Photogram of the Day

This beautiful image of an insect's wing is a photogram by William Henry Fox Talbot, born on this day in 1800. Frustrated by his efforts at tracing images projected in a camera obscura, Fox Talbot took to experimenting with objects placed directly onto light-sensitive paper, producing minutely detailed and hyperrealistic photograms - a kind of photography without cameras. Like many such very early images, they have a strangely haunting quality.