The world's oldest photograph - 1790?

[tim atherton]

well, sort of, possibly...

http://photo-muse.blogspot.com/2008/...raph-1790.html

[Michael Alpert]

Tim,

Although Wedgewood and others knew about the properties of silver halides, they did not know how to fix images. At least that's what I've always read. Sir John Herschel came up with hypo fixer in the 1830s, and Fox-Talbot put all the pieces of the photo puzzle together at the end of that decade. If that account of photography's invention is true, it's really far fetched that the print that's up for auction was made in the 1790s. The speculative language surrounding this auction should be a red flag for any would-be buyer; but, given that the world is crazy, there will probably be fierce bidding for this shadow of a leaf. Thanks for the post.

[tim atherton]

Tim,

Although Wedgewood and others knew about the properties of silver halides, they did not know how to fix images. At least that's what I've always read. Sir John Herschel came up with hypo fixer in the 1830s, and Fox-Talbot put all the pieces of the photo puzzle together at the end of that decade. If that account of photography's invention is true, it's really far fetched that the print that's up for auction was made in the 1790s. The speculative language surrounding this auction should be a red flag for any would-be buyer; but, given that the world is crazy, there will probably be fierce bidding for this shadow of a leaf. Thanks for the post.

The history of the beginnings of photography is always being tweaked and revised.

In 1833, after some work and experimentation, Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence invented a silver nitrate on paper process for fixing camera obscura images on paper. (In 1830, he had previously invented a process for copying botanical drawing from an expedition and came up with something he called "polygraphia", similar to the mimeograph)

He had also come up with the term "Photographia" some four years before Herschel, who later used the term "Photography" for the process.

Hyppolyte Byard is also often ignored. By 1839 he had independently invented a direct positive process fixed on paper also using hyposulfite of soda (hypo) in probably the exact same month that Herschel came up with hypo to fix Fox Talbot images. But he was asked to keep quiet about his process to favour the Daguerreotype...

By June 1839 Byard was exhibiting his photographic prints, having the worlds first exhibition of photographs

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

Hyppolyte Byard

Tim : the proper name is Hyppolyte Bayard.
He was the member of the Heliographic Mission 1851, a team of 5 photographers who first documented some famous historical monuments of France on assignement with the French government ( Commission des Monuments Historiques). Historians say that this work has inspired subsequent work e.g. by the Farm Security Administration in the US.
I have the book about the MIssion Héliographique, unfortunately it is in French, this is the bibliographical reference for those interested

La Mission héliographique.
Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851 :
Baldus, Bayard, Le Gray, Le Secq, Mestral
by Anne de Mondenard
Publisher : Patrimoine/Monum (French Ministry of Culture)
320 25 x 28,5 cm
Price : 69 € (not cheap !) - ISBN : 2-85822-690-3

[Once]

The history of the beginnings of photography is always being tweaked and revised.

The reason is logical - there were many different processes that were close to the photography in the modern sense of the word and the communication between researchers was not as easy as it is today, hence any bickering about 2 or 3 months of the "first" discovery is easy and confusing at once. Add to it the modern "we first" national pride and the possibility of finding truth is even weaker then. Nevertheless, the painstaking perseverance of all the "first" photography researchers shows that all of them were well aware of the far reaching consequences of their field of research. The history only confirmed their feeling.

[russyoung]

I've known Prof. Schaaf for thirty plus years; he is unquestionably the world expert on Talbot and early English photography. He is also very conservative in his approach, unlike some others. Sotheby's chopped up his essay unfortunately but he goes through the survival of non-hypo-fixed images and notes that there have been and are others surviving. It is particularly interesting to note who he believes may have made this photogenic drawing and what their place is in English science history.

N.B.: Schaaf never says "I know" but "evidence points to" in the full essay.

It is most exciting to think that, as he points out, there are almost certainly a few others from the same album still in existence, and hope they come to the surface before *I* fade away for lack of fixing properly.

Russ Young, PhD

[tim atherton]

Hyppolyte Byard

Tim : the proper name is Hyppolyte Bayard.

yes, correct - my typo...

and his "self-portrait" as a dead sailor is thought to be his response to being paid keep quiet about his invention (and I'm not sure, but the Daguerreotype may have been bought out by the French government by then?) and thus essentially ignored

[tim atherton]

It is interesting to see that the origins of photography are a lot like many other great discoveries and inventions. Somehow a 'spirit' seems to hit a lot of people around the world and these discoveries and new processes are introduced by many people in roughly the same time frame. No contact between them and no interchange of ideas but they come up with similar processes at pretty much the same time.

That's basically it. Society pretty much sets itself those problems it can solve.

At the time photography emerged (in a way a better way of looking it it than it being "discovered" or "invented"), certain sets of conditions came together to cause it to do so.

Industry, science and commerce were converging at a point where a certain set of problems - conducive to the emergence of photography - needed to be solved.

