(FORTUNE Magazine) – One thing that has always distinguished FORTUNE from other business magazines--and from magazines in general--is our ambitious, creative use of photography to document the course of commerce.

When Henry Luce drafted his prospectus for FORTUNE in 1929, he envisioned "...the most beautiful magazine yet attempted in this country--so strikingly illustrated that nearly every page will be a work of art."

Luce delivered. In FORTUNE's first issue, dated February 1930, the American photo essay was born with Margaret Bourke-White's depiction of the meatpacking giant, Swift & Co. Luce told Bourke-White that her camera should explore "every corner of industry from the steam shovel to the board of directors" to produce "the most dramatic photographs of industry that had ever been taken."

So Bourke-White, and such other famous photographers as Walker Evans and Alfred Eisenstaedt, marched out into the world and came back with stunning photography that helped make early editions of FORTUNE some of the most prized magazines ever produced.

Beautiful as much of the past can be, times change. Just as in baseball you can't always play in the tradition-filled old park, in publishing today there is an ever-growing emphasis on utility for the reader, practicality, and, frankly, efficient allocation of resources.

Don't get me wrong. FORTUNE is still distinguished by its photography. We attract many of the best photographers in the world, and thus bring you the most compelling photos in business journalism, owing in large part to the skills and efforts of our picture editor, Michele McNally, and our art director, Margery Peters--and, of course, their talented staffs. But those early years of FORTUNE constituted a true Golden Age.

Now here's the good news: We've discovered more than 130,000 images in our basement--technically, the newly digitizing Time Inc. Picture Collection. And in each issue we plan to share one of them with you on the back page of our magazine. We hope you enjoy this glimpse into our archive as much as we enjoy combing through it for evocative moments from FORTUNE's past.

John W. Huey Jr. MANAGING EDITOR