The first selfie, the first person photographed and eyes that saw the French Revolution

What unites the first person to be photographed and the oldest person to be photographed? Shoes.

The first person ever photographed was shining his shoes. The oldest person to be photographed made them, and their birth is closer to Leonardo Da Vinci’s time than today.

After all, who are the pioneering “subjects” of photography?

The first people to be photographed

Little is known about the first two people who are visible in a photograph. It is only known that, at that moment, one was having her shoes shined next to the Boulevard du Temple, in Paris, and the other was shining them.

As it is an activity that involves little or no movement, the people, whose identity is unknown, were sufficiently clear — unlike the carts and people in motion, which became unrecognizable “ghosts” — in the image made by Louis Daguerreem 1838 or 1839using the , which would be that year the first commercially successful photographic process.

The oldest person to be photographed

This is an award that is highly sought after by many ‘photographed’ subjects. However, among the candidates, the American shoemaker John Adamsborn on February 1, 1745is often cited as the oldest individual to be photographed. John was ten years old when the Lisbon Earthquake occurred; 11 when the Seven Years’ War began; 31 years when your country, the USA, became a nation. He saw Kant philosophize, Mozart play, Goya paint.

With a well-documented date of birth, the North American, photographed on his 100th birthday, is only behind speculative candidates, that is, those whose age has not been solidly proven. We talk about other photographs of people who were potentially born long before the shoemaker.

With what is best documented today, Conrad Heyerallegedly born in 1749peasant and American Revolutionary War veteran, takes second place. It was photographed around 1852, making it more than 100 years old.

The portrait of a woman, Gorby Still, allegedly born around 1746could be the second oldest person ever photographed. It was immortalized around 1840, in this way.

But if the dates of two other major candidates are ever confirmed, then the oldest person to be photographed could have been born in the years 1730–1740.

A free and formerly enslaved black man could be the winner of the list, if his date of birth was confirmed. Caesar (also identified as Cesar Nicholls) was born in 1737 and was photographed over 110 years ago.

This list also includes John Owenwar veteran, who may have been born in 1735 and was photographed at the age of 108.

The first selfie

The first person purposely photographed, in portrait, was most likely the North American Robert Corneliusem 1839.

The chemist and amateur photographer assembled an improvised camera with a theater spectacle lens just months after the daguerreotype process was announced in Paris.

He placed a silver-coated plate and uncovered the lens, and ran to the front of the camera. After 10 to 15 minutes of standing still posing, he left the world’s first selfie — now considered the first intentional photographic portrait of a person.

On the back of the plate, Cornelius wrote something like “The first light picture ever taken”, but this was not exactly correct, as we will see later.

Cornelius himself opened a studio in Philadelphia shortly after the landmark and in 1840 made what is often touted as the first known commercial studio portrait, by the optician John McAllister Jr.

The oldest photograph

The “View from the Window of Gras” is the first photograph still in existence. It was created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépcebetween 1826 e 1827in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, from a window of his house, in the French village.

This was one of the first images made using a process known as heliography, that is, according to the origin of the word, from the Greek, “engraved with the sun”.