William Henry Fox Talbot - a scientist, mathematician, author and artist - is credited with being the inventor of photography as we know it. In mid-1834 he began to experiment with light-sensitive chemistry, and in January 1839 he announced his invention of the photogenic drawing, two weeks after Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre's daguerreotype process debuted in France. Talbot's improved process, the calotype, was introduced in 1840. This invention, which shortened exposure times and facilitated making multiple prints from a single negative, became the basis for photography as it is practised...

Gustave Le Gray's life was as romantic as any novel. A young painter in Rome, then a fashionable portrait photographer in Paris, Le Gray received commissions from Napoleon III, and astonished viewers with his painterly landscapes and ravishing seascapes. Facing bankruptcy, he fled Paris with
Alexandre Dumas to Palermo, traveled to the Middle East, and finally settled in Egypt, where he became drawing master to the ruler's children and continued to make photographs until his death in 1884.

Le Gray's work had remained largely unknown by the general public until he...

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) has been described as one of the Finest portraitists of the nineteenth century-in any medium. Raised in a well-connected and creative family, Cameron led an unconventional life for a woman of the Victorian age. After devoting herself to an artistic and literary salon at her home on the Isle of Wight and raising eleven children, Cameron took up photography in her late forties. Over the next fourteen years, she produced more than a thousand strikingly original and often controversial images. Her searching portraits of her friends and...