Stopping time: Henry Fox Talbot and the origins of freeze-frame photography

As an image-making tool for scientists studying the transient, instantaneous photography has long been seen as opening up a visual realm previously inaccessible to the inferior testimony of the human eye. But when photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot took the first photograph of a moving object by the light of an electric spark in 1851, he was guided by existing visual practices designed to create instantaneous vision in the eye itself. Exploring the background behind the peculiar subject of his experiment – a mechanically spinning disc – reveals a hidden prehistory of spark-illuminated photography: physicists’ pre-photographic techniques for stopping time.