ar X iv : a st ro - p h / 97 08 07 5 v 1 8 A ug 1 99 7 The Hubble Deep Field : Introduction and Motivation

Although it is just over a year since the data was made public, the HDF exposure has stimulated considerable progress towards our understanding of the faint galaxy population. I present a brief personal account of the history of faint galaxy studies culminating in the HDF, and describe what I consider to be the main highlights thus far from this remarkable image. The HDF has given considerable impetus to studies of galaxy evolution and this has led to the emergence of a convincing empirical framework. Further exploitation of deep HST images in conjunction with ground-based 2-D spectroscopy will assist in the physical understanding of the evolutionary processes involved.