In the late 18th century, the rise of capitalist culture brought a need for producing cheap mechanical reproductions of images - the many new types of documents that society was producing, as well as for affordable portraits of the newly emerging middle class. (it was as much a technical/industrial/commercial quest as an aesthetic one - in fact, probably more so)

As a result, many of the best inventive and industrious minds of the period were focusing on those problems, searching for solutions - and coming at them from various different directions.

In their experimentation, three main factors really came together: concerns with amateur drawing and new ways of reproducing printed matter; existing experimentation with light sensitive materials; and the existing use of the camera obscura.

That these minds came up with broadly the same solution to producing images with light and chemicals - photography - at pretty much the same time (in some cases, within days of each other) but using somewhat distinctly different different methods and techniques, isn't really at all surprising

It's been estimated that there were at least 24 different people - mostly working fairly independently - who all pretty much "invented" photography at roughly the same time. Of course those one or two who managed to claim to be first in the main areas - Niepce, Fox Talbot and Daguerre, are the ones who win the laurels in the history books. Coming in second doesn't count... :-)

Daguerre was one of those in which all those three factors - a means of reproduction or portraiture, successful use of light sensitive materials and use of the camera obscura came into alignment, and was the first to get it out there. But most of the others (Fox Talbot etc, were working with the same three).

[Maris Rusis]

Tim Atherton is right when he says the beginnings of photography are being revised.

A current theory for the origin of the earliest form "photographie" is that it is French and it came from Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence (Hercule to his friends) in Brazil in 1833. The word was apparently suggested to Hercule by Joaquim Correia de Mello, a botanist and pharmacist, who was looking for herbal remedies in the Brazilian jungle at the time. The Hercule Florence story is supported by no less than Helmut Gernsheim in his 3rd edition Origins of Photography, 1982, pp 8-12.

Hercule Florence was very isolated in the back-blocks of Brazil and his discoveries were not brought to the attention of the world until 1973. Therefore the old histories do not mention him and the new ones do. But, and it is a big but, there is more.

The entire Hercule Florence story was constructed from Florence's diaries, notes, and samples by Boris Kossoy, a Brazilian journalist, and by the recollections and legends preserved by Florence's descendants. Unfortunately a growing skepticism now clouds the story. Dates don't match, diary pages have two kinds of ink, the technology doesn't make pictures, new dates have been annotated onto old pages. Original photographic samples have been locked away by Florence's descendants and are unavailable for inspection and further scholarship. Florence's letters to newspapers in 1839 and 1840 (the only Florence material in the public domain) indicate that he had no idea of photography as such. Worse still the Joaquim de Mello connection looks crook. De Mello was only 16 years old in 1833 and he wasn't in Brazil!

I suspect (but can't prove) the Hercule Florence story is a con job or at least an exercise in Brazilian nationalism run wild. This sort of thing has happened before. Remember during the cold war the Russians insisted that they had invented baseball, they said "beizbol", before the Americans. Even in Australia there is support for the idea that Hargraves is the true inventor of flight; the Wright brothers merely adding the detail of engine power.

Just to add to the confusion about the first photograph I'll throw in a theory of my own. Sir John Herschel in 1819 prepared a paper coated in silver chloride and exposed it, with half covered by a card, to daylight. The daylight half, of course went dark, and Herschel then washed the entire sheet in a solution of "hypo", sodium thiosulphate. The exposed half stayed dark and the covered side stayed white; the exposure had become "fixed". Herschel filed the paper away in his archives where it may still be inspected. This drab black and white sheet is the first photograph.

As for the hypo chemistry, Herschel filed that away in his memory and simply recalled it twenty years later when William Henry Fox Talbot asked him how to fix an image.

I won't be bidding on the 1790 photograph. It's provenance is simply not good enough to secure it's place in the early history of photography; a subject, as Tim Atherton indicates, remains inconclusive.

[Once]

Tim Atherton is right when he says the beginnings of photography are being revised.


Just to add to the confusion about the first photograph I'll throw in a theory of my own. Sir John Herschel in 1819 prepared a paper coated in silver chloride and exposed it, with half covered by a card, to daylight. The daylight half, of course went dark, and Herschel then washed the entire sheet in a solution of "hypo", sodium thiosulphate. The exposed half stayed dark and the covered side stayed white; the exposure had become "fixed". Herschel filed the paper away in his archives where it may still be inspected. This drab black and white sheet is the first photograph.

.

The first photograph of a similar kind is, in fact, much older. Here is the story...
If you leave a leaf, covered partially by an object - perhaps yet another leaf - exposed to sunlight for a sufficient time, you can notice that the underlying leaf receives contours of the overlying object. It even remains "fixed" for quite a time.
Now, a cave man noticed many times this effect in his nature walks and had an idea. He took a broad leaf, arranged on its surface small pieces of branches fragments, bark, small stones all put in forms of letters, saying -"love ya, Lucy". He left it exposed to the sunlight for some time and when finally ready, brought it to Lucy's cave, while she was sleeping. The morning after she woke up and found it... The first photograph was born! The rest of the story we know from a few tracks...