Why Talbot made a broom the star of The Open Door

In The Open Door, William Henry Fox Talbot used an ordinary broom to make an ambitious argument for a new art.

The most important object in this photograph is something you might move out of the way before taking a picture. A broom leans against a doorway, its bristles fanning across the bright ground. A lantern hangs nearby. Behind them, an open door leads into shadow. Nobody has arrived to turn the scene into an obvious story.

William Henry Fox Talbot made The Open Door at Lacock Abbey. The Met dates its salted paper print to before May 1844. The subject later appeared as plate six in The Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s publication demonstrating what photography could do. This was an ambitious place to put a broom.

An ordinary subject with an extraordinary job

Talbot knew that a familiar scene could carry artistic weight. In his accompanying commentary, he pointed to seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a precedent for choosing everyday subjects. The argument was about attention: an artist could find something worth looking at where another person saw only an unremarkable corner.

That makes the doorway more than a convenient test of a camera. Talbot had the historic architecture of Lacock Abbey available to him, but here the picture concentrates on a stable entrance and working objects. The photograph asks an emerging medium to handle a very old artistic problem: how to make commonplace things hold our gaze.

Try following the broom handle. It supplies a diagonal inside the strong upright edges of the doorframe. Its fine bristles break into a soft, irregular triangle at the bottom. Across the opening, the lantern provides a smaller, firmer shape. Rough stone, bundled twigs, wood, and creeping growth all register differently in the same narrow range of tones.

The darkest area is also the invitation. Look into it and a small window begins to emerge at the back. That distant patch of light gives the shadow depth; the doorway becomes a route through the picture rather than a flat black rectangle. Your eye can enter where your body cannot.

A book made from photographs

The Pencil of Nature appeared in installments from 1844 to 1846 and contained twenty-four photographic plates. Its subjects proposed practical uses as well as artistic ones, including recording buildings, copying documents, and cataloguing possessions. Talbot’s negative-positive process made multiple paper prints possible from a negative, an essential advantage for distributing photographs in a book.

The project nevertheless struggled commercially and ended before a planned further installment. That uneven outcome is worth keeping beside the photograph’s quiet confidence. A demonstration can be culturally important without becoming a successful product. The book was both an exploration of a medium’s possibilities and an attempt to find a market for them.

Today, when making an image is often effortless, the broom can seem like an eccentric choice for an early photograph. Yet its ordinariness is the point. Talbot did not need a spectacular event to demonstrate that a camera could make a compelling picture. He needed relationships between things: a diagonal and a vertical, coarse texture and smooth darkness, an open threshold and a space just beyond clear sight.

The doorway offers no dramatic revelation. It offers a reason to stay a little longer.

Try it: Photograph what you would usually tidy away

Choose a broom, a dishcloth, or another ordinary working object. Make one photograph using its shape to connect a light area to a dark one. Move the object or change your viewpoint, rather than adding filters. Compare the two compositions.

Artwork & sources

The Open Door
William Henry Fox Talbot · before May 1844
Salted paper print from paper negative
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen and Robert Rosenkranz Gifts, 2005. Object 2005.100.498.

• The Met: The Open Door
• The Met: The Pencil of Nature
• British Library: another print of The Open Door

Image: Public domain; The Met Open Access, CC0. Image-use terms.

Historical information is drawn from the linked collection and research records. Visual readings and creative prompts are original Storied Spark contributions. Storied Spark is independent and is not affiliated with the museums.