The First Photograph of a Human Being: A Photo Taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838

"You've like­ly heard the rea­son peo­ple nev­er smile in very old pho­tographs. Ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy could be an excru­ci­at­ing­ly slow process. With expo­sure times of up to 15 min­utes, por­trait sub­jects found it impos­si­ble to hold a grin, which could eas­i­ly slip into a pained gri­mace and ruin the pic­ture. A few min­utes rep­re­sent­ed a marked improve­ment on the time it took to make the very first pho­to­graph, Nicéphore Niépce's 1826 "heli­o­graph." Cap­tur­ing the shapes of light and shad­ow out­side his win­dow, Niépce's image "required an eight-hour expo­sure," notes the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor, "long enough that the sun­light reflects off both sides of the build­ings.""

"Niépce's busi­ness and invent­ing part­ner is much more well-known: Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who went on after Niépce's death in 1833 to devel­op the Daguerreo­type process, patent­ing it in 1839. That same year, the first self­ie was born. And the year pri­or Daguerre him­self took what most believe to be the very first pho­to­graph of a human, in a street scene of the Boule­vard du Tem­ple in Paris. The image shows us one of Daguerre's ear­ly suc­cess­ful attempts at image-mak­ing, in which, writes NPR's Robert Krul­wich, "he exposed a chem­i­cal­ly treat­ed met­al plate for ten min­utes. Oth­ers were walk­ing or rid­ing in car­riages down that busy street that day, but because they moved, they didn't show up.""

Early photographic processes required very long exposure times, sometimes up to 15 minutes or many hours, making steady facial expressions impractical. Nicéphore Niépce produced an 1826 heliograph that required an eight-hour exposure to capture light and shadow outside his window. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre later developed the daguerreotype and patented it in 1839. In an earlier street photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, a ten-minute exposure recorded a stationary man while other moving people and carriages did not appear, demonstrating how motion affected early image capture.

Read at Open Culture