"Despite being honoured for having invented photography, William Henry Fox Talbot has yet to be sufficiently appreciated as a photographer in his own right. It might surprise some to know, for example, that Talbot made more than 5,000 individual images during his relatively short photographic career, and in the process established many of the medium's most familiar genres and practices. His work is extraordinarily diverse, including photographs taken as scientific proofs, as legal evidence, as artistic experiments, as documentary records, as architectural studies, as copies of existing images, as keepsakes for friends and family, as pictures for public exhibition, as prints for sale, as illustrations in books and as mechanical reproductions. Talbot was a prominent intellectual, counting some of Europe's leading scholars as close friends and colleagues, and his photographs always bear the mark of his intelligent and enquiring mind. Whether consciously or not, they also reflect on and embody the social and cultural issues of his time. For all these reasons, Talbot's photography continues to offer provocative challenges for the contemporary viewer."