This Exhibit Of Pioneering Photographer William Henry Fox Talbot Will Reboot Your iPhone Photo Habit

William Henry Fox Talbot invented photography to make up for his artistic bumbling. The idea came to him on his honeymoon, as he struggled to make simple landscape drawings. For half a decade, beginning in 1834, he struggled to "fix a shadow" with chemicals. By the time he succeeded, a French painter named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre had perfected an alternate technique.

Talbot's blotchy paper prints never stood a chance against the silvery daguerreotype. The astronomer John Herschel succinctly expressed the difference when he proclaimed the daguerreotype to be "a miracle. Talbot's [photographic] drawings are child's play in comparison." (And Herschel was Talbot's friend.)

An important new exhibition at the London Science Museum and accompanying book confirm Herschel's judgment, though not necessarily in the way he meant it. While the daguerreotype was a strikingly successful commercial product, Talbot's prints remained playfully experimental. In his quixotic quest for financial viability, Talbot tried photographing everything from buildings and statues to lacework and stained glass windows. He shot rocking horses and candlesticks and disembodies hands. Though some of his prints are beautiful in the traditional sense – notably the Sun Pictures in Scotland series he published in the 1840s – his work is far more interesting for his obsessively curious exploration of his immediate surroundings.

Photography in Talbot's era was an arduous process, especially in comparison to the instant gratification of an iPhone snapshot. However his quirkiest photos foreshadow the offhand immediacy of smartphone photography. They are arguably the first examples of photography as a way of seeing: the photographic process as an act of focused observation. In that sense, they serve as a reminder of how valuable digital photography can be as a practice, regardless of the finished product.

But it would be a mistake simply to classify Talbot as a shutterbug avant la lettre (or to see him as nothing more than a technological pioneer). His best photographs are also artistically radical because they are not traditionally beautiful. Images such as Four City Views with Test Patches are amongst the first (inadvertent) examples of an aesthetic completely outside painterly depiction, imaginable only through the lens of photographic reproduction.

Talbot wanted nothing more dearly than to draw and paint like a Romantic. Through his childsplay, he provided the raw material for transcending Romanticism.

 Follow me on Twitter, read about my latest art project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, order my new book, You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, to be published this month by Oxford University Press, and listen to an All Things Considered interview about the book on NPR.