It was over 170 years ago that Henry Fox Talbot created permanent images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution, shortly afterwards patenting his process as a "calotype". In a similar time-frame, Louis Daguerre created images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and ‘develop’ with warmed mercury – the Daguerreotype process.
The excitement to have been able to create an image without using paint or canvas, this new extraordinary mix of science and alchemy, might well have seemed to many all that time ago that both Talbot and Daguerre were dabbling in magic. They may well have been the magicians of yesteryear, but who are the magicians of today?

Photography is no longer the pastime of the few, nor is it the travail of the lone enthusiast in his darkroom breathing the dull fumes of harsh chemicals. It is now within everybody’s compass to create an image of depth, an image of significance and an image of beauty.