‘I have seized the fleeting light and imprisoned it. I have forced the sun to paint picturesfor me.’ – LOUIS-JACQUES-MANDé DAGUERRE
The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple one spring day in 1839 had noidea he would make history. But Louis Daguerre’s groundbreaking image of the man and a customer is the first known instance of human beings captured in a photograph. Before Daguerre, people had only been represented in artworks.
That changed when Daguerre fixed his lens on a Paris street and then exposed a silver-plated sheet of copper for several minutes (though others came into the frame, they did not stay long enough to be captured),developed and fixed the image using chemicals. The result was the first mirror-image photograph.Unlike earlier efforts, daguerreotypes were sharp and permanent. And though theywere eventually outpaced by newer innovations—daguerreotypes were not reproducible,nor could they be printed on paper—Daguerre did more than perhaps anyone else to show the vast potential of the new medium of photography.