DAY 12

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

The First Photograph

“SMILE!”

Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765–1833) is credited with what is widely accepted as the first photograph, that is, a permanent photographic image as opposed to one that deteriorated shortly after creation or upon attempts at duplication.

Beginning in the late 1700s, Niepce experimented with various types of pre-photographic devices to record images, including lithography and an early chemical process known as photo-etching. Some of Niepce’s early photo-etchings have survived but are not considered photographs in the conventional sense. Niepce also experimented with the chemical silver chloride, which darkens when exposed to light, and ultimately looked to bitumen, which he used in his first successful attempt to record a permanent image.

He dissolved the bitumen in lavender oil, coated a sheet of pewter, and placed the sheet inside a camera obscura to capture the picture. Eight hours later, he removed it and washed it with lavender oil to remove the unexposed bitumen. Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen, and then exposed it to light. The shadowy areas of the engraving blocked light, but the whiter areas permitted light to react with the chemicals on the plate. When Niepce placed the metal plate in a solvent, gradually an image, until then invisible, appeared.

Niepce called the process “heliography” (from “helio” for sun and “graphein” for writing”), “sun prints” or “sun writing,” and his first successful, permanent image, a view from his window created in 1825, is widely considered a prototype for the modern photograph. —DJG