{"id":29823,"date":"2024-09-17T08:49:19","date_gmt":"2024-09-17T08:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=29823"},"modified":"2024-09-17T08:51:33","modified_gmt":"2024-09-17T08:51:33","slug":"photography-turns-200-years-old-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/archives\/29823","title":{"rendered":"Photography Turns 200 Years Old Today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u00a0Sep 16, 2024\u00a0Jeremy Gray<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Photography turned 200 years old today, September 16, according to French photography publication R\u00e9ponses Photo<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its latest issue, number 373<\/a>, the longtime magazine marked photography\u2019s 200th birthday. There are a lot of candles on that bicentennial birthday cake. The obvious first question to ask is, \u201cWhy today? Why this year?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot of disagreement about the exact time photography was invented, a topic R\u00e9ponses Photo<\/em> tackled last summer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut why this date of 1824 precisely? To do this, we must go back in time, now more than two centuries ago, and focus on the life of Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e9pce. A brilliant engineer, he was born in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment in Chalon-sur-Sa\u00f4ne, the epicenter of the birth of photography,\u201d R\u00e9ponses Photo<\/em> writes in a translated article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Portrait of Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e9pce<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1816, Ni\u00e9pce resumed late 18th-century experiments on capturing light to create an image. Contemporaneously, others were hard at work on the same thing \u2014 including English scientist John Herschel, who would eventually create the cyanotype in the early 1840s. Herschel is also credited for the creation of the word \u201cphotography.\u201d For his part, Ni\u00e9pce instead went with \u201cheliography,\u201d which is \u201cwriting with the Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More importantly, over the proceeding years, Ni\u00e9pce made progress on his experiments, testing different equipment and chemicals, finally cracking the code on September 16, 1824.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a letter to his brother, Nic\u00e9phore described his first successful photograph, although that\u2019s not the word he used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith the help of the improvement of my processes, I have managed to obtain a point of view such as I could desire, and which I hardly dared to flatter myself with, because until then, I had only had very incomplete results. This point of view was taken from your room on the Gras side [\u2026] The image of the objects is represented there with astonishing clarity and fidelity, down to the smallest details, and with their most delicate nuances,\u201d Nic\u00e9phore wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
The original photograph, \u201cView from the Window at Le Gras,\u201d captured in 1826 or 1827 by Nic\u00e9phore Niepce. It is, for now, the oldest known surviving photograph. | CC BY-SA 4.0.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

September 16, 1824, was a momentous day, to be sure. Beyond it being the day photography was born, it was also the day Louis XVIII of France died \u2014 the last French monarch to die in reign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although this first photo no longer exists, according to one of the inventor\u2019s descendants, some historians still hope to find one of the engineer\u2019s earliest photographs, perhaps in a French attic. It wouldn\u2019t be the first time a significant historical artifact was discovered after a long time in hiding somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Ni\u00e9pce captured the first photograph in September 1824, why do some people photography\u2019s bicentennial is still a few years away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A colorized version of the photograph, \u201cView from the Window at Le Gras.\u201d | CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In large part, it\u2019s because that first referenced image was not preserved. Ni\u00e9pce recorded early photographs to stone and then sanded them down to reuse them. The earliest surviving photograph is Ni\u00e9pce\u2019s View from the Window at Le Gras<\/em>, created in 1826 or 1827. This original photograph was found in 1952 and has been on display at the University of Texas at Austin almost continuously since 1963. It has occasionally made its way on the road for special exhibitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, conflating the oldest surviving photograph with the first<\/em> photograph is a mistake, per some experts, including Bernard Perrine, former editor-in-chief of Le Photographe<\/em>, Pierre-Yves Mah\u00e9, director of the Sp\u00e9os school, and Manuel Bonnet, a direct descendent of Ni\u00e9pce himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mah\u00e9 hopes to find a photo earlier than View from the Window at Le Gras<\/em>, but even without it, he is confident that today is photography\u2019s 200th birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/petapixel.com\/2024\/09\/16\/photography-turns-200-years-old-today<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Sep 16, 2024\u00a0Jeremy Gray Photography turned 200 years old today, September 16, according to French photography publication R\u00e9ponses Photo. In its latest issue, number 373, the longtime magazine marked photography\u2019s 200th birthday. There are a lot of candles on that bicentennial birthday … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1826,586,1828,1827,16],"class_list":["post-29823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-200-years","tag-anniversary","tag-heliography","tag-niepce","tag-photography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29823"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29825,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29823\/revisions\/29825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}