First photograph

The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera is View from the Window at Le Gras, made by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826–27 at his country house in Burgundy. It shows rooftops and buildings seen from an upstairs window. The exposure took many hours, possibly several days.^[1] As a result the sun lights both sides of the buildings at once, because it had time to go round. It is the only photograph in history that took longer to take than to look at.

How it was made

Niépce coated a pewter plate with bitumen, a kind of natural asphalt that hardens when exposed to light. After the long exposure he washed the plate with solvent, which dissolved the bitumen that had stayed soft in the darker areas, leaving a faint image.^[2] The plate is now kept at the University of Texas at Austin.

Niépce called the process heliography, from the Greek for “sun drawing”. The Sun is therefore credited, in a sense, with the first photograph, and is still waiting for its copy.

The first person

In 1838 Louis Daguerre photographed a busy Paris street, the Boulevard du Temple. The exposure was several minutes, so moving carriages and walkers left no trace and the street appears empty, except for a man standing still having his boots polished. He is thought to be the first person ever to appear in a photograph, and is in it only because he stood still for long enough.

• c. 1826: rooftops (hours or days).
• 1838: one man (minutes).
• Now: the same rooftops, instantly, with a filter.

See also

• Window – where it was taken
• Sun – which did most of the work
• Shadow – which went on both sides

References

1. Bitumen, B. (1827/2002). Sun Drawing. Fictional reprint.
2. Exposure, E. (2009). “How Long Exactly?” Photographic History 1: 1.
3. Bootblack, B. (1838/2015). Hold Still. Boulevard Books.