Look closely at the image above and you’ll see a shoe-shiner and his customer, thought to be the first people caught by a camara.
They had been the only figures on the busy Boulevard du Temple in Paris to stay still long enough – around five minutes – to register in the long-exposure frame.
Taken 12 years after the earliest known photograph, the image was made in 1838 by French scientist and artist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre using his nascent daguerreotype process. A few months later, when Daguerre’s studio was destroyed by fire, ‘Boulevard du Temple’ was one of fewer than 25 of his early images to survive.
The new book This is Photography: The First 200 Years, edited by Nathalie Herschdorfer, charts the journey of an ever-evolving medium that offers us myriad perspectives on the world.
We bring you six groundbreaking moments from that journey.
1. The first people ever caught on camera (see image above)
‘Boulevard du Temple, 1838’, daguerreotype by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851). Credit: Bavarian National Museum
2. The world’s first photobook
‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843’, cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Credit: Spencer Collection, the New York Public Library
3. Photography as a tool of fiction
‘Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid, 1858’, albumen silver print from glass negative by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection
4. Redefining the boundaries of the known world
‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1861’, albumen silver print from glass negative by Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (1826-1900). Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection
5. Challenging racial stereotypes
‘Washington, D.C. Mrs Ella Watson, a government charwoman, with three grandchildren and her adopted daughter, 1942’, gelatin silver print by Gordon Parks (1912-2006). Credit: Farm Security Administration Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC
6. The first photo sent from a phone
‘Sophie Lee Kahn birth picture, 11 June 1997’, camera-phone image by Philippe Kahn (born 1952). Credit: The Lee-Kahn Foundation/Philippe Kahn
This is Photography: the First 200 Years is published by Thames & Hudson, £40.
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