Historical Photography

Source

Harry Ransom Center

The first photograph, 1826

It took eight hours to expose a single image from a window in Burgundy.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce placed a polished pewter plate coated in bitumen inside a camera obscura and pointed it out the window of his estate in Le Gras, France. The resulting image — soft, ghostly, barely legible — is the oldest surviving photograph in the world. It changed how humanity remembered itself.