The First Photograph We Still Have

The image the world calls the first photograph is nearly invisible, undecipherable. Looking at it, most people can’t see anything clearly identifiable. And it hasn’t been in France for over a century. The photo is a pewter plate, about sixteen by twenty centimetres, coated with bitumen of Judea. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (which can only be pronounced “Nièpce”, BTW) coated it, then put it in a camera obscura at an upstairs window of his family house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in Burgundy, and pointed it at the courtyard. The exposure lasted several days. The sun crossed the sky so many times while the plate sat there that daylight ends up hitting the buildings from opposite sides, which is why when you look at it closely as a photographer it doesn’t seem to make sense (see the buildings left and right in the photo, both illuminated like the sun is in-between them). Clément Chéroux, the photography historian who has looked at it, described the experience in a 2019 book, and Libération…