William Henry Fox Talbot: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

There are countless photographs around and they all seem so permanent and so immediate that it comes as almost a shock to view the excellent reproductions of these pioneering images and find them so fragile, almost evanescent, and with a timeless quality that the best photographs (as the best art) contain. The Getty Museum holds about 350 pictures made by the photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, and 50 of them are reproduced and discussed in this attractive volume.

They date from 1836 to 1858 and range from images of plants to a full‐scale view of the Boulevards of Paris....