Further driving home the idea that photography was a simultaneous invention and collective effort, John Herschel (seen above) was the fist to discover that hyposulphite could dissolve silver salts to fix an image around 1819. In 1830 Antoine Florence observed images could be created from bleached out impressions of objects on fabric (photograms). This first printing technique was called poligraphie, or multiple writing. Florence’s journals from 1832 depict drawings of rudimentary cameras and printing frames. He started using the term photographie, latin for light writing, for this process. Herschel later coined the terms photography, negative image, positive image, and snap-shot in an paper he wrote called “Note on the art of Photography, or The Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purpose of Pictorial Representation” in 1839. Niepce called his photographs “sun writing.” For years in the early 1800s two chemists, Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, experimented with light sensitive chemicals and sought to fix an object’s shadow cast on treated paper. It was Herschel that later came up with the solution.

The lesser known inventor of photography, working during the same time as Talbot and Daguerre, is Hippolyte Bayard. While Daguerre was so eager to claim his credit and patent, Bayard was already exhibiting his work. Bayard’s work predates Daguerre and is given the credit of the first ever photography exhibition in 1839. But when a friend of Daguerre convinced Bayard to postpone releasing the details of his process to the French Academy of Sciences, Bayard lost the rite of claiming the invention of photography.

Seen above is the photograph Bayard made in protest to the injustice of credit being taken from him. It is a self portrait with a sense of dark humor depicting himself as a drowned man.  This is the first know use of photography as propaganda and faked photo. The statement released was the photo was this:

“The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery.
The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life….! He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.”

Of course the hands and face were just the result of his tan line. Bayard continued to work and actually displayed greater care and sensitivity than Talbot or Daguerre in his photographs. Bayard also developed the technique of combination printing using separate negatives to print the sky.

The Pencil of Nature was the first photo book ever published. Made in 1844 by William Henry Fox Talbot, The book contained 24 calotype prints and a detailed explanation of the process. Each photo was pasted in by had and were meant to show examples for application of the new technology. Since most people were unfamiliar with the concept of photography Talbot put this note into his book:

The plates of the present work are by the agency of light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.

The book was commercially unsuccessful and discontented before all of the installments of the book could be distributed.

The first photo ever taken of a person was by Daguerre in 1838. The photo was taken of a busy street corner but because the exposure was more than 10 minutes long, the only person that stayed still long enough to be captured was a man getting his shoes shined.

At the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot was on the English side of the first photographic patent. There was great debate over which nation had the first created a stable photo process although Talbot was working on his process long before Daguerre. It became a ploy of nationalistic pride to be the inventor of photography. The French or the English. Talbot spent much of his own fortune on creating his process which lead to him licensing it to chemists for use. Talbot’s process was the calotype and became the basis for most future photographic processes. Talbot came up with idea of the negative image that many positive reproductions could be produced from. Aside from being an inventor he was also among the first too attempt establishing photography as an art. Even before the pictorialists, Talbot toyed with the use of compositional elements in photos as something beyond simple documentation.

In 1839 was the official invention of photography, the French half of the photographic patent is held by Louis Daguerre. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. The process did not use any type of plate (negative) making it a single print method. Daguerre was the first to use and publish the principal the the latent image, speeding up the development of the image. Daguerre’s work was heavily funded by the French government so he proclaimed his process “free to the world,” except in Great Britain where the patent was enforced to slow development of it’s own process.

As the process evolved, the design of the camera obscura had to be improved for image quality. New grinding processes were developed for better lenses producing cleaner and sharper images.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce- point de vue du gras france 1827

Starting around the inception of photography, the first fixed image. Before there were proper cameras, photo paper, or film, this image was simply created with a camera obscura aimed out of a window exposing on paper painted with light sensitive chemicals. Created before the latent image was conceived, an eight hour exposure was used and gives this scene unusual lighting and shadows.

Of course this was not the first photo ever taken. Basic forms of photography had been experimented with by many people in different countries for years. This images is simply famous for being the first image to be sustained with a chemical fixer.