How was the oldest photograph in the world in a French village

The “Gras Window View” is the first photograph of the usual still existing. It was created by forgotten Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, between 1826 and 1827, in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France.

Louis Daguerre and his daguerreotype, Henry and the salty paper technique. It is difficult, like other great inventions, to push a pionee at the exact point of the story in which it was born.

Although 1839 was a great year for the art of “drawing with the light”, a pioneer and an innovative technique were forgotten, subexted in the shadows.

It is true that the (very successful) brought us the photographic studios, and that the process of Talbot – which would evolve into the calotype (or Talbotype), recorded in the early 1840s and that allowed to produce negatives and copies from them, a concept that would reign to digital – were unavoidable milestones. But first of all, Joseph Nicephore Niépce He made history from a window of his house in a French village.

Before Niépce was known how to take a photograph. But no one has found a way to eternalize it yet. The young Frenchman, from an early age fascinated by science and chemistry, managed in 1816 to obtain the first impressions of a view from a window.

But the Burgundies debated with a small, big problem: the images darkened very quickly. Then he realized that the image failed to disappear if he applied photosensitive emulsions In stone or metal plates, which could create permanent images through the engraving, which could then be used to make copies.

The Burgundy Inventor started to use Judea Betumea derivative of oil, as light sensitive coating. Dissolved the bitumen in lavender oil and applied a thin layer on a polished tin plate. The plate was then inserted in a dark-room (box with a hole on one side, which allowed the entry and reflection of light and the formation of an inverted image) and placed near a window, where the necessary exposure would be made for days.

The first images “recorded with sun”

In 1822, the inventor will have been able to reproduce a engraving of Pope Pius VII and in 1826, by Cardinal d’Ambroise – whose sign is in the Royal Photography Society collection at V&A Museum of London.

But none of these images was obtained directly from reality – or by simpler words, none was properly a photograph.

The unprecedented process Niépce used became known as heliographya term that comes from the Greek “record with sun”.

The first “point of view”

Niépce managed to make “magic”-as he described himself-in 1824, when he captured a real view of a dark chamber, he wrote the Frenchman to his brother, Claude, on 16 September, as historian Julien Faure-Conorton confirms, who transcribed all the letters of Niépce to. To the process, Niépce called “points of view.”

However, the “success” he described in the letter was not total: the exhibition needed to get the image was four to five days and the result was unleasant. The photograph did not survive to this day, but it was even “the first click.”

Finally: the oldest photography in the world

Only in 1827with new lenses – courtesy of the Parisian optic Chevalier – is that Niépce captured an image from the window of his home in Le Gras. He recorded it on a tin sign that still exists today at the University of Texas in Austin as part of Gernsheim Collection.

“Gras point of view” . It is considered the oldest photograph still existing captured from real life.

Everything is due to Niépce

Inventor of an internal combustion engine, a hydraulic system to supply versales, a method of extraction of the indigo dye and even a bicycle, the (later) creator of the first photographs was prepared for years of investigation to improve the heliography.

Closed a ten -year partnership with Louis Daguerre in 1829, according to, but Death got aheadin 1833, the year he suddenly died. The son, Isidore, joined Daguerre, but the latter who took over the rudder and presented the daguerreotype in 1839, which accelerated the evolution of photography.

In the 1950s, the process of Frederick Scott Archer’s damp colode, which combined the sharpness of the daguerreotype with the multiplication of copies allowed by the calotype. But “it’s very interesting to imagine that the whole history of photography and film revelation, and even television, retreats to the point where Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made this image in 1826,” said Dusan Stulik of the Getty Conservation Institute.