THOUSANDS of pictures and images created by the ‘father of photography’, including those he took at Lacock, have been collated into an online catalogue.

William Henry Fox Talbot is recognised as the leading pioneer of photography in the Victorian era and created some of the world’s first photographs, which were taken in Lacock.

The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford have now created a catalogue of his work collected from around the globe, which already features more than a thousand images.

Roger Watson, curator at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, said: “This is the culmination that all historians and museum curators hope that will happen.

“These pictures have been collected from all over the world and to get them all online and in one place is a major coup.

“All of the experiments that Talbot did were done at Lacock, this was his home base and most of the early images were shot here. It’s surprising how many scientists are actually good artists themselves. We get a lot of visitors from the local area, they come back again and again but we draw a lot of photography pilgrims from around the world.”

The Bodleian Libraries have spent the last two years transferring Talbot’s images into a modern online form and it is hoped that by 2018 a total of 25,000 of his images will be available to view.

“There has been nothing like this before in the history of photography,” said Professor Larry J Schaaf, project director for the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné and visiting professor of art at the University of Oxford.

To view the catalogue, visit foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk