Shot by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a French Inventor, this was taken from the rear, top floor window of his residence with his self designed camera Obscura (primitive camera) in 1826 or 1827
Shot by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a French Inventor, this was taken from the rear, top floor window of his residence with his self designed camera Obscura (primitive camera) in 1826 or 1827 by exposing a 16.2 cm × 20.2 cm bitumen-coated photo engraving plate onto on his windowsill for nearly eight hours with some researchers suspecting the exposure could have gone on for several days.
Josehp Niepce is today widely acknowledged as the worlds first photographer and his work “View from the window at Le Gras” is the oldest result of a “Photographic Process”. But he and his work were relatively unkown during and for nearly a century after his lifetime. By 1827 Niepce was showcasing his work in the United Kingdom at various shows and to important people. But he never received a huge reception. He called his process “Heliography”
Only by 1952 , Photohisotorian Helmut Gernsheim learnt of the existence of this work from records of exhibits Niepce participated in. He traced it and with the help of the Kodak Eastman Company tried to reproduce a print from the plate. But to various technical reasons, the first reproduction turned out very bad, although with reasonable detail. Then Helmut personaly spent 11 hourstouching up the print using water colours.
It is this third reproduction of the print (the first by Niepce having been lost in the intervening century) that is widely circulated today, including the above picture.
Brief History of Photography
Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, relating to seeing an image and capturing the image. The discovery of the camera obscura ("dark chamber" in Latin) that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid independently described a camera obscura in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.
The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) also invented a camera obscura as well as the first true pinhole camera. The invention of the camera has been traced back to the work of Ibn al-Haytham. While the effects of a single light passing through a pinhole had been described earlier, Ibn al-Haytham gave the first correct analysis of the camera obscura, including the first geometrical and quantitative descriptions of the phenomenon, and was the first to use a screen in a dark room so that an image from one side of a hole in the surface could be projected onto a screen on the other side. He also first understood the relationship between the focal point and the pinhole, and performed early experiments with afterimages, laying the foundations for the invention of photography in the 19th century.
Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camerae obscurae that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. It is a box with a small hole in one side, which allows specific light rays to enter, projecting an inverted image onto a viewing screen or paper.
The birth of photography was then concerned with inventing means to capture and keep the image produced by the camera obscura. Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate, and Georg Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered silver chloride, and the techniques described in Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics are capable of producing primitive photographs using medieval materials.
Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as photography.
Around the year 1800, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance. He used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. Although he succeeded in capturing the shadows of objects placed on the surface in direct sunlight, and even made shadow copies of paintings on glass, it was reported in 1802 that "the images formed by means of a camera obscura have been found too faint to produce, in any moderate time, an effect upon the nitrate of silver." The shadow images eventually darkened all over.