02/02/2026
⛔️ The Best Photo in the World
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Photography began with the discovery of two crucial principles:
the first was the projection of images by the camera obscura, and the second was the discovery that certain materials change visibly when exposed to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions indicating any attempts to capture images with light-sensitive materials before the 18th century.
**“View from the Window at Le Gras” (1826 or 1827)** is believed to be the oldest surviving camera photograph.
Original heliograph (left) and colorized version (right).
Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze used a light-sensitive slurry to capture images of cut-out letters on a bottle. However, he did not attempt to make these results permanent.
Around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented attempts to capture camera images, although unsuccessfully in making them permanent. His experiments produced detailed images, but Wedgwood and his assistant Humphry Davy found no way to fix them.
In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce succeeded for the first time in permanently fixing an image captured with a camera, although it required at least eight hours or even several days of exposure, and the earliest results were very crude.
Niépce’s associate, Louis Daguerre, went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process. Daguerreotypes required only minutes of exposure and produced clear, finely detailed results.
On August 2, 1839, Daguerre presented the details of the process to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.
On August 19, the technical details were published at a joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts at the Institut de France.
(In exchange for granting the rights of the invention to the public, Daguerre and Niépce were awarded generous lifetime pensions.)
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