Early Photographs.

The invention of photography was pioneered by four major figures:

Joseph Nicephore Niepce -
Produced the world's first ever photographic image circa 1826, using the medium of heliography (sun drawing), which depicted the view from a window in a French village. The image was created with a sheet of pewter coated in light capturing liquids which was placed inside a camera obscura (darkened chamber) and exposed for 8 hours. It is not technically a photograph.

William Henry Fox Talbot -
A British inventor who created the calotype process (paper negative) in 1841 and is therefore responsible for the forerunner of photographic processes which was relied upon until digital began to take over in the 21st century.


Louis Daguerre -
A French chemist who was accountable for the first publicly announced photographic process, the daguerreotype, which he produced in collaboration with Niepce in 1839. The process involved forming a image using the alloy of mercury and silver.

Hippolyte Bayard -
A French photographer who invented his own photographic process, direct positive printing. Bayard claimed to have invented this process prior to Daguerre's daguerreotype process, which was announced before his and in turn detrimented him of being recognized as one the fundamental inventors or photography. In response to the unfairness he felt had been cast upon him, he acquired his process to create a portrait of himself acting as a suicide victim.

                    Self Portrait as a Drowned Man cica 1840.


TASK: Find and date an image from each pioneer -

                                                    William Henry Fox Talbot

Latticed window in Lacock Abbey taken in 1835. A print made from the oldest photographic negative in existence.

                                           Joseph Nicephore Niepce

Another example of the earliest known photographic activity created by Niepce using the heliograph process in 1825.

                                           Louis Daguerre

"Boulevard Du Temple" taken in 1838 by Daguerre. The first known photograph to capture a person, in the ten minutes it took to expose it the only people who stood still long enough to be depicted were a man and a shoe-shine boy.

                                           Hippolyte Bayard

"Paris Montmartre" 1842.