“View from the Window at Le Gras,” original plate (1826-1827) (Photo: Nicéphore Niépce via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The oldest known photography was taken in 1826 or 1827 by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The image, titled View from the Window at Le Gras, shows some roofs and the neighboring countryside. However, just because this is the oldest surviving photograph, doesn’t mean it was the first one that was ever taken. By looking at further evidence, it may just turn out that photography is already 200 years old.
French photography publication Réponses Photo proposes looking at Niépce’s earliest successful attempts. Aiming for a specific date, the magazine suggests September 16, 1824 as the day photography was invented.
“But why this date of 1824 precisely? To do this, we must go back in time, now more than two centuries ago, and focus on the life of Nicéphore Niépce,” they write. “A brilliant engineer, he was born in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment in Chalon-sur-Saône, the epicenter of the birth of photography.”
While Niépce didn’t coin the term “photography”—this is attributed to English scientist John Herschel, who created the cyanotype in the early 1840s—he aimed to capture light to create an image throughout the late 18th century and early 19th century. Experimenting with different techniques, he finally got it right on September 16, 1824, when he shared his findings in a letter addressed to his brother.
“With the help of the improvement of my processes, I have managed to obtain a point of view such as I could desire, and which I hardly dared to flatter myself with, because until then, I had only had very incomplete results. This point of view was taken from your room on the Gras side […] The image of the objects is represented there with astonishing clarity and fidelity, down to the smallest details, and with their most delicate nuances,” Niépce wrote.
Although it may not seem like a lot of time, the 1824 start for the timeline of photography not only honors Niépce’s earliest findings, but also makes academics wonder and wish for the emergence of these even-older images. Sadly, this is a long-shot, as the first image ever may have not been preserved due to Niépce’s style of recording early photographs to stone and then sanding them down to reuse them. Still, a finding of this nature would be a marvelous way to celebrate a landmark anniversary of the medium that came to revolutionize the way we see and document the world.
While the oldest surviving photograph is from either 1826 or 1827, French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s earliest successful attempts took place in 1824.
Nicéphore Niépce. (Photo: Musée Nicéphore Niépce via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
It seems that the art of photography is already 200 years old.
Colorized reoriented enhancement of “View from the Window at Le Gras” (Photo: Nicéphore Niépce via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
h/t: [PetaPixel]
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