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In his book "Lettre à St. Lou" published in 1990 which will became "Lettre à St. Loup" in 2005, the great Daido Moriyama simply recalls: "That summer Day in St. Loup July 1827, over a period of 8 hours, the glaring sunlight which poured down over Saint Loup, a small town in France, was slwoly printed on the layer of an asphalt plate in a Camera Obscura, a square box which a man had placed there. The blurred vague scene of "The back yard of a small dovecote", copied on a plate, became a fossil of light and time, which human beings acquired for the first time and has remained intact till now. This happened because an alderly ambitious inventing maniac, whose name was Nicéphore Niépce, recorded the views out of a window of his room -his- longstanding heartelt dream-and fossilized it under the name of "Héliography", i.e. a picture drawn by the sun. This was nothing other than the first "photograph" in the world. Now, I am vacantly sitting in front of a desk, having nearly finished my editing of this photographic collection. The scene of that summer day is constantly projected in the corner of my mind and stays in view while I am trying to write this afterward; At first, it started from arough uncertain image like an X-ray picture, which you may occadionallly see as a small illustration in ap hotographic history book, and then gradually, light and objetcs made their outline clear until they displayed their appeareances in full, as though I had been standing on the very spot. Through the shadow of an open French window, not only the wall of the next house, the dovecote with atriangular roof and dense trees but also houses, the field and even white clouds in the distance are emerging in the dizzy light as if I were looking straight at them. Continuing to sense such an image. I cannot somehow help thinking that the essence of my memories and photography turns upon a certain spot in that scene of a summer day at St. loup, 163 years ago, in a quest to reproduce that light and time. Is seems to me again that the scene at St. Loup, which was recorded and fossilized, is the original scene of my photography before it was the scene of the photograph itself. Thinking and feeling in that way, I attached the momentous name of St. Loup to my photographic collection. It can be said that this collection is my private letter to St. Loup on that summer day, as well as an album of various things whic I see everyday, living in 1990."

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