Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock 18th October 2016

For our first University trip at Bath Spa we visited the Fox Talbot Museum and Abbey in Lacock. I had never visited Lacock before and was surprised to find out that the Cloisters and surrounding rooms of the Abbey were used to film the early Harry Potter Films. Lacock is located 45 minutes from Bath in the village of Wiltshire, 3 miles from Chippenham. The village contains an array of old cottages with various architectural styles and I was pleasantly surprised by the photogenic landscape of the location, weather was nice which also made for nice photos.

Lacock Abbey Cloisters

The Fox Talbot Museum contained a temporary exhibit by Sophie Gerrard called 'Drawn To The Land' which was a series of photographs which documents the lives of female farmers living in Scotland. I made recordings and took pictures of this exhibit as it may become useful for my next project which is named environmental portraiture.
The museum itself explores the life of Fox Talbot in his efforts to create the first negative and gives a detailed timeline of the history of Photography including 2 working camera obscuras. I was surprised to find out the camera obsurca is an ancient method dating back to 1000AD. I also found out about Fox Talbots passion for botany which is why alot of his subjects were plants.

My favourite part of the trip was looking round the abbey in which fox talbot resided in, all rooms were well kept with traditional decor and alot of the original furnishings. I got to witness the subject of the first ever negative 'Latticed Window' which is one of the windows in the Abbey.