A graduate of Cambridge University with wide-ranging
interests including chemistry, mathematics, and botany, Egyptology and Assyriology,
philosophy, philology, and art history, Talbot was nonetheless a frustrated artist.
In the late 1830s, he devised a means of making pictures with light and
chemistry alone. The basic principle of his process— creating a camera negative
from which multiple positive images could be printed—remained at the core of
nearly all subsequent photography until the digital age.

Only a decade old in
this photograph, the Bridge of Sighs at St. John’s College is named after the

similarly shaped covered bridge in Venice.