When Louis Daguerre announced 170 years ago that he had invented photography, a retired British member of Parliament declared that he had a prior claim. William Henry Fox Talbot had been working since 1834 to capture nature using a camera lucida and a camera obscura, both popular drawing aids at the time. His paper negatives, from which multiple prints could be made (unlike the daguerrotype), were exhibited at the Royal Institution in London soon after Daguerre revealed his discovery. In celebration of this public, if disputed, debut, photography is the subject of this issue, which features stunning work by Hiroshi Sugimoto, James Welling, Sophie Ristelhueber, and others.

Talbot’s first photographs, which he termed "photogenic drawings," were made with light-sensitive paper in boxes so tiny that his wife described them as "mousetrap cameras."He would leave these for daylong exposures around the grounds of his stately home, Lacock Abbey, and wrote that the thumbnail-size pictures he snared "without great stretch of the imagination might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist." His subjects ranged from foggy landscapes to the ghostly forms of botanical specimens or pieces of lace. "The resulting effect," he boasted, "is altogether Rembrandtish."

Hiroshi Sugimoto, interviewed here, has bought dozens of Talbot’s original negatives and reprinted them for the first time since the 1830s and ’40s, experimenting with the same chemicals that Talbot used as he tried to stabilize the fugitive image. "A good photographer," Sugimoto says in recognition of his polymath hero, "always has to be part scientist."

In the self-portrait Sugimoto created for our cover, he dons a pair of joke glasses with camera-thick lenses and poses as, in his description, a "blind photographer." He adds, "I seldom shoot a live person. I used the same light as I did for the wax portraits," referring to his Holbeinesque photos of wax figures, "so it became very dead looking." Sugimoto plays with the ambiguity inherent in photography. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, his 1980 meditation on the frozen moment, photographs can both prefigure death and effect a resurrection. "Editor's Letter" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.