“The world may not know who painted the first painting or who carved the first sculpture, but we do know who made the first photograph in a modern sense. And it wasn’t Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, whose 1826 invention of a photomechanical printing plate was indeed epochal, or Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre.” It was William Henry Fox Talbot. He’s the man who “set certain basic terms by which photography operated for almost the last 150 years. He invented the photographic negative, the process by which light creates a negative image on a piece of chemically treated paper, which can then be reproduced – once or in great quantity – in a positive form.”