Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1850s and 1860s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the earliest pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.
The albumen print, also called albumen silver print, is a method of producing a photographic print using egg whites. Published in January 1847 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, it was the first commercial process of producing a photo on a paper base from a negative, previous methods - such as the daguerreotype and the tintype - having been printed on metal. It became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the start of the 20th century, with a peak in the 1860–90 period. During the mid-19th century, the carte de visite became one of the more popular uses of the albumen method. In the 19th century, E. & H. T. Anthony & Company were the largest makers and distributors of albumen photographic prints and paper in the United States.
Hippolyte Bayard was a French photographer and pioneer in the history of photography. He invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world's first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839. He claimed to have invented photography earlier than Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England, the men traditionally credited with its invention.
Heliography from helios, meaning "sun", and graphein (γράφειν), "writing") is the photographic process invented, and named thus, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1822, which he used to make the earliest known surviving photograph from nature, View from the Window at Le Gras, and the first realisation of photoresist as means to reproduce artworks through inventions of photolithography and photogravure.
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection, the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
Dr. Samuel A. Bemis (1793–1881) was one of the earliest photographers in the United States. A small number of his daguerreotypes have survived.
The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as George Eastman House and the International Museum of Photography and Film, is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York.
Jean Louis Marie Eugène Durieu was an early French amateur nude photographer, primarily known for his early nude photographs of men and women.
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard was a French inventor, photographer and photo publisher. Being a cloth merchant by trade, in the 1840s he developed interest in photography and focused on technical and economical issues of mass production of photo prints.
Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey was a French scholar and draughtsman whose use of photography while he was active in the Middle East pursuing archaeology and studying ancient architecture has made him recognized as an important early photographer. His daguerreotypes are the earliest surviving photographs of Greece, Palestine, Italy, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. After his death in 1892, his carefully stored photographs were discovered in the attic of his estate in the 1920s and they only became known as important works eighty years later.
Jean-Louis-Henri Le Secq des Tournelles was a French painter and photographer. After the French government made the daguerreotype open for public in 1839, Le Secq was one of the five photographers selected to carry out a photographic survey of architecture.
Helmut Erich Robert Kuno Gernsheim was a historian of photography, a collector and a photographer.
View from the Window at Le Gras is a heliographic image and the oldest surviving camera photograph. It was created by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras, as seen from a high window.
The French firm Susse Frères manufactured a daguerreotype camera which was one of the first two photographic cameras ever sold to the public. The company was also engaged in the foundry business and owned a large foundry in Paris.
The Société française de photographie (SFP) is an association, founded on 15 November 1854, devoted to the history of photography. It has a large collection of photographs and old cameras.
Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours was a French optician and daguerreotypist. He is best known today for his Excursions Daguerriennes, books of views of the world's monuments, based on early photographs redrawn by hand as Aquatint engravings.
The practice and appreciation of photographyin the United States began in the 19th century, when various advances in the development of photography took place and after daguerreotype photography was introduced in France in 1839. The earliest commercialization of photography was made in the country when Alexander Walcott and John Johnson opened the first commercial portrait gallery in 1840. In 1866, the first color photograph was taken. Only in the 1880s, would photography expand to a mass audience with the first easy-to-use, lightweight Kodak camera, issued by George Eastman and his company.
