Updated: January 2003

"Among the earliest photographs William Henry Fox Talbot made was a picture of lace now in the Talbot show at the International Center of Photography. Talbot placed the lace on a piece of paper he had sensitized with silver salts, then put them both in the sun. After a few minutes he removed the lace. The paper, reacting to sunlight, retained the impression of the fabric as a silhouette. Amazing. This image today looks mysterious: a fine, flat, abstract shape, irregular and ghostly. It takes a moment to recognize it.... Talbot photographed Byronic landscapes and also pensive men sitting in plush armchairs gazing dreamily into the ether. The Rembrandtish quality of his prints, softly accentuated by the texture of the paper, enhanced the atmosphere of moody poetry. He contrived stage scenes of laborers, who posed holding saws and hammers or stood beside ladders, pretending to work or do who knows what. Shadowy streets and university buildings, empty (because the photographs required long exposures and so couldn't capture people moving), look ghostly like ruins. Views of Paris make the city seem stonily inert." —The New York Times

"The remarkable thing about the English gentleman-scholar William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) is not so much that he invented photography (perfecting the negative-positive process in the early eighteen-forties) but that he immediately followed up his scientific achievements with artistic ones. His work is a perfect balance of values and aesthetics in the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic movement.... While Talbot's 'photogenic drawings,' as he originally called them, might not blow away the conceptualists among us, the sheer breadth of his output and expanse of his curiosity will." —The New Yorker

"...beautiful, instructive, and deeply-moving...reveals how photograph, at least as Talbot used it, marries the disparate disciplines of science and art." —New York Newsday

"Talbot, an amateur scientist with a passion for chemistry and optics, set out to permanetly capture these fugitive scenes. The results of his efforts was a form of representation whose impact on modern art, not to mention modern life, has been immeasurable: the mass-reproducible photograph." —Time Out New York

"These images represent nothing less than that first moment when, hesitantly, we dare to imagine that we can see ourselves." —New York Post

"...gathers the photography pioneer's sublime record of daily life at his estate in Wiltshire, England, and 'photogenic drawings' of flowers and leaves, patterns of lace, and other subjects, many of which were among the world's first negative-to-positive prints." —New York Magazine

"...focuses on the work of this pioneering photographer who invented te negative-to-positive process in 1839." —Time Out New York

"...never-before-published images of landscapes, architectural studies, and portraits from the archive of the photography pioneer." —Stern Portfolio #30