ghostly quality for purely technical reasons. And it’s this quality I tried to evoke in Caught in the Light.
The tantalizing fact is that photography could have been invented many decades before it actually was. We might easily have had photographs of Nelson or Napoleon. But it wasn’t to be. Not until William Fox Talbot started his experiments at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire in the 1830s was photography born. Fifty years earlier, however – yes, fifty years – Elizabeth Fulhame, wife of an Edinburgh doctor, Thomas Fulhame, was using photographic techniques to print patterns on cloth, only to abandon her researches in the face of the misogynistic indifference of the scientific establishment, as she recalled in her book, View to a New Art, published in 1794.
Sadly, we know very little of the life of Elizabeth Fulhame. The character of Marian Esguard in Caught in the Light is, however, in many ways a tribute to her. What if someone really had perfected the technique of photography before Fox Talbot? And what if the photographs they took had survived, hidden away somewhere, to the present day? It’s a genuine and fascinating possibility.
Such photographs, were they to exist, would, of course, be worth a fortune. And where’s there a fortune there are always fortune-hunters. That’s what turned a speculation about the early nineteenth century history of photography into a late twentieth century thriller: Caught in the Light.
