ABSTRACT
When Fox Talbot acquired the very first permanent photographic images of living objects in 1835 using a camera obscura and simple silver chemistry, a new era was ushered in, allowing the first faithful capture of permanent records of appearance. Up to this point in time, human skin appearance had been recorded by the artist and lithographer, subjectively interpreting and translating into solid media their perception of the subject on hand. The ‘‘photograph’’ (literally ‘‘a written record of light,’’ from the Greek ‘‘uosof’’ meaning ‘‘light’’ and the Greek suffix ‘‘graph’’ denoting a transcribed record), however, was revolutionary-suddenly, life-like images reminiscent of human vision itself were being captured and printed within a few hours. This seeming miraculous advance was possible, of course, because a device was now being used that was derived from the optical principles of human vision itself-a lens apparatus to focus incident radiation and a photo-reactive array (i.e., the light-sensitive cells of the human retina), with a response spanning the 400 to 700 nm bandwidth. The advent of this new technology not only revolutionized the world of art, but also provided the clinician with the first truly objective means of recording the appearance of human biology. Within 40 years of the first Talbot photographs, the camera was being used to faithfully record the anatomy of normal and diseased skin and, in 1883, the definitive anatomy text, ‘‘Gray’s Anatomy,’’ contained clinical photographs for the first time.
