Who invented photography?
From left to right: Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot, Bayard and Florence.
Let’s start from the end
Since 1991, every August 19th has been celebrated as World Photography Day. It was the idea of Indian photography professor O.P. Sharma, later joined by Australian Korske Ara and John Morzen from the U.S. They chose this date because on August 19th, 1839, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, a very enthusiastic François Arago introduced to the world the invention that would revolutionize image-making: the daguerreotype.
The man behind that miraculous invention was Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. He was a stage designer (he patented the diorama) who, in search of greater realism in his installations, had been experimenting with the camera obscura. From those trials came, quite unexpectedly, the fixing of the captured image… and the rest, as they say, is history.
Or is it?
In reality, although we’ve agreed by convention to identify the birth of photography with the daguerreotype, this movie is a little more tangled — and has more characters.
The earliest photograph we know of is not by Daguerre but by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. A lithographer, inventor, and tireless researcher, Niépce had already been experimenting in the early 1820s with the possibility of fixing images from the camera obscura. He was driven by necessity: when his son enlisted in the army, he lost the draftsman who had helped him with his lithographs. Niépce tested countless emulsions and supports until one day in 1826 (or 1827, sources disagree), after an exposure of about eight hours according to his notes —though modern research suggests it could have lasted several days— he managed to capture a view of rooftops and landscape from his window on a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea. That moment, not August 1839, was the true eureka. Niépce called his creation a heliograph and, if you ever visit the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, you can see the original image for yourself.
Partners, but not friends
Enter the Chevalier opticians (who really deserve their own article). They introduced Niépce to Daguerre. The two met, corresponded, exchanged ideas, and in 1829 formed a partnership to jointly investigate how to fix images from the camera obscura. But poor Niépce died in 1833 and, although the partnership was technically transferred to his son, Daguerre maneuvered to take the lead alone.
To be fair —and not cast Daguerre as the villain (even if here we’re #TeamNiépce)— the breakthrough of daguerreotype chemistry, that is, the action of mercury vapor to develop the latent image, was his. Accidental, but his. He kept working to improve the results and, finally, in 1839 came Arago’s famous presentation, which also convinced the French government to buy Daguerre’s patent and make the process public. Everyone happy: France showed itself as a scientific powerhouse, Daguerre got his payday, and society finally had access to its own image. It may not sound like much today, but it was revolutionary.
Meanwhile, at Lacock Abbey…
…William Henry Fox Talbot was pursuing the very same line of research, unaware of what was going on in France. Whereas Niépce’s experiments had been driven by lithography, Talbot’s were born from his frustration using a camera lucida (another optical device you can read about here). First, he produced contact prints —the so-called photogenic drawings— and in 1835 he obtained the very first photographic negative, now preserved in the museum that bears his name.
Here lies the key difference: the daguerreotype was a direct-positive process, producing a single, unique, unrepeatable image. Talbot’s method, by contrast, required two steps: first, an inverted-tone impression —a negative— and then a second exposure onto another support to obtain the final image. At first glance, it may seem more cumbersome, but it had a fundamental advantage: copies! The negative/positive principle would define chemical photography for more than a century.
It was through his friend Herschel (yes, that Herschel, the astronomer) that Talbot learned about the daguerreotype. On the one hand, this spurred him to refine his own process; on the other, it irritated him that the credit was going to a Frenchman and not to him. The result of his improvements was the 1841 patent for the calotype (from the Greek kalos, meaning “beautiful”). Despite being cheaper and having the enormous advantage of reproducibility, it could not compete with the daguerreotype in terms of quality. Using paper as a support rather than metal, calotype images were less sharp and had a shallower tonal range (in plain words: fewer shades of gray).
Your invention? I don’t like it
Back in France, a tax clerk turned amateur scientist had also managed to fix a camera obscura image in 1837. His name was Hippolyte Bayard and, although he tried to sell his discovery, Arago —a staunch supporter of Daguerre— urged him to keep quiet so as not to overshadow the daguerreotype. Bayard was so furious that he staged the very first fake in photographic history: a self-portrait as a drowned man, exhibited in 1840 with a bitter caption on the back that went something like this:
The corpse of the gentleman you see here is that of Mr. Bayard, inventor of a process whose marvelous results you have just witnessed, or are about to witness. The Academy, the King, and all who saw his drawings —which he himself deemed imperfect— admired them as you do now. This brought him much honor, but not a single coin. The government, having already given too much to Mr. Daguerre, claimed it could do nothing for Bayard, and the unfortunate man drowned. Oh, instability of human things!
Bad sportsmanship, Monsieur Bayard…
Across the ocean
While all this drama was unfolding in Europe, things were also happening across the Atlantic. Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence, a Frenchman living in Brazil, not only invented another image-fixing process in 1833, but also coined the very word photography (incorrectly attributed ever since to Herschel). However, being so far from the political and economic center meant his contribution had no impact, and his story remained unknown until 1976, when Brazilian photographer and researcher Boris Kossoy rescued it from oblivion.
In conclusion
The names reviewed in this article are today considered the “founding fathers” of photographic technique, even if Daguerre was the one who walked away with the lion’s share. But many more contributions followed in those early years and subsequent decades —from men (and a few women) who improved optics, emulsions, processes, supports… and, in short, carried photography from hesitant chemical experiments to a truly global phenomenon. But that is another story.
Notes:
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The opening illustration was generated with Sora AI, based on public-domain portraits of Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot, and Bayard (via Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons), and the portrait of Florence by Centro de Memória – Unicamp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
